Apple Seeds 'Snow Leopard Graphics Update' to Developers

[Mac-Michael]

Don't get your hope up, there's nothing that can be done for 8600m. Software drivers can't fix hardware issues, they can reduce the chances of it happening but not too much. In fact, if the drivers are improved to the point that the GPUs are being used more, the heat can increase from the higher performance and this can harm the chips.

Oh my. Now you have me scared that mine will fail. It's been problem free for two years, but of course I haven't used the computer in a any GPU intensive ways. Is there a way to improve cooling or is it up to chance?

I guess this will help me keep my time gaming short and go to bed on time.

 

[Rubydoppler]

soooooo would 10.6.5 couple with this? Or would it be a separate dealy.

 

[Minimoose 360]

You wanted to say graphics drivers are pathetic maybe?

Sorry. Apple is pathetic. Even if Macs aren't built for gaming, out of the gate they should at least be able to handle the things decently. This has always been the case since OSX was first introduced, but now with Steam the problems are just gaining more clout.

There has always been more of a market for Mac gaming than Apple has realized. Not all of us are "professionals" who use their computers for work only. Hell, I only use my MacBook Pro for browsing the internet most of the time.

You could blame ATi and nVidia, but Apple is really at fault for not lighting the fire under their butts.

Perhaps he really is a frenchie.

Heck no, I hail from the greatest country on the planet.

 

[PeterQVenkman]

Heck no, I hail from the greatest country on the planet.

Oh, you mean kazakhstan.




Been hammering my 8600m in my non-unibody MacBook Pro with Starcraft 2 during off hours along with Unity. Hasn't failed yet, but Blizzard's suggested settings in Starcraft 2 didn't produce smooth framerates. I had to drop it down to low for everything.

Gimmie some performance out of this "pro" machine apple. i've fed this laptop 6 Gigs of ram, too.

 

[Redbeastmage]

Here's to possibly not being the last person to load in StarCraft II on my late 2009 MacBook (maxed out RAM and HD).

This, except on my early 09 iMac

 

[Jason Beck]

Sorry. Apple is pathetic. Even if Macs aren't built for gaming, out of the gate they should at least be able to handle the things decently. This has always been the case since OSX was first introduced, but now with Steam the problems are just gaining more clout.

There has always been more of a market for Mac gaming than Apple has realized. Not all of us are "professionals" who use their computers for work only. Hell, I only use my MacBook Pro for browsing the internet most of the time.

You could blame ATi and nVidia, but Apple is really at fault for not lighting the fire under their butts.



Heck no, I hail from the greatest country on the planet.

Thanks for the post. That is exactly where I am coming from! I would love to be able to get down with some light gaming when I am not in Photoshop and Adobe. I agree, Apple needs to kick the people in gear, lets hope they are now. It's good to see the results coming more frequent these days. The Apple hardware, while not "cutting edge", is good for OSX and a properly coded OSX port should be able to take advantage of the operating system-- and that's where properly coded graphics drivers come in.

If they really start pushing some good ports and some _decent_ drivers.. I think they could make some bucks off making the Mac a gaming platform too. The iMac is as much a family computer as the Macbook.. they *should* be able to play games with mid-high settings!

Those frame numbers that have been posted look promising. I feel for you 8600 owners, I am hoping you get some love out of this update too. Anyways.. no more wrappers, lets see some people do some actual coding!

 

[greythorne]

All;

I installed this last night and it was a huge breakthru for me.

This is easily available;
-download mid 2010 iMac update.
-use pacifist to extract.

Performance;
Big improvement at 2560x1440;
Framerates went from 700-800fps OpenGL to 1200+

what to extract? give some details pls

thanks

 

[ChuckBlack]

what to extract? give some details pls

thanks

I imagine anything that says ATI or NVIDIA depending on what you have and anything that's OpenGL.

I'm downloading it now and will try it out after...

 

[ikir]

Lets hope we can play games and use graphics intensive apps. Apple seems to suck at graphics drivers.

While graphics drivers on OSX can improve a lot, they don't sucks especially Snow leopard ones. Do some benchmarks on Leopard, Tiger, Amiga OS4, UBuntu. SNow Leopard is faster on same/equivalent hardware. We are far behind windows right now, i hope we fill the gap soon but most of the work should be done by ATI and Nvidia i think.

 

[ChoMomma]

All;

I installed this last night and it was a huge breakthru for me.

This is easily available;
-download mid 2010 iMac update.
-use pacifist to extract.

Performance;
Big improvement at 2560x1440;
Framerates went from 700-800fps OpenGL to 1200+

Confirmed working on my 24" iMac with Nvidia 7300GT, I can game again!

 

[ChoMomma]

what to extract? give some details pls

thanks

I extracted/installed anything that said Nvidia or NVXXX or 7XXX on it

 

[greythorne]

I imagine anything that says ATI or NVIDIA depending on what you have and anything that's OpenGL.

I'm downloading it now and will try it out after...

But is this only for the previous iMac iteration or its for all macbook pros?

Since macbook pros don't have ATI.

