True, unfortunately. Mac OS X graphics drivers are still very bad and thats a fact. Its really frustrating to see graphics intensive apps on boot camp (XP, Win 7) blow away their OS X counterparts.
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Valve Claims Frame Rate Improvements of Up to 120% With Snow Leopard Graphics Update
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True, unfortunately. Mac OS X graphics drivers are still very bad and thats a fact. Its really frustrating to see graphics intensive apps on boot camp (XP, Win 7) blow away their OS X counterparts.
Well the update does help for integrated video. I have an older 08 Macbook and I have seen WoW run faster (this is a game that does run on this machine). You may just be running into system performance issues. If you have the base model MBP 13" then you have an integrated video as well. Since this shares memory and performance with the system it all depends on your memory and what the game needs to run on your computer.
For example, if you still only have 2GB of memory (I don't know as you didn't post), Snow Leopard uses 1GB, leaving 1GB for your game AND to use 256MB (max for integrated) for graphics. You have 4GB you might get better performance.
If you have 4GB then the game just might need better hardware and then it is no fault of the drivers but the hardware.
Been using Mac's since LC. The drivers suck and thats a fact. Stop the fanboy nonsense.
This is pretty disappointing. This report is essentially saying that Apple have been making users of their machines suffer from poor performance in the range of 15-120%.
Drivers for video cards is ONE thing that PC users do get to enjoy.
Someone said it earlier - let ATI and nVidia make their own OSX drivers. If that doesn't make Apple happy let them release it through the software update so they can make sure it's not going to affect anything else.
Drivers for video cards is ONE thing that PC users do get to enjoy.
Someone said it earlier - let ATI and nVidia make their own OSX drivers. If that doesn't make Apple happy let them release it through the software update so they can make sure it's not going to affect anything else.
The problem is that Apple doesn't allow ATI or NVIDIA to access the required API.
Sorry, should have added that; I have 4GB RAM.
I don't think it's the hardware because (as posted above) I'm able to play at higher resolutions and settings in Boot Camp.
I guess this update only improves Macs with dedicated graphics.
Apple never wrote Nvidia or ATI drivers. Nvidia driver code is 100% closed, ATI's is 90% closed. Nvidia and ATI write their own drivers, always. They also sometimes release them on their own. After OS X they started to release them only with OS X updates, maybe Apple wants that, but there have been a couple releases on Nvidia's website even in the last decade.
But the reason the drivers suck is not only because of Nvidia and ATI's laziness. It's mainly because that mac gaming market is extremely small compared to the PC and none of those companies bother spending millions of dollars of driver development on a platform they hardly sell any hardware for. Plus there's always directx vs opengl.
Linux for example has even worse drivers than OS X, because Linux gaming is even smaller than OS X.
But the reason the drivers suck is not only because of Nvidia and ATI's laziness. It's mainly because that mac gaming market is extremely small compared to the PC and none of those companies bother spending millions of dollars of driver development on a platform they hardly sell any hardware for. Plus there's always directx vs opengl.
Linux for example has even worse drivers than OS X, because Linux gaming is even smaller than OS X.
Not true. nvidia and ATI write spec drivers which are then modified by device manufacturers. On OS X the code comes from Apple since nvidia and ATI lack the required API access.
Almost certainly. You have to remember, the install base for Windows is *far* larger than OS X, so if a company has to choose between optimizing performance for a game via OpenGL or DirectX, they're almost always going to go with DirectX. You have to remember too, that nVidia and AMD both push money to developers to implement the latest features into games, and generally those features will be appearing in DirectX long before they'll appear in OpenGL. Thus, you basically have a system that is continuously pushing DirectX to be on top.
But Auchron just said he had improvement using an integrated graphics card on his early 08 MB.......
This is surprising. ATI doesn't release their own notebook drivers very often. For example, I have to get driver updates for my Thinkpad t61p as ATI does not release drivers for it. Not sure if they do it at all for notebook cards anymore.
...and update your Flash while you're at it. With luck you end up with hardware accelerated h.264 decoding and you'll be more then fine.
Part of the technical explanation of the lighting effect that has had a speedup:
Because its intensity is attenuated with the occlusion of the light source geometry, the glow sprite fades gently in and out as it becomes more or less occluded by the rest of the scene. It's a simple technique...
It's the stuff geeks love to read, but I found it amusing that they use technical language and then call it "simple" when it's not going to make sense to a lot of consumers. To translate, it means "lights glow more realistically without slowing down the computer so much."
Famous engineering textbook quote: "As is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer, [insert many pages of advanced calculus]"
Ah, dang that sucks. Ironically the last Windows box I dealt with "custom" drivers on was a 6800 (what is that 6 years ago?). I had a Gateway laptop with integrated (X600) graphics and so I never really got driver updates from ATI. That was 4 years ago now, so yeah I may be a little out of touch on WHQL-fail...
So the Nvidia drivers released at Nvidia website couple weeks ago were written by Apple? I doubt it.
Thinking...
My Corei7 27" 2.8 ghz machine prior to the updates, this was the BEST I could do in GL View prior to the update:
After I was getting this and sometimes slightly better:
At more reasonable resolutions (1920x1080) I see 2000+ fps.
This is much more like it and makes me feel better about the machine as a whole.
I don't game very much - at least there was no cause to. Now I've installed Steam and will take a look around.
I mainly use X-Plane and watch HD movies - ANYTHING that causes the framerates to be smoother and happier on existing hardware is a good thing to me.
Some of the performance improvements I'm seeing defy belief but there they are.
Even the performance I get on this seems amazing if you think about it - just a little code made THAT much difference. That's the power of software.
My Corei7 27" 2.8 ghz machine prior to the updates, this was the BEST I could do in GL View prior to the update:
After I was getting this and sometimes slightly better:
At more reasonable resolutions (1920x1080) I see 2000+ fps.
This is much more like it and makes me feel better about the machine as a whole.
I don't game very much - at least there was no cause to. Now I've installed Steam and will take a look around.
I mainly use X-Plane and watch HD movies - ANYTHING that causes the framerates to be smoother and happier on existing hardware is a good thing to me.
Some of the performance improvements I'm seeing defy belief but there they are.
Even the performance I get on this seems amazing if you think about it - just a little code made THAT much difference. That's the power of software.
Show me a current OS X graphics driver released by nvidia. If you are refering to CUDA then that is a parallel computing architecture and not a desktop or workstation graphics card driver. Latest CUDA 3.1 driver was released about month ago. With CUDA you can use GPU for other computational tasks then desktop graphics. Example computational tasks is biological models etc.
This turns out not to be the case - but certainly the games mentioned in the release notes were well suited to act as benchmarks / test-cases to help identify which driver paths needed improvement.
For example, the improved occlusion query mechanism is likely to improve performance on any app that combines use of the multithreaded GL mode with use of occlusion queries.
If the changes were actually hard coded to specific titles then *no* improvement would be seen on other titles, and that is not the case here.
I believe he was talking about windows drivers from the chipmakers, which was the topic of the conversation at that point.