Will OS X 10.6.5 narrow gaming performance gap?
When Apple announces new Macs and demos what everyone expects will be OS X 10.7 “Lion” next Wednesday, the Cupertino, California-based company will likely release a fairly significant Snow Leopard maintenance update with important iOS 4.2 dependencies. As we consider today’s latest OS X 10.6.5 developer seed, we should look ahead at what to expect in this release overall.
MacRumors reports that Apple has seeded OS X 10.6.5 [10H555] to developers. As was the case with the previous dev release two weeks ago, this one arrives with no known issues and Apple’s asked coders to focus on the same areas — 3D graphics, printing, QuickTime, Time Machine and USB devices.
Although nothing’s certain until it’s actually released, refreshed Macs and operating system updates often ship on or about the same day. This relative concurrence points to next Wednesday’s “Back to the Mac” Apple media event, where the company is expected to release updated Mac hardware, as well as preview Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion.”
What’s inside?
When Apple releases iOS 4.2 in November, which brings multitasking to the iPad and AirPrint mobile printing to the idevice line, it carries a dependence on OS X 10.6.5. Yes, there will be limited idevice printing capabilities without it, limited to only HP’s latest top-shelf all-in-one printers, but compatibility with legacy printers requires this Snow Leopard update.
What else is new in OS X 10.6.5? According to AppleInsider, the mothership and its merry band of coders have baked the following into this release:
• Improved reliability with Microsoft Exchange servers
• Resolved a delay between print jobs
• Addressed a printing issue for some HP printers connected to an Airport Extreme
• Resolved an issue when dragging contacts from Address Book to iCal
• Addressed an issue where dragging an item from a stack causes the Dock to not automatically hide
• Added SSL support for uploading files to iDisk
• Resolved an issue with Wikipedia information not displaying correctly in Dictionary
• Improved performance of MainStage on certain Mac systems
• Resolved spacing issues with OpenType fonts
• Improved reliability with some Bluetooth braille displays
• Resolved a VoiceOver issue when browsing some web sites with Safari 5
• Addressed stability and performance of graphics applications and games
Regarding the last point, back in late August after the release of Snow Leopard Graphics Update, the software simians at Valve praised the patch for markedly improving gaming performance. However, they also made a rather pointed remark on how Apple could further improve Snow Leopard.
“Lastly, and this is the bit that pleases me most, Valve pointedly mentions that Apple could further boost performance by optimizing floating point validation, overcoming a significant CPU bottleneck.”
Thereupon, the Mac versions of Valve/Steam games are much more stable and offer 80 to 90 percent of the performance of their PC equivalents. If Apple can palpably narrow the frame rate gap with OS X 10.6.5 — right before the Christmas holiday — a lot of people will take notice, especially if the company delivers the update on freshly tweaked (i.e. faster) Macs…
What’s your take?
All your performance gaps, software updates and optimizations are belong to us. If we were trying to turn macs into toys for playing games, we would have done it a long, long time ago
Some of those performance optimizations that do make games faster, could also improve OS, CoreVideo, CoreImage, and some 3rd part 3D apps, so while 3D performance wasn’t as big of a focus years ago… it is being used in more and more.
Any performance improvements in terms of gaming on a Mac will be much appreciated. Not having to load windows in bootcamp on my Mac Pro to play my favorite games would be nice.
If Steve Jobs has matured and seen the explosion of sales for iPhones and iPad because they are (additionally) great for playing games, he would be a fool not to bring that ability to OS X. He may personally dismiss games but he set his sights on Dell and there is only one way to close that gap rapidly…Expandable mid-priced Mac’s and co-operation with Games Developers.
But my money is on Jobs still confined to his play-pen with teething rings and an Ives designed rattle/comforter or two to fondle.
Shouldn’t any improvements in frame rates have already been noted by developers?
It’s nothing new that games are usually a great performance indicator for the whole system. They push the system to its limits in almost all areas, be it graphics, file-/memory-IO or sound.
Apple doing good to keep an eye on all gaming performance issues – optimizing those will result in a performance gain in all other areas too
What about OpenGL 3.0 support? I believe the only thing that has been holding it back has been GLSL 1.30 support, since the other extensions have been implemented. It’s disappointing that the opportunity for renewed emphasis in OpenGL, now that the Khronos Group is putting out a steady pace of new versions and GPU vendors are keeping up with driver support, seems to be squandered by lack of support by Apple. OpenGL 3.x contains DX10 level features, yet is cross-platform compatible, and would seem like a more tempting target compared to DirectX for new games to be written in now that Steam opens the door to more viable cross-platform commerce, but the cross-platform carrot to encourage OpenGL use by developers just isn’t there if Apple isn’t going to support it with drivers.
The other thing that makes now the perfect time to encourage game developers use more OpenGL is that OpenGL 3.x and 4.x are supported in Windows XP and can bring DX10/DX11 features to that platform. Currently, the Steam Survey notes out of all DX10/DX11 GPU owners, 21% actually run Windows XP. I would think the ability to target the large population of XP users without having to resort to a separate DX9 version and instead use an OpenGL codepath that can also run on Vista/7, Mac, and Linux would be tempting. This motivation works while the XP userbase is still large, but still relies on Apple supporting OpenGL 3.x to really emphasize the cross-platform benefits. If enough support isn’t put in place to let OpenGL native game development reach a critical mass now, it’s hard to see it happening at all in the future, which means Mac games will still generally be ports released after the Windows version if at all.
I would personally love to see OS support for 3rd-party USB 3.0 SuperSpeed PCI and ExpressCards – at least until Apple starts including built-in USB3 ports on it’s entire laptop and desktop line. The USB 3 train is leaving the station – I’d hate to see Apple lagging adoption – instead of leading the way.
re: MacGizmoGuy
Intel isn’t even doing USB 3 really, since they are focusing on Light Peak which has many advantages over USB3 – including speed.
Although there was word that Intel was finally doing a chipset with USB3 support, once that ships, unless Light Peak will be out very shortly after, likely Apple will add support around then.
[...] See also: Will OS X 10.6.5 narrow gaming performance gap? [...]
[...] It will be interesting to see whether we simply get refreshed graphic drivers or if something more substantial gets delivered — game maker Valve among others has identified a number of graphics performance issues. [...]
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