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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."
But I think this is clearly AT&T's fault.
Valve, if you're listening...
Please, please, please do steam and your games on linux. You've already made them POSIX and OpenGL, you're 85% of the way there.
I will buy every damn game you release on linux. I never want to run windows again, and if I can get portal and TF2 on linux, I won't.
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No this is not true... AMD and Nvidia write the hardware facing aspects of their respective graphics drivers and work with Apple on various other aspects. Apple writes the common OpenGL core, etc. AMD+Apple teams and Nvidia+Apple teams are really what exist... this is a good thing and close to what MS has with these vendors
Apple does however qualify and release these drivers via their update channels (not that Nvidia and others haven't release updates of their own at various points).
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.
BRIAN: Did you say -- OSX Leopard? ... sixteen years behind the bell, and proud of it, thank you sir.
OSX LEOPARD: That's right, sir. (he salutes)
BRIAN: What happened?
OSX LEOPARD: I was cured, sir.
BRIAN: Cured?
OSX LEOPARD: Yes sir, a bloody miracle, sir. Bless you.
BRIAN: Who cured you?
OSX LEOPARD: Jobs did. I was hopping along, when suddenly he comes and cures me. One minute I'm a Leopard with no games, next moment me productivity's gone. Not so much as a by your leave.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, 2008 sure does want that 5750 bad, but does she want it badly enough to wait until late 2009?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Apple knows best
That would be rather complex, but their certainly control the drivers. They dictate what they do, what can be released, and so on. Net effect is the same.
However it is a larger problem than that, OS-X also doesn't have a very fast 3D layer. Despite what you might think, DirectX is fast and able when it comes to getting things to graphics cards. Also Windows provides a good way to plug in an OpenGL (or any other) API that can get at the hardware fast and low overhead. OS-X is not so good in that regard. Apple has never really had a gaming focus.
Perhaps this is going to change, we'll see. Apple has in the past talked up the games thing and hasn't delivered anything, but maybe they are more serious this time around.
That's fine, but then no bitching if performance sucks. A high performance graphics layer is required if you want high performance games. The CPU has to be able to get data to the GPU quickly and efficiently with minimal overhead to make good use of said GPU. If the implementation remains poor, then the performance will likewise.
Also realize two additional things:
1) With proper OS architecture, the graphics driver isn't a big problem. 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. The system just restarts the driver. The GPU still can halt the system of course, and piece of hardware can because they have DMA and if they go nuts can corrupt things, but the driver can't protect against that.
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.
Couple that with the fact that the end-user can't really upgrade their video hardware without throwing away the whole computer (excluding the prohibitively expensive Mac Pro)
That's generally true of all laptops. Very few of them allow you to update the video. Most of the time the video chip is soldered on the MB.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Regardless of the non-state of the art of their vid cards, the same cards are (or were) running better when booting Windows on the same computer than under OSX. Hopefully they've fixed this.
Apple is the only major desktop manufacturer that doesn't have a user-accessible PCIe x16 slot in at least one of their entry and/or mid-range models.
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.
Wait, what changed in the last couple years? Last I heard, graphics drivers were a very substantial cause of Windows crashes. This article says nVidia + ATI together was over 1/3 of reported crashes, and nVidia was responsible for 1.5 times the number of crashes that MS was.
Was that just a temporary situation caused by Vista's release? Or maybe things were different in the XP era when it was easier for a driver to crash a system?
I'm guessing you're a complete and utter moron. And my guess is correct.
Those complaining are complaining about the games performing better ON THE SAME Mac running Windows.
Donno if its true, but it would seem like it ... and its a great trade off. Apple's nVidia drivers are about 3 billion times more reliable than anything nVidia itself has ever produced.
I'm happy with my 'slow' graphic drivers as I've never noticed them being slow. Until Steam learns how to deal with case sensitive file systems I doubt Steam will ever be a problem for me.
I play all sorts of stuff on my Mac and can't tell the difference between it and the Windows versions. I can say that the graphics update did seem to make my Mac run cooler while playing EVE Online but it doesn't seem to be any 'faster'.
