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When will Apple and nVidia release new drivers/updates for the new SR MBP?

A

AbsenceOfTruth

macrumors regular
Original poster
^Topic 😛

It has the new graphics chipset but it doesn't seem to take full advantage of it, especially gaming wise.
 
Apple doesn't work like that. They don't upgrade the drivers every week for people to download and use. The drivers are built into the computer and they just work. Nobody really upgrades the drivers unless there is a problem.
I think the reason games run a little slower on Macs is because they're not really built for the platform. They are ported as an after thought.
 
i would have to ask the same question as absence here
i have a new sr mbp and it runs old games like *****
cod 2, ut2003, ut 2004 demos, (all demos, all apparently universal binary), run at less than 20fps consistently.

doesn't apple release vid card drivers for its laptops? the nvidia website doesn't have an OSX section on its drivers page... i am wondering about this too.

apart from this frame rate problem, i am getting kernel panics consistently when i try to put COD2 demo up to max settings on the comp. this is a comp with a 2.4ghz core 2 duo, 4GB of RAM and a geforce8600M GT with 256mb vid card!!! no way it wouldn't run COD2 on full settings??? besides, on lowest settings it runs less than 20fps as well -___-!!! frustrating 🙂
 
Habusho said:
Apple doesn't work like that. They don't upgrade the drivers every week for people to download and use. The drivers are built into the computer and they just work. Nobody really upgrades the drivers unless there is a problem.
I think the reason games run a little slower on Macs is because they're not really built for the platform. They are ported as an after thought.
Click to expand...

Nope. Check out the latest barefeats benchmarks. The SR MacBook Pro are like slower with their superior GPU.
 
It seems updated graphics drivers were not in 10.4.10, so I wouldn't be surprised if we have to wait until Leopard. Maybe Apple will stick something in Software Update between now and then, but if not, Boot Camp is the way to go.
 
Erasmus said:
It seems updated graphics drivers were not in 10.4.10, so I wouldn't be surprised if we have to wait until Leopard. Maybe Apple will stick something in Software Update between now and then, but if not, Boot Camp is the way to go.
Click to expand...

I think that drivers maybe (or should be) relased in July - when EA release some of the new games mentioned at WWDC i.e C&C3. It would be silly to release games for the mac without the latest macs being able to run the games effectively
 
Habusho said:
Apple doesn't work like that. They don't upgrade the drivers every week for people to download and use. The drivers are built into the computer and they just work. Nobody really upgrades the drivers unless there is a problem.
Click to expand...

There is a problem. The drivers are terrible.
 
outlandos said:
When you use Bootcamp, will you have to download and install Nvidia drivers from the site manually?
Click to expand...

No, Apple's NVIDIA drivers included in the Bootcamp driver sets work fine. Just make sure you're not planning on using an external display with Vista on a SR MBP, though, as it'll only go up to 1024x768.
 
lag1090 said:
No, Apple's NVIDIA drivers included in the Bootcamp driver sets work fine. Just make sure you're not planning on using an external display with Vista on a SR MBP, though, as it'll only go up to 1024x768.
Click to expand...

That's not true. I've hooked it up to a 1360x768 TV under Vista, using the Boot Camp drivers.
 
Quick question about this,
Using boot camp I have the option to use the nvidia drivers from their website instead of the ones that come from bootcamp? Or am I forced to use the nvidia drivers in the bootcamp package?

Thanks
 
Andrew275 said:
That's not true. I've hooked it up to a 1360x768 TV under Vista, using the Boot Camp drivers.
Click to expand...

Do you have a Santa Rosa MBP? If you do, you might have gotten one of the unaffected ones. Also, what interface are you using? I and several others have experienced the resolution limitation using DVI, and I personally am trying to use a 1920x1200 display.
 
lowteg said:
Quick question about this,
Using boot camp I have the option to use the nvidia drivers from their website instead of the ones that come from bootcamp? Or am I forced to use the nvidia drivers in the bootcamp package?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I'm curious how the bootcamp 1.3 video drivers with the nvidia card handles games...
 
lowteg said:
Quick question about this,
Using boot camp I have the option to use the nvidia drivers from their website instead of the ones that come from bootcamp? Or am I forced to use the nvidia drivers in the bootcamp package?

