[Heavy]

I read here that someone read that Apple is working on a driver to improve the GPU on the MB. Anyone know anything about this? I hope it's not just a rumour.

[P]

I think you can safely assume that any driver currently delivered on the Intel Macs is rather far from optimized, so yes, they're working on it. The fact remains, however, that there is still no T&L hardware which will severly limit performance for some operations.

If you make a list of all the ATi GPUs and all the nVidia GPUs since the first Geforce256, you can more or less put them in a pecking order. There are games that favor ATi and those that favor nVidia, but it's more or less there. What you can't do is put the GMA950 anywhere in that order. On some things, like Quartz Extreme and some games, it will work great. On others it will work badly (when the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU is killing it) or not at all (when the game refuses to start). The GMA950 is a GPU that works well for the graphics demands on modern operating systems. Incidentially, that means that you can also game on it from time to time - but that was never its purpose.

[lookmark]

A Blizzard developer in WoW's Mac support forum has confirmed that Apple is actively working on both 950 drivers and more general OpenGL improvements, and the (not yet released) results so far are looking good.

I wouldn't get *too* hopeful, esp. for the 950, but it does look like improvements are coming down the pipeline soon.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by lookmark

A Blizzard developer in WoW's Mac support forum has confirmed that Apple is actively working on both 950 drivers and more general OpenGL improvements, and the (not yet released) results so far are looking good.

I wouldn't get *too* hopeful, esp. for the 950, but it does look like improvements are coming down the pipeline soon.

I say tigerclaw, the Bliz dev always making wild claims, is full of ****...can anyone that has access to 10.4.7 tell us how much WoW performance has changed?

The 950 drivers may be unoptimized...but I highly doubt OpenGL is.

[lookmark]

Why the cynicism, and what wild claims? tigerclaw has seemed like a pretty honest, upfront guy to me.

I have no idea if the upcoming changes are in 10.4.7, or a later update, or Leopard (I'm assuming it's going to be 10.4.something, but who knows).

And yes, the OpenGL APIs on OS X still need improvement, and/or the games and apps that utilize OS X's OpenGL APIs need more tuning. There's no other way to explain the rather humbling performance gap between the same game running on OS X and Windows on the very same Mac.

[videian28]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

I say tigerclaw, the Bliz dev always making wild claims, is full of ****...can anyone that has access to 10.4.7 tell us how much WoW performance has changed?

The 950 drivers may be unoptimized...but I highly doubt OpenGL is.

There was an improvement on my core duo 1.83 iMac, pre patch, 30fps with full screen glow off and 20 fps with it on, standing in the same spot, updated to 10.4.7 logged back on, same 30fps in the same spot with FSG off, turned it on and the framerate did not drop, 30fps with FSG on, so there was a definate change

TIgerclaw did mention that you MUST use the combo update to see the improvements, which I did



WTB black Macbook with a real video card.......I have been looking at some of the pics here of that machine and I am in love, but damn, so much power and so crippled at the same time

[jstw]

Hey, how would the macbook 2gb ram, 2.0ghz do with a game like the sims? or simcity?

[jstw]

anyone?

[Dopetrackalistic]

If it's anything that requires 3d or openGL effects, it would run like ****. The ONLY time that videocard will be good for gaming is if the game is so old or lame it doesn't even require a graphics accelerator.