On Thursday, Apple released a rare supplemental update to OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 that resolves a bug in a video driver that was causing some Mac owners to report startup issues or even full-blown kernel panics "when running certain apps that capture video," said the company. Users were reported longer-than-normal startup times or crashes. Not fixed by the new update are
scattered reports of problems opening large JPEG files using Preview of QuickLook, but this is again not a universal issue.
Ironically, the problem with the video driver may have to do with improvements made to such drivers in 10.10.3 that developers reported as improving game performance. Feral Interactive noted last week that the update had resolved some issues with some of its games, and spot checks of other game developers by
MacNN and
Electronista show general improvements in performance under 10.10.3 as well. One of our staff reported notably-improved video performance at higher resolutions on some games following the update.
Some users were able to resolve the video driver issue on their own by resetting their Mac's PRAM, or resetting the startup disk choice, but these fixes did not affect other users. The new update should resolve the issues while retaining the game-performance enhancements, while the company will likely include a fix for the JPEG crashing issue in a future scheduled update.
Some users have said that reinstalling 10.10.3 has fixed the problem for them, at least partially, while the issue can be avoided temporarily by using list view in the Finder for images. There is no suggested workaround for the Preview application issue on machines that are seeing the problem thus far other than to avoid using it. A variety of Mac models appear to be affected by the bug, but only with very large JPEG graphics files. Under the issue, Preview will either quit or display the image very briefly, then go blank. A quick test of our own machines (including Mac minis and MacBook Pros) could not reproduce the problem with files up to 6MB.
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