I just remapped the orange portals to the "q" key.
Portal still plays fine for me. I don't have any other Source games (or any other games via Steam). Maybe my graphical standards just aren't as high? I've been playing it with the 9400M.
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Valve Warns of Gaming Performance Issues With NVIDIA Graphics Cards on Mac OS X 10.6.4
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I just remapped the orange portals to the "q" key.
Portal still plays fine for me. I don't have any other Source games (or any other games via Steam). Maybe my graphical standards just aren't as high? I've been playing it with the 9400M.
Oh for God's sake!
It's a minor issue related to an OS update that just came out. Stop being such a drama queen.
I play DOA on my MBP and I don't have any major issues. I know the FPS didn't go up after 10.6.4 and now I think maybe they went down a few after reading this. 
I wish Apple would decouple the video drivers (kexts) so that nvidia and ati could compile their own updates and allow us to install at will. It would solve the folks who don't care - they would get new drivers via the next 10.x.x update. Those of us who game could grab drivers from nvidia/ati as they are updated.
This whole upgrade at once deal kind of sucks...
I update my drivers on my Windows boxes whenever nvidia releases a new round (or if I want to play with a beta) of drivers.
I understand sheltering users from the horrors of drivers but for those of us that would like to game on the Mac, this really has to addressed.
I wish Apple would decouple the video drivers (kexts) so that nvidia and ati could compile their own updates and allow us to install at will. It would solve the folks who don't care - they would get new drivers via the next 10.x.x update. Those of us who game could grab drivers from nvidia/ati as they are updated.
This whole upgrade at once deal kind of sucks...
I update my drivers on my Windows boxes whenever nvidia releases a new round (or if I want to play with a beta) of drivers.
I understand sheltering users from the horrors of drivers but for those of us that would like to game on the Mac, this really has to addressed.
The hidden good news
the hidden good news in this is that there is now a powerful company who act as watchdogs over mac gaming. If not for Valve, this news would have been unproven speculations on forums for weeks or even months.
Plus the fact that they are working with ATI and NVidia for better drivers makes me confident that things will get better eventually. Let's just have a little patience
the hidden good news in this is that there is now a powerful company who act as watchdogs over mac gaming. If not for Valve, this news would have been unproven speculations on forums for weeks or even months.
Plus the fact that they are working with ATI and NVidia for better drivers makes me confident that things will get better eventually. Let's just have a little patience
Oh my God! What a complete and utter total, shameful, humiliating, embarrassing, degrading, horrific, tragedy: a minor bug in an OS upgrade. Thank God Microsoft never introduces problems with their OS upgrades, right?
You should try some of the other Mac ports like Dragon Age: Origins. The game itself works, but add-ons (DLC) blow up the game... My suggestion is to Boot Camp for games at least until someone actually starts to actually care.
10.6.4 is just NOT stable. The number of kernelpanics I have gotten on my Mac Pro is just flat out ridiculous. It even got to the point that I could NOT boot my machine. It wouldn't leave the grey screen without a kernelpanic.
I was forced to purchase a new drive and do a restore from timemachine. It was time to upgrade the size of the drive, so it kinda sorta worked out a bit.
But still, its very feking annoying.
I was forced to purchase a new drive and do a restore from timemachine. It was time to upgrade the size of the drive, so it kinda sorta worked out a bit.
But still, its very feking annoying.
I couldn't even play TF2 under 10.6.3. The update to 10.6.4 completely fixed the game for me. Runs fine, and I don't have that great of a machine. So... I'm not sure where this story is coming from, personally.
I have noticed that it takes longer to turn on my MBP, though.
I have noticed that it takes longer to turn on my MBP, though.
Let's be patient people. This Apple's first real foray into gaming with such a large user install base of Steam games. While I have no doubt .4 messed up a lot of peoples video performance, I am quite sure Apple is working on it. Let's just hope it doesn't wait until .5. That would suck, but maybe a graphics card update in a little bit of time.
What Apple really needs is a framework like Direct X. Will it happen? Probably not.
What Apple really needs is a framework like Direct X. Will it happen? Probably not.
So was the 9400M and the 8600M GT. There are plenty of Apple hardware launches of new GPUs. Introduction of hardware is not the same thing as gaming performance, though.
First and fastest have next to nothing to do with each other. Driver support has always been complete, but rarely optimized to be as fast as possible because of limited resources. Suitability and support for high-end graphics operations is a totally different beast than sheer speed optimizations for gaming. Apple has never been a leader in the latter category, because it focuses on the former.
Then you lack experience. I've been a computer professional since 1980, working on Windows PCs since Windows/286 and have lost count of the number of horrific problems caused by Windows updates over the years, with some rendering many PCs unbootable.
Just one example
You do realize that the speed of an OS is not measured in frames per second, don't you? Most adults are much more concerned with stability, the overall usability of the GUI, startup and shutdown times, and the speed of disk-intensive applications.
2009 Mac Pro running just fine under 10.6.4. I've even seen an increase in screen refresh speeds on my 30" monitor with GTX-285 and Photoshop CS4. I don't play games so cannot comment on that.
well perhaps you should upgrade your PCs to XP, Vista or 7. You know, 95 and 98 aren't that good today!
