Hello there fellow Mac users,
I currently own a mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It has an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU in it. When Steam cam to OS X I started playing games on it almost instantly. Ther performance was amazing. However, Mac OS X 10.6.4 was known to cause some graphical issues. There were updates over time that fixed some issues, but one still remains. One major issue was that the video would completely lock up and the screen would start flickering. This was fixed in 10.6.7 however. Currently, one problem remains. When I am playing a game that runs on the Source engine, and only on the Source engine, I sometimes get this bug where the frame rate jumps all over the place. I am getting 65 FPS at one time, and all of a sudden it drops to 10, then back up, then back down, and so on. It switches about every half a second. I thought the problem was with NVIDIA grahpic drivers. However, I was recently told that NVIDIA does not write the drivers for OS X, but Apple does (I have not confirmed that). I have tried numerous things as well. I have contacted Valve tech support, and they told me to enter in some launch options (-autoconfig -sw) which works sometimes, but not always. I have tried changing the resolution of my whole system, running my Mac in clamshell mode running off of a Cinema Display. I have tried numerous different quality settings in games, I even reset the PRAM, SMC Controller, and I did an archive and install of OS X. Some of these things cause the bug to go away temporarily, but it still comes back. It is random, and I don't know what's wrong. This might be a hardware problem, but I doubt it because the bugs started happening right after 10.6.4 was released. I do not remember what updates Valve did around that time. So I have narrowed it down to this:
-The bug happens randomly
-The software problem is either from NVIDIA or Valve (I have an older iMac with an AMD GPU in it, and this never happens)
-It might be a hardware problem (but unlikely)
Sorry for this long post, but can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
P.S. sorry for any type-os (if there are any) I am typing this on a PC running IE8. No spellchecker
_______________________________________________
For the PCs of tomorrow, look at the Macs of today.
I currently own a mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It has an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU in it. When Steam cam to OS X I started playing games on it almost instantly. Ther performance was amazing. However, Mac OS X 10.6.4 was known to cause some graphical issues. There were updates over time that fixed some issues, but one still remains. One major issue was that the video would completely lock up and the screen would start flickering. This was fixed in 10.6.7 however. Currently, one problem remains. When I am playing a game that runs on the Source engine, and only on the Source engine, I sometimes get this bug where the frame rate jumps all over the place. I am getting 65 FPS at one time, and all of a sudden it drops to 10, then back up, then back down, and so on. It switches about every half a second. I thought the problem was with NVIDIA grahpic drivers. However, I was recently told that NVIDIA does not write the drivers for OS X, but Apple does (I have not confirmed that). I have tried numerous things as well. I have contacted Valve tech support, and they told me to enter in some launch options (-autoconfig -sw) which works sometimes, but not always. I have tried changing the resolution of my whole system, running my Mac in clamshell mode running off of a Cinema Display. I have tried numerous different quality settings in games, I even reset the PRAM, SMC Controller, and I did an archive and install of OS X. Some of these things cause the bug to go away temporarily, but it still comes back. It is random, and I don't know what's wrong. This might be a hardware problem, but I doubt it because the bugs started happening right after 10.6.4 was released. I do not remember what updates Valve did around that time. So I have narrowed it down to this:
-The bug happens randomly
-The software problem is either from NVIDIA or Valve (I have an older iMac with an AMD GPU in it, and this never happens)
-It might be a hardware problem (but unlikely)
Sorry for this long post, but can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
P.S. sorry for any type-os (if there are any) I am typing this on a PC running IE8. No spellchecker
_______________________________________________
For the PCs of tomorrow, look at the Macs of today.