Thanks
Click to expand...

No, you can pretty much use either set. I don't believe that NVIDIA's own set for Vista is yet updated for the 8600m GT, though. I know that both the BootCamp set and NVIDIA's set work fine under XP, though.
 
djinn said:
I'm curious how the bootcamp 1.3 video drivers with the nvidia card handles games...
Click to expand...

So far, the divers seem pretty good under XP. Even on 1920x1200, most games have seemed to fare fairly well. As for Vista, it was just a mess for me. Under 1440x900 on the internal display, it wasn't as great as I had expected.
 
lowteg said:
lag1090, I'm curious to know if you have the 2.2 or 2.4ghz MBP model 🙂
Click to expand...

I have the 2.4 Ghz model. It's a replacement Apple sent me for my previous busted MBP (original Core Duo model without any of these problems).

djinn said:
Native res that bad? Thats odd... What games did you play under XP?
Click to expand...

I play a bunch of old games like Close Combat III and the like, in addition to newer ones like Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2142. Most of them were much worse under Vista, but they worked just fine under XP. BF 2142 under XP is great. 🙂 On a sidenote, CoD2 under OS X also sucks big time with its really low FPS.
 
I honestly believe Apple hasn't released optimized drivers for games under OS X. After reading several threads and looking at the benchmarks on barefeats it clearly shows this. In due time, Apple/Nvidia should release a set of drivers that will blow your socks off. Wasn't it in 10.4.9 multi-threaded opengl support was released, which improved a lot of gaming performance?

I guess the next question would be, for those games do they support the res 1440x900? Cause if they don't I can see why performance would be impacted.

Doesn't surprise me that games under Vista wouldn't run very well. Heck, it seems the drivers under Vista by Nvidia are still in beta, even if they don't specify it. Look at what Dell did, they re-introduced XP cause of the issues Vista has.
 
djinn said:
I guess the next question would be, for those games do they support the res 1440x900? Cause if they don't I can see why performance would be impacted.
Click to expand...

All of the newer games I used supported 1440x900, or I forced them into that resolution by using custom parameters. This is not an issue, as they run fine in XP under 1920x1200, a much higher resolution. As for the older games, most of them were in 1024x768, as a lot of them don't have options for custom resolutions. Even so, they still performed better at 1600x1200 under XP than 1024x768 on Vista.
 
I'm guessing this is a fairly good indication that I shouldn't buy the OS X version of Rise of Nations with my MBP tomorrow...

Has anyone tried it, I really want to play it and I can't afford to buy a copy of Windows. Anyone tested it?? Please help. 😱
 
Vista with 2.2 SR

Hi,
I play UT 2004 and HL2 at full resolution 1440*900 without an hitch under Vista on my MBP. I was trying to test the lost planet demo using DX10 but I can't get it to work, I am missing DLL. But basically under Vista, the OS can allocate additional memory by assigning RAM to act as VRAM and my SR macbook pro is performing very well. I am hoping that barefeats benchmark the new macbook pro under Vista.
As for MAC OS X, well game support is as always, not so good. But that's one reason I switched, my gamer side is well taken care off using boot camp and and I use OS X for everything else, wish that one day I won't need Vista, but it won't be happening soon.

BTW, I am using default driver with latest version of boot camp.

Simon
 
thegrandmaster said:
I'm guessing this is a fairly good indication that I shouldn't buy the OS X version of Rise of Nations with my MBP tomorrow...

Has anyone tried it, I really want to play it and I can't afford to buy a copy of Windows. Anyone tested it?? Please help. 😱
Click to expand...

It ran fine on my 1.25 Ghz iMac G4, so I wouldn't doubt that it runs well on a MBP. MR's UB games wiki entry says it runs well under Rosetta.

Edit: I installed it on my MBP and it ran pretty well. I was getting anywhere between 40 and 60 FPS, which isn't so bad for a game running under Rosetta.
 
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