I finally got a chance to update my MBP to Snow Leopard from Tiger and so far the performance in Unity is pretty disappointing. On one project I am getting a 30+% decrease in frame rates over the exact same project running OS X 10.4.11. I’m using a MBP with Intel Core Duo 2 2.33 GHZ, 2 GB of RAM, and OS X 10.6.4. I’ve updated everything I could think of and rebooted a number of times.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?
You actually measured the decrease percentage?
Wow. I have never experienced it. Although, I shouldn’t be speaking.
I’m a pc.
Maybe it will run faster if you upgrade your ram or clear some hard drive space (yes, clearing hard drive space makes your computer faster).
It’s easy enough to measure the difference. This morning I was running OS X Tiger and tonight I’m running Snow Leopard. This project has been giving me 12-15 fps all week long, but now won’t go over 9 fps. I’m pretty disappointed.
Increasing / changing the hardware isn’t the point. I’m trying to find out if perhaps there’s something I can do to the OS to get it up to the same performance I had with the older operating system.
Could I perhaps get a reply from someone who actually is using Snow Tiger on a Mac? :roll:
this has nothing to do with unity or osx, it has to do with 10.6.4 which has some serious problems on the gpu drivers.
The steam board and alike are full of it, as the drop compared to 10.6.3 was that visible that even osx non-techies realized it when it went from fluent to stuttering
Any word on a fix / update?
Not as far as I know but we talk about Apple here.
At least we know that first developer versions of 10.6.5 went out and we can hope that apple will fix the drivers by then
Thanks dreamora. Both my Macs have ATI gpu’s so I’ll have to wait for an OS update to fix this. At least now I know I’m not alone. 
Its no ati thing.
valve claims its an nvidia thing, but at the same time, the 9400m and x1600 has no problem (ok not that it had to lose much, that might be the reason they are not affected) and other reports indicate that the radeon 4670 suffers too.
so either a problem with drivers for the higher end gpus or a problem deeper in 10.6.4 itself
Both my Macs have the ATI X1600 GPU with 256 MB of video RAM.
Now that I think about it, I tested the Unity editor after I did a clean install with 10.6.3 (I think). I saw that the performance was real crappy so I immediately did a Software Update. After the update I still have crappy performance. I also looked at the GPU temps and cleared my widgets, but without any benefit.
So I guess this huge performance hit is something I’ll just have to learn to live with. 
Fortunately, I will be phasing in a new PC that is (so far) blazingly fast compared to my aging Macs.