 

[Akshunhiro]

Can't wait for this! I recently bought a GTX 285 to replace the 8800GT in my hackintosh and it is a big step up performance wise. I also found that Nvidia had released OS X drivers for the GTX 285 since 10.6.4 made a mess of them...

Here's a screenshot of the extensions viewer, still a huge difference between 2.0 and 2.1 on my native res.

 

[ikir]

Does this mean I now get to watch You Tube videos?

LOL, watch them in HTML5 and problems are gone :-D

PS: after the joke, seriously, html5 youtube is working great, half cpu usage

 

[blinkin182]

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.

Am hoping the official graphics update will come just before I receive my refurbished 27inch i7 Would be great to have that new jump in performance for games

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Oh my. Now you have me scared that mine will fail. It's been problem free for two years, but of course I haven't used the computer in a any GPU intensive ways. Is there a way to improve cooling or is it up to chance?

I guess this will help me keep my time gaming short and go to bed on time.

Sorry, but the OP is wrong. There is plenty of room for OpenGL on the 8600M. It's supported up to OpenGL 3.3 by Nvidia with OpenCL on Linux and Windows.

I've got an 8600GTS for one desktop and a 9800GTS for another one. They are both supported for OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL 1.0/1.1.

OpenGL 4.x starts with the Nvidia 400 and Fermi boards.

My next workstation for Linux is waiting for AMD Bulldozer and next version of ATi GPGPUs.

Apple should have no problem supporting it, if they want to do so.

 

[ATMB]

2xUPDATE BELOW

I'm asking this to be sure everyone does the RIGHT thing if they decide to apply the iMac Graphics Update to their non-iMac computer.

I'll suppose people knows how pacifist works (opening the .pkg and so on), and they just need to know WHAT to install.

Afaik, the graphic adapters drivers are in

/System/Library/Extensions/

In this folder, you will find many files. There are drivers (ATI, nVidia, Intel...) and more OS stuff.

The question here is:
what can we safely install without compromising our system?

Once we know this, half the replies in this thread will be fulfilled

UPDATE:
I tried installing only the "nvidia" related files (geforce, nv, 7xxx and so on), and all I got has been OS X using Apple SOFTWARE drivers.
Then I used pacifist to install ALL the folder (Extensions) except the ati/intel stuff. After a restart, I got back to the Open GL drivers, now with a .18 instead of a .16 version.
I'll be testing now with WoW (the game that got the worst happenings after the 10.6.4 disaster drivers).

UPDATE 2:
I tested WoW with the new drivers. I have absolutely no words.
Dalaran with 10.6.4 drivers, lowest graphic settings, no antialiasing, no vsync: about 20-25 fps.
Dalaran with iMac updated drivers, ULTRA graphic settings, antialiasing 2x, vsync enabled: 60-70 fps.

After that, I enabled the 30 fps limit (/console maxfps 30) to let the graphics chip be cool.

And who knows what Dalaran means, will be :O like me.

I just hope a link leaking the beta drivers will come out...

Updates will be added...

 

[ChuckBlack]

No Luck...

Well, I downloaded the iMac update for my MacPro 2008 with an NVIDIA 8800. I installed these files from the update into system/library/extensions and have gained no improvement that a reboot wouldn't account for

GeForce.kext
GeForce7xxxGLDriver.bundle
GeForceGA.plugin
GeForceGLDriver.bundle
GeForceVADriver.bundle
NVDANV40Hal.kext
NVDANV50Hal.kext
NVDAResman.kext

I wasn't sure about the NVDA files but the versions were different so I updated those too. Did I miss some files or is my card out of the loop?

 

[ChuckBlack]

If I had an ATI card I would update these files...

ATI1300Controller.kext
ATI1600Controller.kext
ATI1900Controller.kext
ATI2400Controller.kext
ATI2600Controller.kext
ATI3800Controller.kext
ATI4600Controller.kext
ATI4800Controller.kext
ATI5000Controller.kext
ATIFramebuffer.kext
ATIRadeonX1000.kext
ATIRadeonX1000GA.plugin
ATIRadeonX1000GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX1000VADriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX2000.kext
ATIRadeonX2000GA.plugin
ATIRadeonX2000GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX2000VADriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX3000.kext
ATIRadeonX3000GA.plugin
ATIRadeonX3000GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeonX3000VADriver.bundle
ATISupport.kext

 

[bolen]

You should also "touch" the extension folder to have SL update the extension cache. Otherwise the changes might not apply.

Start the terminal, type:
touch /System/Library/Extensions

 

[ATMB]

You should also "touch" the extension folder...

Thank you very much for the advice!

 

[wjlafrance]

The iMac update has no love for 9400M. Go figure though, since they don't have 9400M's..

 

[greythorne]

Thank you very much for the advice!

Is yours an iMac or macbook pro?

When you said ALL folders what you mean by that?

 

[Master Chief]

I'm under NDA so I can't really tell anything, except maybe that I hear the fan a lot more, and the GPU temperature is higher now. Oh hello album art [iTunes]. That's a nice improvement. Thank you Apple.

 

[Akshunhiro]

Oh hello album art.