Steam Prompts OS X Graphics Update

Stoobalou writes "Mac gamers got a massive boost when online gaming hub Steam started supporting the platform a few months ago. The arrival of the online service, which allowed Mac-toting gamers to play some of the same games as their PC brethren, in some cases cross-platform, created a great deal of debate between the two camps, with the PC crowd pillorying Mac fans for the relatively poor performance of their expensive hardware. Now it seems that Apple has gotten the message, as they have provided a graphics update for OS X Snow Leopard which will make progress toward closing the gap between the two platforms."

Comments

Re:Vendors

[Thinine]

Nope, nVidia and AMD both write their own drivers. Apple supplies the OpenGL implementation. This fix was a combination of updated drivers and refinements to Apple's OpenGL to increase performance.

Re:Vendors

[BitZtream]

Windows 7 runs it all in user mode (you don't have to reboot when you install a driver) so a crash isn't a big deal.

Uhm, live kernel driver updates is something windows has done since Windows 2000. 99.9% of the time in Windows XP can have its graphics drivers update on the fly and work fine if you just ignore the 'you must reboot' button.

The drivers are kernel mode, they always have been, they always will be, unless you want them to be slow as molasses due to the userland/kerneland context switching thats required.

Rebooting is not required to modify kernel drivers. Its as simple as issuing 'net stop' and 'net start' commands (or using the API for the same purpose) with the NT kernel. I know, I do it, I've written Windows kernel drivers.

2) nVidia in particular but ATi as well are real good at writing drivers. They don't crash much, if ever. They are not going to be our source of instability.

What world do you live on?

ATI has some of the shittiest most unreliable drivers on the freaking planet.

nVidia gives you a 50/50 chance of getting a good version that works reliably without a bunch of bugs. Half the time you score, the other half the time you're falling back to an older version of some sort so your games don't crash or your machine bluescreen anymore.

I'm not really sure where you get your information from, but you probably should not use that source anymore.