10.6.4, OpenGL, Blizzard, Valve

[corjello]

With the recent release of Steam for Mac, and the countdown to the release of Starcraft 2, I've been thinking that Blizzard and Valve should (or current are) actively pursuing Apple to make OS X more compliant with OpenGL, and at the same time increase effieciency of their graphics card drivers. Both of these companies are having the potential market for Mac gaming grow every day, and need their clients to run as smooth on a Mac as they would on a PC. I followed the dev builds of 10.6.3 somewhat closely, and remember seeing the builds add in compliance with OpenGL 3(?), so my question I'm asking is: Do you think Blizzard and Valve are actively working with Apple to increase performance for their games? And if so, is Apple pushing them away, or gladly accepting their money/programmers/knowledge? Will we see more results in 10.6.4, or will this be a big part of 10.7?

 

[Adam Kaplan]

Yes I think so. Blizzard must have a close working relationship with Apple. Take a look at the recent performance benefits from the rewrite to the OpenGL backend, including improving shadows in World of Warcraft. I remember when running Bootcamp to play WOW resulted in better performance. Today the two are almost identical.

With Starcraft 2, I really hope they continue to improve performance. The beta constantly overheats my MacBook Pro unless I keep my fans running at 6000 RPM. I'm more of a Blizzard fan but just downloaded Steam recently. Portal runs pretty good but again I think they have some way to go.

I'm really impressed with the level of support coming to bring quality gaming to the mac platform. I know they will provide some updated drivers with 10.6.4. We can only hope that Apple has some big plans for 10.7 and more importantly for gaming performance.

 

[ProstheticHead]

The beta for SC2 does heat up my MBP pretty crazily as well.

Portal has been off and on behaving strangely, it got so bad at one point that I thought I had the 9600GT turned off in my laptop, lo and behold it was on though.

Really strange.