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

[iBug2]

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.

If they keep spending the same amount of money/resources on OS X driver development as they do now, it'd be probably the same frequency of releases.

The gaming industry is big, and I don't think it's really up to Steve Jobs to do something about it. Apple is expensive. Even if games did run as fast as Windows on OS X, people still wouldn't buy macs just to play games. It's just not worth the premium.

 

[Gasu E.]

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.

Yes, you are correct. All I'm saying is Apple should continue to focus on improving performance on SL, and get diverted by tweaking performance on earlier releases. Leopard should be maintained only for bugs, security and compatiblity.

 

[Yamcha]

Honestly, its no secret, Apple needs to add a dedicated graphics card in the entry level computers, otherwise playing steam games on native resolution is not going to happen, drivers isn't gonna solve the problem, obviously there will be minor improvements, but its not gonna make a noticeable difference..

PC still remains the best platform for gaming..

 

[iBug2]

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.

If you are someone really interested in cutting edge gaming gear, you'll just buy a 1200$ PC box with top of the line GPU anyway.

Or go bootcamp, in which case even with the inferior GPU's in MBP's and iMacs, games will run fast enough.

 

[iBug2]

Yes, you are correct. All I'm saying is Apple should continue to focus on improving performance on SL, and get diverted by tweaking performance on earlier releases. Leopard should be maintained only for bugs, security and compatiblity.

Well they are already doing that. 10.6.3 performs better than 10.6 for me.

 

[SimonTheSoundMa]

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.

To be fair, the MacBook Pro machines have decent GPUs.

Apple could use the GTX 480M, but the cooling would look something like this:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/04/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480m-breaks-cover-frags-competition-in-3dmar/

 

[SimonTheSoundMa]

Well they are already doing that. 10.6.3 performs better than 10.6 for me.

10.6.3 is still slower than 10.5, though.

 

[iBug2]

10.6.3 is still slower than 10.5, though.

The only area Leopard is faster than SL for me is Finder window opening. Opening multiple windows is still much faster in Leopard.

But that's something I can live with. SL outperforms Leopard in pretty much everything else.

 

[rbarris]

10.6.3 is still slower than 10.5, though.

Slower to say it out loud, maybe.

 

[SimonTheSoundMa]

The only area Leopard is faster than SL for me is Finder window opening. Opening multiple windows is still much faster in Leopard.

But that's something I can live with. SL outperforms Leopard in pretty much everything else.

I'm talking FPS in gaming.

 

[iBug2]

We're talking FPS in gaming.

I only play WoW on OS X, the rest of the games I play using bootcamp, but WoW performs the same on Snow Leopard than it does on Leopard at the moment. It's not any faster, at least I don't notice any difference, but it's not slower either.

So my experience says the FPS hasn't changed from 10.5.8 to 10.6.3.

It was slower in 10.6 though but that's understandable.

 

[joshjoshlol]

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.

That you have experienced no major issues is fine for you and yours; But do have a wider grasp on the subject and realize that, beyond your desk, people have different set-ups with wildly different variables than your own and thus situations that you have not experienced could very well be a heavy issue.

I would also likewise ask that you refrain from insinuating that, based on semantics, my choice of words diminishes my standing in the digital art profession. A hint as to the type of person who refers to the breadth of Adobe's products by the collective version would be, "a freelancer who uses programs beyond Design Standard." I've not kept myself apprised of what advances have come about with SL and CS4, as my workflow is fine as is without the Russian Roulette style updates that one might encounter, and the early reports of consistent crash on quit with flagship applications like PS certainly didn't help to sell me.

If you are finding fault with me because I am not putting a deeper amount of cash flow into Apple's pocket with a small OS upgrade, you are off base; The situation stands regardless if it is Apple or Adobe at fault for the reported issues, as I just do not feel like tampering with a perfectly sound set-up.

 

[PlayRadioPlay]

Team Fortress 2 is pretty much unplayable on my 17" MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Due, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.6.3)

It doesn't bother me much since the main reason I also own a PC is to play games and I already owned TF2, but it would be nice to play it while traveling. It's just sooooo slow. Even with the graphics turned down.

 

[diogenis]

Well, I play both the windows (via bootcamp and win7, 64b) and the Mac OSX version of a very demanding game that is the TF2. The game runs incredibly well on the Mac partition, and doesn't crash something that happens in win7.
The experience and feeling are both much much better on the OSX, performance is indeed a bit behind windows, it is noticeable but the difference is very small. I would say some 10% less. Provided that this is Valve's very new attempt and that both Apple, Valve and Ati/Nvidia are working together to fix drivers, I predict that soon Macs will outperform their PC cousins.

