Game Performance Improvements in Latest Mac OS X Update

[anon_86430146]

News - Game Performance Improvements in Latest Mac OS X Update

Mac adds Occlusion Queries and more YAY

[bigkahuna]

Just upgraded to 10.6.4 from 10.4.11 on my older iMac and MacBook Pro. Big mistake. Unity now runs like a snail. Games that once ran at 20 fps+ now barely crawl at 6 or 7 fps. Even my faster apps went from 60+ fps to under 30 fps. Big disappointment. Wish I could go back to Tiger, but unfortunately Unity 3.0 means no more Tiger support. :roll:

[anon_86430146]

wow thats bad - will need to test my stuff on the Mac

[Aras]

I had extreme performance drop once I upgraded to OS X 10.6.4 (from 10.6.3), but after a couple of reboots it went away. YMMV.

About this graphics update for OS X: occlusion queries were supported for ages by now on Mac, just at horribly slow speeds This latest update fixes that apparently. We’re not using them in Unity, so no big speedups for Unity’s games with this update.

[anon_45332833]

We are seeing dramatic performance improvements on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models. Depending on the game, video settings and the hardware, we have measured frame rate improvements from 15% to 120% on these systems.

I wonder where did they exactly measure a 120% framerate improvement?

[bigkahuna]

The latest OS update that came out last week resulted in a meager 10-20% improvement (over previous 10.6.4 performance, which is still roughly 50% slower than 10.4.11).

My solution? Bought a $1000 i5 Windows notebook with an nVidia GTS 360M. Result? 20-30x performance increase for less than 1/2 the price of a Macbook Pro. Thank you Apple for teaching me why I shouldn’t stick with Macs.