“For years, Apple never really spent time and resources for improving performance levels and quality of its graphic card drivers, and with 3D application, when running benchmarks, we always obtain better results on Windows than on Mac OS X,” Lionel writes for HardMac.
“This was the result of both the lack of interest from Apple and the high marketing need from graphic card manufacturers to optimize their drivers on Windows as performance is a key driver for sales,” Lionel writes. “With many models available from AMD or NVidia, optimized drivers are required; such competition for Mac users, do not really exist (pending you do not flash your graphic card with some hacked ROM).”
Lionel writes, “It is about time for Apple to really improve its drivers, and simply work more with AMD, NVidia and Intel to make its drivers more competitive. The last Open GL3 drivers from Intel supports more functions than the one found in Mac OS X.”
Full article, with benchmarks, here.
Amen! It’s far past time Apple no longer lags behind winter on this!
It’s time for Apple to step up and assist in creating state-of-the-art drivers for modern video cards. It’s shameful that the “graphics” computer requires specific cards that are custom built priced ridiculously and underperform spectacularly. Gaming or development; it’s thew same. Proprietary and inferior.
This is something Apple has be behind the curve for…..well, as long as I can remember. I would love it if they got in gear and jumped ahead.
Sorry, I meant has BEEN behind the curve. Oy.
The need to have the bleeding edge graphics drivers in windows is 50% of why windows machines have problems.
just my $0.02
BULLSHIT.
Stop defending Apple. Everyone knows that GPU performance on the Mac is a piece of shit.
It’d be nice for people not to laugh when I tell them I game on a Mac! No Bootcamp for me…want to be windows free!
Who cares? 3D is BS and gamers are a bunch of fantasists living in their Mommys basement – at the age of 35.
This is another minority appeal whine from – well, a minority.
Let them eat windows.
It’s NOT, I repeat NOT, just gamers living in their mom’s basement that need this.
Apple (yes, that Apple) came up with OpenCL. The latest graphics card (like the recently announced AMD card) are several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest graphics care Apple currently supports (the antique 5870 that came out about two years ago). Apple’s support of cards that can take advantage of OpenCL is two full generations behind.
Want to do work that can best be done under the great OpenCL framework started and promoted by Apple? Better get a Windows machine!
Apple needs to wake up and support their own.
You myopic jackass. When they speak of 3D, they are not talking about the silly fad of stereoscopic content, they are talking about 3D modeling and animation programs such as Cinema 4D and Maya.
As a motion graphics artist who relies heavily upon these types of applications, I can emphatically state that the above article is 100% true. Mac is sadly way behind the curve on this stuff, and it is an annoyance to say the least.
Yeah, having eyes that enable us to see in stereo is silly. Humans should have 2 D vision. And the idea of having movies mimic the way we see things in real life -what a fad.
Yes, it’s a fad this time, just like it was in the 50’s and 80’s. Stereo is a half-assed attempt at trying to mimic (your word) binocular vision. It’s still a 2D screen.
Too bad it sucks. Whether active or passive, it either flickers, or it’s dim and muted, or both. Worse, it’s generally no more immersive than really well-done 2D content, unless it’s over-the-top and in-your face.
Stereo is fun for games, but really lame for movies. I’d rather watch the 2D version with no crosstalk, superior color, brightness, and overall picture quality.
Humans don’t have have 3D vision either. We have just have 2d vision from two similar view points.
How humans perceive depth has more to do with visual perspective than stereoscopic vision. That’s why you can still see depth in paintings and photographs, and more importantly, why a gun touting pirate or a cyclops holding a boulder is dangerous even from a distance.
That’s not strictly true based upon the scientific studies that I have read. The “2-D vision from two different viewpoints” that you describe is stereoscopic vision, and it does provide 3-D information. Because of the limited baseline distance between human eyes, my understanding is that stereoscopic vision provides useful depth perception only for short distances (say 6 feet or so). Beyond that distance, people increasingly rely upon visual cues for distance and scale. That is one reason why it is generally easy to fool people with optical illusions. Similarly, realistic paintings provide visual cues that facilitate human visual interpretation as 3-D.
