Will Lion be better for gaming?

[I'mAMac]

Pretty much thread title. Drivers right now are pretty bad and was wondering if there's any word on improvements in lion.

 

[alust2013]

I think it's more that the coding for games on the Mac is bad than bad graphics drivers. A lot of newer games, like Portal 2 for example, run about the same on Mac and PC, simply because it was better developed for both platforms, rather than developed for windows then ported to Mac.

 

[I'mAMac]

I think it's more that the coding for games on the Mac is bad than bad graphics drivers. A lot of newer games, like Portal 2 for example, run about the same on Mac and PC, simply because it was better developed for both platforms, rather than developed for windows then ported to Mac.

I think this is true but why then do Blizzard games which are developed both for Mac and PC, run better in Windows? Do they just sort of cut corners when coding for Mac OS?

 

[Reasec]

Its all about apples support. Outdated opengl stack, outdated drivers and poor coding by third party software developers. WoW is an example of ****** programing.

 

[kjjnk]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/review...ias-sole-mac-offering-a-promising-start.ars/4

My initial reaction was, "That's pretty underwhelming considering that the Quadro and Radeons already support OpenGL 4.1 on Windows," but I think there's reason to be confident that we won't have to wait as long as we did with 3.2 to reach GL 4.1. The 3.2 OpenGL stack in 10.7 is a completely new implementation, and it's been separated from the existing 2.1 stack, which will be used by apps until code explicitly calls for the "forward context" GL implementation. Even before I knew about Lion's OpenGL 3.2, I'd heard from some reputable people that an "overhaul" of the GL stack was coming, so this need to explicitly call the new implementation suggests it's radically different from the previous one. The low-ish 3.2 might just be to give Apple and developers fewer bugs to squash while moving to this new path.

 

[Killery96]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/review...ias-sole-mac-offering-a-promising-start.ars/4

Yay, Open GL 3.2 for mac!!!

 

[AppleMatt]

Also early benchmarks (of the very first beta I believe) showed overall speed improvements:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_107lion_dp1&num=1

AppleMatt

 

[Huntn]

Pretty much thread title. Drivers right now are pretty bad and was wondering if there's any word on improvements in lion.

What drivers are you thinking of? If the complaint is windows= faster, I think this is a result mostly of the ways games are developed, developed in a windows environment and then adapted to Mac which includes work arounds for Direct X implementation and such. Portal runs fine under MacOS, although I have not done a side by side comparison. Before this the last game I seriously played under MacOS was WoW which seems to be ok other than reports that the Windows version was faster. I just enjoy not having to be exposed to Windows when I can. 😉

 

[Jyby]

I think this is true but why then do Blizzard games which are developed both for Mac and PC, run better in Windows? Do they just sort of cut corners when coding for Mac OS?

OpenGL requires about twice the amount of memory to draw textures than DirectX. This is why Apple has been pushing large amounts of memory for its computers. Check out their current iMacs.. 512 is the lowest they go, and 1Gb is becoming the next standard. Apple wants to push games, but its up to the developer to take advantage of the hardware.