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Apple, ATI, NVIDIA Actively Working on Improving Mac Gaming Performance

I'm praying that my Mobility Radeon X1600 isn't left behind, I need this graphics update for a (sorely needed) boost to Steam performance!

Do us early Core 2 Duo-ers proud Jobs!
 
Does anyone know if they are working on the older NVidia 7 series drivers? I figure they are not, but it would be nice if someone could just put my last ounce of hope out of its misery.
 
joshjoshlol said:
Unlike the vast majority of people that buy Apple these days, I actually use my machine primarily for art and design related applications. Snow Leopard had more issues with CS4 than Leopard at the time of upgrade, and thus my decision was made. Please consider both spectrums of the Apple consumer base before you haphazardly stumble into the notion that status symbol seekers sum up the more important market share.
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True. And most users here don't understand/appreciate the value of a flawlessly working production environment.
 
iBug2 said:
Up until couple months ago, the fastest single core GPU, GTX285, was available for mac. I don't think macs are lagging way behind anymore. We lag like 6 months behind nowadays, which is a big improvement over the past.
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We're sadly in the HD 5000 and GTX 400 era now. HD 6000 is just around the corner.
 
Eidorian said:
We're sadly in the HD 5000 and GTX 400 era now. HD 6000 is just around the corner.
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Did you read the text before replying maybe? I said until "couple of months ago". Yes we are lagging but at least one generation and circa 6 months.
 
Bokito said:
Apple didn't take the opportunity to help EA develop native Mac OS X games. OpenGL is in some ways superior to DirectX and sometimes DirectX is better, but overall a DirectX game rewritten in OpenGL on OS X doesn't need to perform much worse in OS X than it does on Windows.

Apple is promising from time to time they improve game performance. Snow Leopard already does quite better than Leopard, and 10.6.3 added a little performance boost in some areas as well, but it's not close near what Windows is doing even though it's possible.

Apple should start with putting higher end graphics cards in their Mac as well, since there is a big gap too. Most budget PCs have better graphics cards than Mac Pros and iMacs.
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As long as games don't sell as much for macs as they do for windows, gaming performance will never be equal. It's not up to Apple. Nvidia and ATI are spending tons of money for driver development for Windows. They don't do the same for OS X, rightfully so, because games don't sell much for OS X, so it's a waste to direct resources for OS X driver development.

I don't know if Apple is actually holding back or anything, since Apple is helping Blizzard a lot about WOW, so why not help other people if they are developing native Open GL games.

Yet WOW performance is still behind Windows (not by too much but around 20% with my GTX285 at least) but one really shouldn't compare Direct3D performance to OpenGL performance either. If the game runs as OpenGL on Windows, one should compare just that with OS X performance.
 
Hopefully they do a unified driver architecture. I know I can't run HL2: Episode 1 or 2 and Portal is slow and doesn't look all that great. I am running on an 8600M GT.
 
Time for Jobs to admit that he made a mistake in making OSX exclusively OpenGL and revive Quickdraw 3D. Too bad he laid off all the QD3D folks years ago and too bad he is incapable of admitting a mistake. Apple used to be leaders in 3D when they had a strong in-house team, but now they lag and always will until they rebuild their own expertise.
 
Interesting. Rbarris never said he was going to work at Valve after leaving Blizzard.
He's one of the good guys, though!

Sadly this is why I left Apple. The expensive hardware just couldn't keep up with what was available on Windows.
Still, love me some Mac OS for just about everything else.

Bring Mac gaming to par and I'll move back in the future :)
 
I'm really glad Valve finally managed to get Gabe to stop yapping, and instead put engineers in front of a Mac long enough to port their engine over to native OS X code. Apple responds to actions, not words, and now we have both Blizzard and Valve pushing to improve gaming on OS X. World of Warcraft on OS X has been a big driver of optimizations to the gaming side of OS X for years now, with it sometimes even jumping ahead of the Windows version.

Looking forward, Starcraft 2 and Valve titles will help to ensure Apple stays up to speed for years to come. 10.6.4 has some good work put in by Apple, and if demand continues and more weak areas are identified, the situation can only improve from here. I think Steam is going to be the turning point where more games make the jump. I had hoped it would have happened sooner, especially after EA was on stage at WWDC a few years back, but at least somethings finally moving in a big way.
 
mdntcallr said:
I agree, Apple to really succeed in this needs to offer a Mid-Sized tower, which is more powerful than your imac and upgradable. But not as over powered and priced as a Mac Pro Tower.

On a different note, i really would like to say this is a long time coming. About time Apple shifts even modest resources to support gaming on the OS and Driver level. They had all but ignored gaming for the last decade.

If Apple is going to do well here... they need to get rid of all the system and drivers that make gaming hard. ie... playing ETQW and getting system slowdowns every few minutes which act like a lag spike, but are probably connected to the Mac Pro doing other things. even when this is the only program i am running.
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Why is it Apple's responsibility to make a video card with, in ATi's case, a ROM that supports EFI, or in nVidia's case, a ROM that is even large enough to have an EFI sector? If ATi and nVidia were shipping cards that had appropriate ROM chips, a rather trivial cost I might add, especially for ATi as all a retail ATi card needs is a bit of software tweaking to run on a Mac, I'd be a bit more inclined to accuse Apple of poor driver support.
 
Eidorian said:
There's something faster than the GTX 285 now?
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Again, up until couple of months ago, where GTX285 was the single fastest GPU offering from Nvidia, on PC's and on Mac's, we had GTX285, so we had the fastest GPU from Nvidia available for our machines.

But couple months ago Nvidia released the GTX400 series, which we don't have, so we are now lagging behind again. But I was actually surprised that for a long enough period macs actually had access to the fastest single core GPU Nvidia was offering.