And I am not talking of general feeling, but pure fps performance, because like I said, on the whole I prefer playing on the mac. It is stable.

Obviously, Apple should at some point try a bit harder with iMacs and GPUs, it is very difficult due to thermal dissipation, but maybe they need to try some new approaches. Again, there is NO other machine that comes close to an iMac, but there are many machines with better gfx cards.

(iMac, 8800GS, 4gig ram, 3GHz core 2 duo, OSX 10.6.3)

 

[nxent]

nice to see this issue finally being addressed. tired of hearing how win machines are better for gaming... is left for dead coming out for macs?

 

[Plutonius]

Hopefully they don't leave us people who felt Snow Leopard wasn't worth the upgrade stranded without a firmware release...

Don't be so cheap . Maybe it's worth the $29 update now .

 

[derek4484]

One thing M$ did good was/is Direct3D. They are so far along with their Direct3D API's that they blow away OpenGL.

Mac gaming will never be able to touch Windows gaming, they're simply starting to take gaming seriously way too late, too far behind M$.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Ah

Not worth the upgrade? It was $29!

Some of us didn't have a choice. PPC stuck at 10.5. Why do I stay with PPC?

Money and the fact that my video card is a nVidia GeForce 7800gs.

My OpenGL performance is significantly higher than what my wife's new iMac 3.06 core2duo gets:

 

[bootsified]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Following Steve's line of thinking, the Steam developers MUST be lazy and stupid. There can't POSSIBLY be anything wrong with Mac OS.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Wow!

To be fair, the MacBook Pro machines have decent GPUs.

Apple could use the GTX 480M, but the cooling would look something like this:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/04/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480m-breaks-cover-frags-competition-in-3dmar/

Now we're looking at heat levels of the rumored Powerbook G5 - the one that melted many a testers laps in a sad meltdown. Wow. That's amazing. What laptop is that fitted in?

 

[Thomas2006]

maybe, just maybe this will be one of the big new features of OSX10.7 next year... optimized gaming performance on par with windows... and maybe, just maybe they will release a gaming version of the mac pro with hardware tailor made for gamers...


...ah who am I kidding.. apple thinks iOS is their gaming platform... and serious gamers will never waste their time with OSX ...

Maybe Apple will include a DirectX-like framework for gaming.

 

[Plutonius]

One thing M$ did good was/is Direct3D. They are so far along with their Direct3D API's that they blow away OpenGL.

Mac gaming will never be able to touch Windows gaming, they're simply starting to take gaming seriously way too late, too far behind M$.

Microsoft will never get direct3d working on macs or license it to Apple.

Apple then has the choice of

1) Dropping OpenGL and focus on making their own direct3d for macs. This will never happen because the software developers (games in particular) would never write their software using Apple's version of direct3d due to Apple's small market share.

2) Try to improve OpenGL. This happens very slowly since OpenGL is an open standard and many companies (including Microsoft) need to sign off on any changes.

As others have also mentioned, people would still use pcs to game even if macs and pcs had the same performance because of the higher mac cost.

 

[Plutonius]

Honestly, its no secret, Apple needs to add a dedicated graphics card in the entry level computers, otherwise playing steam games on native resolution is not going to happen, drivers isn't gonna solve the problem, obviously there will be minor improvements, but its not gonna make a noticeable difference.

The cost of the computer will then go up. If gaming is a priority, I would suggest not getting an entry level Mac

 

[Stridder44]

Awesome news! Keep up the good work guys.

 

[slb]

oh yeah, I wish we could go back to quake 2 graphics. that would be just swell.

you do remind me of how much time i spent laughing at the people who did q3 arena FPS tests 6-7 years after the game came out, trying to show that macs were good for gaming because q3a would run 300 fps on a powermac g5.

meanwhile pc gamers were playing through HL2 and UT2004 at "only" 100 fps.

as an aside, i want to point out that (so far) this is the first front page entry i've ever seen with ZERO negative votes.

at this writing it is 44 positive, 0 negative.

I'm impressed, macrumors!

of course now i'm tempted to "negative" it just because.

also, because it's sad that it took steam coming to mac for apple to give two butt nuggets about their 3d drivers.

Why did you space out every single sentence of your post? How incredibly obnoxious.

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.

Abandon industry-standard OpenGL for some obsolete Quickdraw API? That's one of the worst suggestions I've read on these forums in a while, and there have been many. The use of OpenGL isn't the issue.