I can play EVE in Win7 with the latest WHLQ drivers and get random crashes. I can play EVE under OSX and it works flawlessly ... considering its using Cedaga to run under OSX I'm fairly confident that I'm happier in OSX than I am in Windows thanks to Apple.
I don't know who, nor do I really care who makes my video card drivers, I do know that in MY experience, games in OSX are more reliable than they are in Windows.
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Um, no. That was due to the difference between Open Firmware on PPC Macs and BIOS on Windows boxes. There has never been any kind of "restriction" as there was even a dual firmware 9600 made by ATI that worked in both G5s and Windows boxes. Then it was due to the difference between EFI and BIOS. Even though Apple implemented BIOS compatibility in EFI not long after the Intel Macs came out, OS X still talked directly to EFI, so a standard PC card still wouldn't work without either flashing the ROM or, as we have now, software hacks to get OS X to recognize it.
"That's generally true of all laptops."
Not even close. MXM has been in multiple laptop models. It's what's labeled/advertised as 'discrete' graphics.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's linked to from TFA but Valve's technical article Game Performance Improvements in Latest Mac OS X Update gives a lot of insight into the OS X driver situation.
Personally, I have a MacBook Pro with a NVIDIA 9600 chip. I was kind of disappointed when I got StarCraft II. I had to run on one of the lowest resolutions with medium defaults. Increasing any setting made the game close to unplayable when complex graphics were being displayed (such as the lava level). Then I updated the graphics drivers. I was able to bump to the highest supported resolution and bumped the graphic settings to high defaults without noticeable slowdowns. I had to go to the ultra defaults before I started getting slowdowns and warnings.
I haven't had a chance to really sit down with it and play for an extended time (damn real life...) but there certainly is a huge improvement. The urge to upgrade is fading...
You know, FWIW, the vast majority of computer users don't need to upgrade their video card, and don't upgrade their video card. I play a decent number of games on my media system PC and so far everything I have runs just fine on my Geforce 8800gt that must be about 3 years old by now. The reality--the people that REALLY care about the tiniest framerate differences, the hardcore gamers, etc--would never buy a mac in the first place. Back in highschool it was really fun to whip out the framerates and optimize for tiny differences, but, IMHO, with today's hardware it just doesn't matter to me or most people anymore. So, for most other people, it's fine. Yeah, mac hardware is more expensive, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody deny that. It also tends to have very good support from Apple and lasts well in my experience. I don't begrudge you your choices, why do you care so much what choices other people make?
What does Flash performance have to do with Apple? I also think your assertion is wrong. Flash does suck, but what else is new. It's supremely ironic to me how many geeks have come out as roaring advocates for Flash since the Adobe/Apple battle started, when before that most self-respecting techies (rightfully!) loathed Flash.
$700 Mini, and Apple is hardly pitching it as a gaming system beyond casuals.
In case you didn't notice, the Mac Pro is NOT a friggin' commodity box. It's a Xeon-based workstation. It's not supposed to be a gaming machine. It's supposed to be a production machine.
And honestly, I don't think Apple will ever seriously care about gamers. They're happy to pick up fence-sitters who would come over with more gaming possibilities, but the hardcore gamers are a small market and one with which there is almost no crossover with Apple's current market. Casual gamers won't care a great deal if they can't max out all of the details. Apple will make some improvements to help pick up that crowd, but serious gamers wouldn't consider a Mac in the first place and Apple knows it.
I would love to see an Apple midtower, but I don't see it happening.
MXM is a rarity.
Just for reference, the EFI thing is only true of the primary card now. You can happily stick a PC graphics card in the second PCI-e slot, and OS X will detect and use it fine.
Hopefully as intel pushes to move all PCs over to EFI, the problem will disappear as more cards become EFI based or dual firmware, but that'll take a while.
The screens Apple uses are IPS LED backlit panels that are better and more expensive than what dell uses.
