Steam on Hackintosh: not viable?

[lilszero]

Hey guys,

 

So I heard Steam released a Mac version of their client. I downloaded and installed it and everything went OK, I downloaded Portal and when I tried to play, Steam showed me an error, exactly this:

 

 

I think I've got a problem with my Nvidia Drivers. I'm running Snow Leopard on a Vanilla kernel and I used EFI Strings for my 7600GT.

 

What should I do? Steam doesn't seem to detect my graphic card correctly

 

Regards.

[curlyboy]

Steam for osx needs a 8 series card

[Beerkex'd]

Not exactly. There are several games for sale on Steam that work fine on most video cards, like Braid, Torchlight, World of Goo etc etc.

 

The "Steam Engine" based games (Portal, TF2, Half Life 2) require 8xxx series and above.

[lilszero]

Isn't there a way to fake my videocard model?

 

It's just dumb, I played Portal with any kind of problems in Windows with the same graphic card. Could it be possible to fake its' identifier or something?

[Beerkex'd]

It's probably a lot simpler to just use Crossover Games or install Windows.

 

Besides it's not something you could fix by changing an "identifier", it's not an artificial limitation imposed by Apple or Valve. Though it kinda looks like that in the error message.

 

According to Valve developer rbarris (he's the author of the Steam engine DirectX to OpenGL translator), it doesn't work because an OpenGL extension is missing from the 7xxx OpenGL drivers on OS X:

 

"The GeForce 7 driver doesn't have the OpenGL framebuffer blit extension, which is required to make the Mac Source engine work.

 

The same issue applies to the GMA 950.

 

If that capability were to appear in the OpenGL driver that Apple and NVIDIA provide, we could support that chip, assuming no other major missing pieces were encountered".