How to Improve Your Mac's Performance When Playing Steam

Remember that delightful day when you first heard that Steam was coming to Mac you were probably filled with joy, as no longer would you have to switch between Mac and Windows just to play games. However the games didn't run perfectly smooth in comparison to their Windows counterpart. Admittedly there aren't very many games available to run on the Mac, but the library is constantly growing. Speaking of which, Left 4 Dead 2 has just been released for Mac on Steam and it is on sale (reduced by 66%). 

Anyways, back to the point of this article. Basically you want a way to make your games run faster on your Mac, yes? To do this, you need to defragment the game. Mac OS X already defragments your hard drive automatically, but doesn't defragment the files if are under 20 MB (most games have lmany small files). Fortunately Steam has a built-in defragmenter; to defragment your games follow the steps bellow: 

- Load Steam

- Go to Libary at the top of the window

- Select the game you want to defragment from the pannel on the right

- Right-click on the title of the game (you must enable right-click if you haven't done so already)

- Select the properties option

- A new window will pop-up; go to the Local Files tab

- Click on Defragment Cache Files

- Wait a few minutes for the files to be defragmented

- Sit back, launch your game and enjoy*. 

*This does improve the performance to the game but for the optimum setting make sure nothing is running in the background and make sure you have the latest updates to Steam and to Mac OS X.

Comments

[Bryan Thomas]

Thanks for the helpful tip! I will definitely be doing this with all of my Steam games. Do you have any idea of how often you should do this?

[Christian Wells]

Well I don't know precisely how often you should do it but games like TF2 are always been updated, so maybe defragment every update or so. You wont notice a massive increase in performance but it does help