Apple Seeds 'Snow Leopard Graphics Update' to Developers

[ChazUK]

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Fantastic news. I know I only have a 2400xt but if an update can squeeze a little more from the old dog, I'll be extatic!

It's still good for older games and old doesn't mean bad.

I know. Some Half-life 2 loving would be fun on my iMac.

 

[Žalgiris]

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I know. Some Half-life 2 loving would be fun on my iMac.

I was playing HL2 cider port and it wasn't very bad. Haven't played Mac Steam version though.

 

[Pheelyx]

I wonder if this will fix the issues I have when playing World of Warcraft on my 2007 iMac. It played fine for years and then suddenly WoW just gives me the spinning beach ball. It will play for a few minutes and then it locks up the whole computer.

I can't remember if I had the problem before Snow Leopard. I thought it was just suffering from old computer syndrome. This gives me a glimmer of hope that it may fix my problems.

 

[aforty]

Yea hopefully this takes care of those performance problems in Steam games and Starcraft 2.

 

[nicklad]

Can somebody please post a link to this?

 

[Žalgiris]

Yea hopefully this takes care of those performance problems in Steam games and Starcraft 2.

I hope Diablo 3 will run as smooth as possible. That's the only game i'm really interested in right now. Still play Diablo and Diablo II and Heroes of Might and Magic II.

 

[mysticalos]

fyi to those that want updated drivers, because the 10.6.4 drivers were so bad, when the imac july update was released i downloaded it, and installed those updated drivers with pacifist and it resolved nvidia based slowdowns that plagued 10.6.4. the drivers in the imac update were in fact much newer. i suspect that apple is finally done being retarded about making people wait for 10.6.5 for a fix (or extract updates from new system disks) and will finally release an update, as they should have done long ago.

 

[fleshman03]

this includes new kext's for all ATi/Nvidia/Intel chips.
including ATi 5xxx kext's.

Hopefully this includes my 8600m. I'd like for it to stop frying mother boards.

 

[funkyp56]

Can somebody please post a link to this?

For the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY: Please torrent this!!!

 

[LagunaSol]

Starcraft 2 makes the fans on my iMac (2.93 ghz, Radeon 4850) run so loud I get flashbacks of my Dual G4 Windtunnel PowerMac days. *shudder*

I hope there is a fix for this coming.

 

[colonelsanders]

I'm happy just seeing that Apple is treating graphics as a priority. I'll be ecstatic when they release something that fixes the mess they created.

 

[Stingray454]

I suspect some of these changes made in onto the new iMacs. There are some threads here describing how to take the graphics drivers from the newly released iMacs and installing them on older iMacs (2009). I tried this today, and there is a very noticeable difference in performance!

A test where you can see the difference (compare orange bar that is updated imac to the bar below that is the standard 2009 version): http://barefeats.com/imac10g.html

Instructions on how to install them can be found here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/978676/

Ofc, this is all at your own risk, but worth mentioning.. I myself couldn't be happier with the performance boost on my 2009 iMac i7.

 

[mrgstiffler]

fyi to those that want updated drivers, because the 10.6.4 drivers were so bad, when the imac july update was released i downloaded it, and installed those updated drivers with pacifist and it resolved nvidia based slowdowns that plagued 10.6.4. the drivers in the imac update were in fact much newer. i suspect that apple is finally done being retarded about making people wait for 10.6.5 for a fix (or extract updates from new system disks) and will finally release an update, as they should have done long ago.

What driver version did that install?

 

[reallynotnick]

Rob Morgan over at BareFeats.com took a new 27" iMac and cloned the HD into the previous 27" iMac - with impressive improvement in gaming graphics:

http://www.barefeats.com/imac10g.html

Good things are coming...

This is some amazing stuff, Portal got over a 2x improvement! The idea of doubling graphics performance by just updated drivers seems pretty mind boggling to me.
I hope there is a nice update for my 9400m, if it could double my framerate I would be in heaven. I'll even accept a 25% improvement as awesome.

 

[iChase]

Apple's graphics drivers are completely subpar.

The other day I decided to do a test. I installed The Sims 3 on my Mac Pro with a GTX 285. One install on OS X and the other on my Windows 7 Bootcamp partition. On Windows I was getting 150 fps with all settings maxed at 1920x1200. On OS X I was getting 20 and less with all settings maxed at 1920x1200. That's just sad.

I hope this leads to Apple being serious about graphics and, in turn, games.

 

[CavemanUK]

hope this fixes the numerous graphics glitches people have been experiencing in snow leopard in general. I for one have been getting thin horizontal lines appearing randomly in wallpaper and brower windows.

 

[Erwin-Br]

Starcraft 2 makes the fans on my iMac (2.93 ghz, Radeon 4850) run so loud I get flashbacks of my Dual G4 Windtunnel PowerMac days. *shudder*

I hope there is a fix for this coming.

Yeah, Steve has the following fix in mind: Convince users it's Blizzard's fault and ban Starcraft 2 from their systems. Saves Steve a lot of trouble.

This strategy worked before, so...

 

[Corrosive vinyl]

It does seem kind of backwards of Apple to not put graphics at anywhere near priority for so many years when there are so many apple owners who do graphics intensive work on theirs, such as photography and photoshop, etc.

Hopefully apple is listening to the growing groan of all of these people along with the gamers.

 

[Minimoose 360]

Pardon my French but thank ****ing God.

OSX is pathetic.

 

[senc01a]

I wouldn't expect any performance boost in old Macs such as the ones with intel graphics, old nvidias or ATIS.
Perhaps not even on the 9400M.

 

[Rubydoppler]

I wouldn't expect any performance boost in old Macs such as the ones with intel graphics, old nvidias or ATIS.
Perhaps not even on the 9400M.

The 9400m is still the most common GPU according to the Steam Hardware Survey, near 30% of all users. That would be silly to not include it.

 

[Žalgiris]

Pardon my French but thank ****ing God.

OSX is pathetic.

You wanted to say graphics drivers are pathetic maybe?

 

[MorphingDragon]

I wonder if it has GLSL 1.3 support?

 

[reden]

You wanted to say graphics drivers are pathetic maybe?

Perhaps he really is a frenchie.

 

[DELLsFan]

hope this fixes the numerous graphics glitches people have been experiencing in snow leopard in general. I for one have been getting thin horizontal lines appearing randomly in wallpaper and brower windows.

Me too. I also hope the random wake from sleep issues get resolved. If the mac goes to sleep, I'm the one who gets to wake it up, please ... kkthx