No they're not, the U2711 is the exact same monitor as is in the iMac... However, that makes the 27" iMac not too badly priced, given that Dell sells that monitor for $1099, and the iMac is $1699... Hell, you can even get a refurb for $1269... so that's $170 for a damn fast Core2Duo system.
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.
I seem to recall a report from Microsoft not too long ago - drawn from the automated error reporting in Windows - showing that video card drivers are, by far, the single biggest cause of system instability.
It comes with slots and will be available in platinum!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I disagree that most mac users are 'technophobic'. I see the lions share of our engineering students using them now, and many CS students have macs that dual boot or just go with linux boxes.
And yes, you can get a cheaper Dell. You can always get a cheaper Dell. I can go down the local korean computer shop and get something cheaper then that. There will always be cheap solutions that have the same 4 or 5 basic metrics people use to compare systems when they are lazy.
I have been building custom game rigs since the 80s and am still running one when my MacBook is not sufficient. I agree, you can get the best $/Perf out of role your own, but it also eats time. I spend more time maintaining my windows gaming rig then all my OSX machines put together, which when I only have a few hours for gaming per week can really add up. Next non-trivial part that fails (last one was just the CMOS battery) I will probably be simply replacing the machine.
One of the 'places' where macs excel is for people who just want (or only have the time) to use the computer, not treat the computer as part of the experience.
I will agree though, having some mac offerings in the midrange (Mac Pros are serious overkill for gaming) that you can swap out the video and sound systems would be nice.
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.
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.
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No.
It was based upon data gathered via error reports and sent to MS automatically and was in reference to the OEM and Retail release of Windows Vista.
And yes, the GPU companies had PLENTY of time to write new drivers and test them, they just didnt make very wise use of it.
This is also why the problems have slowed down considerably since the release of Windows 7.
It uses the same driver architecture as Vista for the most part making the creation of Drivers for Win 7 a much less painful process resulting in more stable driver releases.
However, Both ATI and Nvidia still have issues from time to time in their releases.
A quick look at any HTPC forum will show the problems they both tend to have.
So your upset that the bottom end Macs dont' include high end graphics cards?
Are you retarded? When did low end machines start coming with modern high end graphics cards from Dell or HP?
My Laptop from last year runs Crysis versions currently available just fine. Of course, its not the bottom end model, but its certainly not the high end model either. I can't say it runs Crysis 2 great, but neither can you say it runs it bad since neither one of us can actually run it ... So your slideshow comment was just a ignorant jab due to your lack of any real logic or reason for your statements.
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Irrelevant, since the comparison is between a Mac running OS X, and the same Mac booting Windows.
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The drivers are kernel mode, they always have been
Not true. They weren't with Windows NT 3.x, for stability reasons. They were moved into the kernel with NT 4 because people complained about the performance. They've been complaining about the stability ever since. I ran NT4 and NT5 (Win2K, from back when it was NT5 beta 2 until several service packs after the release) and the only time either of them blue screened was in drivers written by Creative, ATi, or nVidia.
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Apple fixed occlusion query in OpenGL, which matters when you're looking into a light source. Useful when sun near horizon in game. Nice, but no big deal.
That was due to the difference between Open Firmware on PPC Macs and BIOS on Windows boxes
And the OpenFirmware stuff wasn't Mac specific. You could pull a graphics card from a PowerPC Mac and drop it into a Sun SPARC and have it work nicely. More importantly, you could buy an OpenFirmware card from Apple for about a third of what Sun would charge for exactly the same hardware.
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I'm glad you're having a great time playing EVE, but I don't think a seven year old game is really relevant to a discussion of the state of the art of graphics cards for gaming. Even a year or two is a long time in the world of graphics cards -- seven years is an eternity.
Are you suggesting that one must be a technophobe to "not want viruses and malware"? :)
The stuff you've listed isn't about "technophobia," it's about "not wanting to spend several hours a week dicking with settings &/or virus scans on your computer." One need not be a technophobe to have things other than building their own computer rigs that they'd rather be doing.
