The latest Graphics Drivers updates hit the Software Update tab yesterday and I found this (technical; i.e., speaking to low level optimizations, occlusion queries and floating point validation improvements) background article talking about how Steam got on Apple’s case to really get the GPU performance updated.
Interesting.
Interesting…more as we all will benefit from this.
Now if someone could push Unity in the same way, so that their quality increases as well?!
Improve?
Unsure
After all the performance was there in 10.6.3, its just that apple fucked it up in 10.6.4
what I dislike is that they did “application specific fixes” instead of just fixing the driver in general so all other affected games are still affected
Its funny to see Valve taking the credit for this, especially since Steam for Mac is the worst port of a Windows app to Mac that i have ever used in my 18 years of using Macs!!
See this post for a partial list of the problems:
Ok, I just finished installing this latest update on my older MacBook Pro (X1600 graphics). The good news is that my Unity games now run faster, but the bad news is that it still runs slower than they did under 10.4.11.
Same game, same scene, same screen resolution, all set to “Fantastic” quality setting:
With 10.4.11 - 14 to 15 fps
With 10.6.4 yesterday - 7 to 8 fps
Today after the update - 10+ fps
that they run slower than in 10.4.11 is to be expected.
10.5 and 10.6 on the os level require more hardware gpu power.
the only way to overcome that is fullscreen actually, in which case the os itself should stop using the gpu for rendering during the time of the game.
but in windows mode it will always be like that (osx is no different than windows in that way which has had the similar behavior in vista and windows 7 which use the gpu for the regular desktop stuff)
Hmm i haven’t investigated this in any way but i also had the impression that the latest Tiger was running quite well, whilst Snow Leopard, whilst also running fine, somehow needed more power under the hood.
Is this only related to the GPU usage? Any further information on this one? Why this is the case? What are the benefits? In which scenarios is it true/false? …
Unfortunately full screen has no effect on frame rates. I just tested the same game, same scene, same view, same resolution, same quality settings in “full screen” and then in “windowed”. Both ran at exactly the same frame rate.