I'd expect we'll get either GTX480 or HD5870 in the new Mac Pro, which should come soon, so we'll catch up again.

And the situation is better than, let's say, 8 years ago, when macs didn't have access to the newest offerings of Nvidia or ATI, ever.
 
iBug2 said:
Again, up until couple of months ago, where GTX285 was the single fastest GPU offering from Nvidia, on PC's and on Mac's, we hade GTX285, so we had the fastest GPU from Nvidia available for our machines.

But couple months ago Nvidia released the GTX400 series, which we don't have, so we are now lagging behind again. But I was actually surprised that for a long enough period macs actually had access to the fastest single core GPU Nvidia was offering.

I'd expect we'll get either GTX480 or HD5870 in the new Mac Pro, which should come soon, so we'll catch up again.

And the situation is better than, let's say, 8 years ago, when macs didn't have access to the newest offerings of Nvidia or ATI, ever.
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HD5870s are cracking cards :)
 
CJM said:
Bit behind, aintcha!
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iBug2 said:
Again, up until couple of months ago, where GTX285 was the single fastest GPU offering from Nvidia, on PC's and on Mac's, we had GTX285, so we had the fastest GPU from Nvidia available for our machines.

But couple months ago Nvidia released the GTX400 series, which we don't have, so we are now lagging behind again. But I was actually surprised that for a long enough period macs actually had access to the fastest single core GPU Nvidia was offering.

I'd expect we'll get either GTX480 or HD5870 in the new Mac Pro, which should come soon, so we'll catch up again.
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I see that nothing has changed with the GTX 285 situation then.
 
joshjoshlol said:
Unlike the vast majority of people that buy Apple these days, I actually use my machine primarily for art and design related applications. Snow Leopard had more issues with CS4 than Leopard at the time of upgrade, and thus my decision was made. Please consider both spectrums of the Apple consumer base before you haphazardly stumble into the notion that status symbol seekers sum up the more important market share.
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Stow the presumptuous jerkass behavior, man.

I use Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign CS4 for a living, and I'm not aware of any significant "issues" with Snow Leopard and the CS4 versions of those programs. ("CS4" is over a dozen different programs, you realize. What actual professional refers to them as "CS4"?!)

If there ever were any, they don't exist anymore.
 
Eidorian said:
I see that nothing has changed with the GTX 285 situation then.
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.......................................................

Again, when I purchased my GTX285 in October, it was the fastest GPU for PC's as well (single core).

8 years ago, the fastest GPU available for a Mac was at least one generation behind, the releases never even overlapped for couple of weeks. It was always at least one generation behind.

So YES things have changed.
 
SPUY767 said:
Why is it Apple's responsibility to make a video card with, in ATi's case, a ROM that supports EFI, or in nVidia's case, a ROM that is even large enough to have an EFI sector? If ATi and nVidia were shipping cards that had appropriate ROM chips, a rather trivial cost I might add, especially for ATi as all a retail ATi card needs is a bit of software tweaking to run on a Mac, I'd be a bit more inclined to accuse Apple of poor driver support.
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Why? because Apple both manufactures hardware and the OS. thats why!

They need to have upgradeable solutions so people don't get stuck with the same graphics chip that was the standard 2-3 years back, but now lags for the latest games. so let people get better performance. it will only make people love their macs better
 
mdntcallr said:
Why? because Apple both manufactures hardware and the OS. thats why!

They need to have upgradeable solutions so people don't get stuck with the same graphics chip that was the standard 2-3 years back, but now lags for the latest games. so let people get better performance. it will only make people love their macs better
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Apple manufactures cases, not the silicon inside your mac. But Apple would be responsible of writing EFI for the 3rd party GPU's out there if they want all of them to be able to work in macs, which they'll probably never do. But that's not a big deal I think. As long as we keep getting one top of the line GPU and one midrange GPU on every Mac Pro and iMac offering, I think people are not going to keep whining about lack of GPU options.

The release process has speeded up over the years, if it speeds up further more, let's say we get the GPU's 2 months after PC's, I think people would be happy.
 
HiVolt said:
What bothers me the most, that there is never any independent driver releases. Always in the OS updates, which take months in between.

Why can't Apple allow nVidia or ATI to release them independently as they identify issues, as is done on the PC?
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I'd like this too. I do not mind if Apple have to test and sign the drivers before they are released, pretty much like Micorsoft's WHQL.

The games industry, at least in Europe, is bigger than the music and movie industries combines. Why Steve Jobs doesn't see this is beyond me.

iOS games revenue is tiny compared to the PC/console/mobile console markets.

OpenGL needs some serious TLC on Mac OS X. Apple have only just released drives that support OpenGL 3.0, two years after it was released. OpenGL 4.0 is now out, there have been four major versions on OpenGL out since 3.0.
 
Gasu E. said:
Hopefully they will focus 100% on making my $29 upgrade to Snow Leopard deliver the performance increases that were promised to justify the release in the first place.
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I don't think they actually promised immediate significant performance increases. They said some stuff will work faster in Finder, which they do.

But the majority of the performance increases will come when applications start to take advantage of OpenCL more, which is still several years ahead I think for major applications.
 
iBug2 said:
Up until couple months ago, the fastest single core GPU, GTX285, was available for mac. I don't think macs are lagging way behind anymore. We lag like 6 months behind nowadays, which is a big improvement over the past.

But since OS X does not support SLI or crossfire yet, don't expect multicore GPU's soon.
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that was on the Mac Pro and a crazy expensive upgrade. no reason why you should have to buy Xeon CPU's and other high end gear just to play games.
 
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