10.6.4 is very stable. It went through extensive beta testing and you will see that there is not some massive outcry about kernel panics. I've got two machines that I've upgraded to 10.6.4 and neither is showing any signs of instability -- much less kernel panics.
It sounds like your computer has hardware issues, and maybe it's the old drive that was to blame.
Testing????
Um....did anyone at this company actually do ANY regression testing with the developer seeds of the OS??? It seems to me that would have noticed a problem if they had.....
Not really sure that Apple is at fault. The only common denominator so far, is this company....
Um....did anyone at this company actually do ANY regression testing with the developer seeds of the OS??? It seems to me that would have noticed a problem if they had.....Not really sure that Apple is at fault. The only common denominator so far, is this company....
WTH is wrong with Apple
I just yesterday bought the highest end MacBook Pro 17" - Core i7 with frickin 4GB of RAM.
Came home, started it up, installed FireFox, Eclipse, Vim. Eclipse startup took long time. Realized that it must be the 5400RPM HDD. But ran FireFox and it all went downhill - random pauses, lots of disk churn. Time to visit Activity Monitor. Holy crap - it's already swapping - 124 Mb pageouts and similar amount of swap used! 979 Mb Wired memory! Double mad.
Was about to go and return it - I don't want a $2.5K machine which can't run a browser/IDE/Editor and terminal without swapping. But then it struck me may be I should put Win 7 x64 on it and see. Exact same workload - and no slowdowns whatsoever! 1.4Gb RAM used (plenty of which is cache) with Eclipse running with Firefox and gvim plus some command windows.
This is the second machine in my house going to Win 7 - first one slowed to crawl after filling up the Intel SSD probably due to lack of TRIM support.
Apple need to get serious about OS X - otherwise they are just going to lose out big time. (Not sure they care but if they still sell it they must care I suppose.)
I just yesterday bought the highest end MacBook Pro 17" - Core i7 with frickin 4GB of RAM.
Came home, started it up, installed FireFox, Eclipse, Vim. Eclipse startup took long time. Realized that it must be the 5400RPM HDD. But ran FireFox and it all went downhill - random pauses, lots of disk churn. Time to visit Activity Monitor. Holy crap - it's already swapping - 124 Mb pageouts and similar amount of swap used!
979 Mb Wired memory! Double mad.Was about to go and return it - I don't want a $2.5K machine which can't run a browser/IDE/Editor and terminal without swapping. But then it struck me may be I should put Win 7 x64 on it and see. Exact same workload - and no slowdowns whatsoever! 1.4Gb RAM used (plenty of which is cache) with Eclipse running with Firefox and gvim plus some command windows.
This is the second machine in my house going to Win 7 - first one slowed to crawl after filling up the Intel SSD probably due to lack of TRIM support.
Apple need to get serious about OS X - otherwise they are just going to lose out big time. (Not sure they care but if they still sell it they must care I suppose.)
Minor bug? If I had a nvidia card, and was over the moon that Steam was available on a mac, this is hardly a minor bug. Be a total pissa given the cost of a 275 or 285 on a mac pro! If I bought one of these cards after the steam announcement, i'd be pissed as. I hope they resolve is asap.
Microsoft does not write graphics drivers for windows. ATI and Nvidia do.
No problem after one full day with 10.6.4. No crashes or GSOD when browsing and developing / debugging a web app locally. For good measure I played ca. one hour of Portal and HL2, no obvious performance problems. Tested on a mid 2010 13" MBP (NVIDIA GeForce 320M).
I guess you don't play games (do you, or are you just commenting on something you are personally uninformed about?). When an OS update breaks graphics to the degree where some games are unplayable, that's a pretty major issue. Especially when it's bad enough that the game company recommends not upgrading to this OS version.
A problem is a problem, pointing that out isn't "drama queen" while insisting a problem is irrelevant smacks of being an apologist. There's really no excuse for releasing an update with a problem like this, beta testing should have caught it.
Not really sure that Apple is at fault. The only common denominator so far, is this company....
I can't imagine they didn't test. But if Apple broke something, even if they let Apple know about it, they can't stop Apple from releasing it.
And valve is not the only common denominator, others have reported big drops in GL benchmarks. Are other games working fine or decreased performance with the update?
I like how Apple fans are defending Apple... by saying it happens on Windows all the time. I thought OS X was better than Windows?
Also you forget that the fact that Apple is meant to have a "tight integration" between software and hardware to avoid just EXACTLY these sort of things. Considering the fact that Apple has such a limited set of configurations, it's a major balls up from Apple. "it just works".
Edit: is there a easy way to revert updates, drivers etc in OSX like Windows has?
Also you forget that the fact that Apple is meant to have a "tight integration" between software and hardware to avoid just EXACTLY these sort of things. Considering the fact that Apple has such a limited set of configurations, it's a major balls up from Apple. "it just works".
Edit: is there a easy way to revert updates, drivers etc in OSX like Windows has?