Apple, ATI, NVIDIA Actively Working on Improving Mac Gaming Performance
The reason for the discrepancy has been described as due to relatively immaturity of drivers on the OS X side as well as other slowdowns. Some modest improvements may be seen with the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.6.4, but more dramatic improvements remain in the pipeline.
Responding to concerns about performance on some Mac Steam games, Valve employee rbarris provides some reassurance that further performance updates will be coming:
Performance is going to improve as drivers are updated. I would expect modest improvements in short term and larger ones in longer term. No, I can't put dates on them. We are making a lot of progress is identifying specific issues that need work inside the game and inside OpenGL and drivers. Apple, ATI and NVIDIA are all involved.
Steam is said to be working with Apple, ATI and NVIDIA on these optimizations for improved gaming performance. Driver-level features should arrive over time with future Mac OS X updates.Top Rated Comments
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Hopefully they don't leave us people who felt Snow Leopard wasn't worth the upgrade stranded without a firmware release...
Not worth the upgrade? It was $29!
Will Source Games on OS X ever perform as well as they do on Windows?
He responded:
Predictions are hard. I know we and Apple are motivated to keep improving these titles for many months to years. Now that we have Portal out and more people can look at it in depth, it will get easier to pinpoint where more elbow grease is needed. It's just engineering, it takes time. I used to work on Mac WoW, it also took a few iterations to get things really humming.
It's not a statement that's as clear as the one in the article but maybe it'll get some people excited anyway :)
No optimizations specific to Blizzard performance problems went into 10.6.4, don't expect big improvements. There's one new OpenGL feature in 10.6.4 that we take advantage of and there's general optimizations.
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=25172042436&sid=5000
Hopefully they don't leave us people who felt Snow Leopard wasn't worth the upgrade stranded without a firmware release...
Why should they keep updating an older os with non security fixes? SL has been out a while now, price isn't an issue, if you still don't want to upgrade fine but don't keep expecting Apple or any software company to keep providing additional features, or performance improvements to software that is a version behind. About all you can expect is fixing of large security holes and even that in my opinion is unnecessary once a newer version is out.
Not worth the upgrade? It was $29!
Thez are willing to pay thousands for faster Macs (through newer hardware) but they are not willing to pay 29 Bucks for faster Macs (through newer software). I don't get it. OSX is the single most valuable Apple product and they almost sell it for free. Utter no-brainer to upgrade imho...
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