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Reports about the huge performance improvements, especially on “older” Macs running ATI GPUs, that Apple’s recent Snow Leopard Graphics Update brings to gaming continue to roll in. A top flight game developer quotes truly impressive frame rate gains and fresh data from Mac hardware guru Rob Art backs up that.

Apple’s Snow Leopard Graphics Update shipped quietly and the resonant buzz has built geometrically in the days since August 16. Valve has hailed Snow Leopard Graphics Update performance improvements, claiming frame rate improvements ranging from 15 to 120 percent.

Thereupon, BareFeats.com has installed the Snow Leopard Graphics Update (SLGU) on an “older” eight-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro (2009) and twisted the settings knob up to 11 while running eight popular games. Unsurprisingly, the results he got are impressive.

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Well, although these results seem to come out of nowhere, a lot of leg work and planning went into making the Mac a lot more competitive gamewise with the PC. According to Macworld UK, Snow Leopard Graphics Update is the result of two months intensive cooperation between graphics chip maker ATI — whose star has been on the rise in the Apple ecoverse — and our favorite fruit company.

Additionally, that work stands on the shoulders of close cooperation between ATI + Valve for six to eight months preceding the May 12 release of Steam for Mac.

Clearly there’s more work to be done — Steam’s hoping Apple will take aim at floating point performance next — but are you or your PC gaming friends impressed? Then again, with Halo playing at 120fps who has time to care…

What’s your take?