Sorry, but you're a delusional fanboy and a liar. The only Mac to approach high end graphics is the Mac Pro. If your laptop is a Mac, it doesn't run Crysis well, period.
Wake me up when Crysis is worth playing. Crysis is the game every single PC gamer cites when mocking the Mac, but it's not even a good game. The days of graphics demos disguised as games died in the late 90s. Visuals are a solved problem. More people play 2D FarmVille than all the copies of Crysis ever sold because most people don't care anymore about high-end graphics. Gamers like you are now a smaller niche than the Mac userbase itself.
Depends on which univ you are talking. The one I am at, people who fall out of the MBA programs would not be likely to surive even the first year of the engineering program, if they could even get into the dept in the first place.
*sigh* I am constantly frustrated by the 'if someone likes a mac, they must have been manipulated into it' meme. Most of the students (undergrad, masters, and PhD) student I know with macs use them because they are low maintenance and good for getting work done. They are good solutions for their situations and tasks... esp among the PhD students who really just do need a computer that works, lets them do their research, and does not burn time with fiddling or maintenance. Mac can be very good for that group.
Na. I've seen intrend away from that type od student.
OSX is a good choice for engineering. There is a lot of power there.
Why do I doubt you know all those student well enough to make the determination? or right, your post is chalk full of Ad Hom fallacy.
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"..."nverted my HDD to case-sensitive
what the hell, man?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is precisely why I own a Mac laptop. I'm a graduate student in CS, and with my Macbook as my primary work computer, I need a *nix compatible operating system but don't have time to dick around for 2 days getting an Xserver working with a new graphics card (though Ubuntu has made this a late easier than a few years ago). I have a cheapo desktop PC/server that I use for that.
Using Windows would be almost impossible for any serious computing when all high performance clusters I've come in contact with at various universities use Linux or Solaris and I need to test the code locally before launching a job. Desktop Linux, up until recently, was an unstable option.
(Note: I do now own a netbook with Ubuntu 10.04 UNR on it and it is a pleasure to use for writing in a coffee shop or somewhere I'm not guaranteed a power outlet).
This latest update for graphics has fixed that bug.
I notice that Apple never seems to have acknowledged the bug, despite people screaming in the support forums, and that the System Update doesn't mention that it's obtw fixing a total showstopper that has plagued many users for the last 6 weeks on all platforms - nothing to do with the games cited.
SimpleDirectMedia Layer. (http://www.libsdl.org/)
With SDL, you can do 2D, 3D (via OpenGL), Sound, Input, and basic video overlay. It supports well over a dozen platforms, including consoles.
GPU-accelerated video decoding isn't supported/exported, but that's not part of DirectX.
SDL even has a Networking layer too, but it's not part of the core. (Actually DirectPlay is deprecated, and its replacement isn't part of DirectX either)
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Do you have evidence or example behavior/feature that shows that OSX doesn't have a very fast 3D layer? Otherwise the most damning thing about OSX graphics engine is that it isn't DirectX. That isn't better or worse but simply different.
That you take StarCraft 2 or Portal and run them on OS-X, then reboot that same system in to Windows 7 and the games run better.
"thats' really an indication of your skill, not the platform"
I'd have to side with @jythie on this one.
I came from a video post production house heavy with Mac workstations and now work at a major network channel that's very Windosey. My god - I truly can't understand the world's sad devotion to Windows. I hardly ever heard from the 60 Mac users at my last job and now I spend most of my day keeping a few dozen HP 360 and 380 shitboxes connected, booted and trying to finish the work you ask them to do. There's always something falling apart on these systems and they're slow as ass.
There's also a Mac graphics department with 12 machines. I MIGHT spend an hour a MONTH maintaining ALL of them put together.
My two year old 8-core Mac Pro at home can run rings around the 12-core HP 380 G6 server at work. On top of that, the people here THINK THAT'S HOW COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK and keep buying them. Cripes.
On top of that, I'm sure I only spent half the money on all the Mac servers and workstations as they spent on this stuff.
There's something to this OS X thing. I wouldn't write it off so fast.
Most of the stuff on