The lack of true depth perception beyond six feet or so helps to explain why people who were blind from birth, but gain sight later in life, are initially unable to infer scale and distance and never really learn to do so very well. It is apparently something that you learn in your early youth.
*DING* My name’s sake appears to be confusing 3-D graphics with the 3-D optical effects.
Highest quality 3-D graphics are going to become nothing but ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL as computers progress. 3-D is the future of the computer GUI, and that’s a very kewl thing.
[BTW: ‘3D’ vs ‘3-D’: Doesn’t matter.]
Yeah, improve graphics card drives so we can waste our productive time playing a game 30 NANO SECONDS faster….
I really enjoy the “Apple Experience” and I think a few nano seconds doesn’t deserve to think Apple as a careless for it’s gaming clients.
An improve is more than welcome, but not as much critic in that are.
just my 2 nanoseconds..
Some of these games you can’t even play with the amount of video ram apple provides…my new mini has 256 mb ram and it’s already obsolete…I love that little guy though!
The mini never was sold as a high performance machine.
And I do love my mini server.
You’re ridiculing this but there is a real performance improvement to be gained just from optimizing the video drivers.
As an example, my MBP does 38 fps on Cinebench 11.5 on Lion (a 10% improvement from the 35 fps it did on Snow Leopard) while it does 43 fps on Windows 7.
30 nano seconds? Have you been drinking Kool-Aid? TEAM FORTRESS 2 IS A 2007 GAME WITH LOW REQUIREMENTS AND IT PERFORMS LIKE CRAP ON MY 2010 MBP! It’s LITERALLY 20 frames per second less than when I boot on windows!
I thought this was about performance in video editing, or Photoshop, or 3D Graphics or something, then I realised it was about playing bloody video games. Don’t these dimwits realise that your average Mac user graphics performance is more than adequate, while the real hardcore gamer spends huge amounts building custom machines so they can sit in their parents basement living on pizza, cheese balls and Red Bull feeding their faces and their unhealthy obsession with stupid games.
Why the hatred against gamers?
The point here is Windows is not just better than the Mac in this respect? It’s MUCH better. On the same 3D video hardware.
Is OS X better than Windows? NOT IN THIS AREA. I do want to see OS X surpass Windows, and that goes by pushing Apple to be the best in every respect and not belittling other persons just because they don’t do the same boring stuff you do.
Gamers aren’t all the same…. I’m a grown up with a great job who likes to play to unwind..but I want to only use Macs…a little more performance isn’t too much to ask
1
My bootcamp video driver hasn’t been updated in who knows how long. And if they don’t want to support it fine, but they shouldn’t make it a selling point when selling machines then…
The Windows bootcamp drivers are outdated and all, and still provide better graphics performance than on OS X.
As I mentioned before, for many of us this has absolutely nothing to do with gaming.
There are many processes that can be sped up by dumping them off to the GPU through interfaces such as OpenCL. Some highly parallel process such as image recognition and even engineering and scientific computing can be sped up by huge amounts. Sometimes by a factor of 100 or more.
When you’re talking about the fastest card supported by Apple being more than a factor of two or more (not 10% and not 25%) slower than the current generation GPUs, this is a huge hit.
People have been talking about highly parallel processes for over 25 years. We’re now getting hardware (well, Apple user’s aren’t yet) that can make real, real-world differences, but Apple is missing out on all of this by supporting hardware that is a full two generations behind the leading edge.
Apple needs to get with the program.
There is a particular CEO at a famous coffee shop that proclaims to be a guild master in WoW (informatioweek interview).
Wonder why he still lives in his mom’s basement.
Mac GPU performance is *crap*. Games or not, it is NOT adequate, moron.
I wish somebody who really understands this stuff would chime in and explain why video card driver performance is really the end-all. If it’s true then why does an aging Xbox 360 run Skyrim with it’s amazing graphics. Said differently, old (and closed, one might add) Xboxes see better and better graphics because the applications are getting better.
The Xobox 360 is a prefect example of graphics card driver optimization. The drivers inside the 360 are highly optimized to take advantage of low power graphics cards.
Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are way behind the latest graphics processing unit (GPU) cards. I do most of my work on a Mac but I have to use a Windows box for anything compute intensive. It has three graphics cards with 1024 cores each, so that is 3K cores running in parallel. Today people use GPUs for every kind of graphics, video, modeling and engineering type of work you could think of.
The biggest change (besides the continued march of ever faster GPUs) is the standardization of OpenCL and CUDA.
And more consumer uses are appearing. All kinds of pattern recognition (face recognition, speech recognition, etc) and machine intelligence (Siri) are massively sped up with GPUs. GPU performance is becoming a mainstream problem.
Apple will have to improve their GPUs or they will get left behind in areas they care more about than games. I am sure they know this, so its a matter of when, not if.
I think it’s about time Apple users banded together and used their collective voices to petition Apple for certain improvements—they have US$100bn available to help pay the wages, after all! There are a few things I’d like to petition, but we should start with the topic highlighted here: vastly improved graphics performance on supported cards! Mac users of the world, unite!
Didn’t apple include CUDA like tools in their Lion developer package? Apple has given developers the tools to optimize their software for multiple CPUs/cores and the GPU.
Apple typically direct developers to use frameworks and OS calls to enable their programs. It’s somewhat difficult for developers to write low level code talking directly to the hardware on Macs and iDevices, although many developers continue to do it. (Example: Ambrosia Software).
Apple should hire me to optimize their graphics drivers.
Mr. Driving Miss Daisy Chain
Windows has much better graphics performance, because GPU makers build in Windows support at the hardware level – there is no Direct X for Mac OS X. nVidia and ATI also write the drivers for Windows and Apple’s left to write their own. This has always been the case. It’s not up to Apple to step up and make this work, it’s up to the the damned GPU makers.
Apple is VERY adept at optimizing their graphics sub-systems, the iPhone is a perfect example of this. No other mobile device can match the smooth fluidity of graphics/animations at the same clock speed as Apple’s iOS devices.
Remember Apple owns part of Imation Technologies (the GPU in the A4 & A5) so they would probably have a deeper hand in the tech and can optimize the hell out of their drivers and OS. They don’t have that luxury with nVidia and ATI who write their Windows drivers while their GPU’s are being developed.
Why does Windows OpenGL performance still exceed OS X’s by a wide margin? Why doesn’t Apple let the GPU manufacturers write the drivers? IT IS up to Apple to step up and make this work. If they need AMD and nVidia’s help, then they should go and get it.
“Why does Windows OpenGL performance still exceed OS X’s”
That was answered already… The GPU makers write their Windows drivers and can make use of every tiny optimization and short cut they know of.
“Why doesn’t Apple let the GPU manufacturers write the drivers”
Not a matter of letting them write their own, it’s more a matter of why would they bother? There isn’t much of an after market for GPUs in Macs. This is due to the fact that there is only 1 computer Apple makes that can even take an after market card, and it’s a system that costs $2000.
According to you, the GPU makers only earn money on add-on video cards and not on every single GPU that Apple puts inside each Mac. And somehow, this gives Apple zero leverage and gives the manufacturers no motivation? Yeah, that makes sense.
You have no evidence to date showing that Apple has not been considering how to improve graphics card driver performance. When Apple feels it can do so while not compromising user experience, then it will. Be patient!
By not doing anything, Apple is already impacting my experience. Especially since people keep their Macs a lot longer, and considering they can’t upgrade their video cards in all but the Mac Pros…there’s tons of 2 – 3 year old Macs out there that have more than enough CPU and RAM to play current games, but lack the GPU speed/features.
When I can bootcamp and run a game on my iMac perfectly smoothly, but can’t do the same running the native OS X version of the same title, it tells me there’s something to be done.
Yeah, the software itself can be optimized, but some better drivers wouldn’t hurt either. Where’s support for OpenGL 3? From a company touting their graphics capabilities and cutting edge hardware, it sorta sucks that they don’t keep up to date when it comes to things like this.
We’ve been waiting since 2001. Enough is enough.
Maybe everyone should e-mail the link to this discussion page to Tim Cooke, and he’ll take notice.
Or direct prayers to Steve.