Steam Warns Gamers Upgrading To 10.6.4

For many of you, it’s probably a bit too late, but if you’re a Mac gamer who uses Valve’s Steam for Mac games delivery client, you might want to hold off updating to 10.6.4: according to Valve, 10.6.4 introduces some major performance issues to owners running Macs with NVIDIA GPUs.

The following message warend Steam users who logged in over the weekend about the upgrade:

The recent 10.6.4 update from Apple has noticeable performance issues for NVidia graphic chip owners running high performance games. If you wish to avoid this, you should consider waiting to install the 10.6.4 update until Apple has had the opportunity to address this issue. Full details of what is contained in the 10.6.4 update can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4150. If you have already installed this update and believe your graphic performance is affected, please contact Apple support (http://www.apple.com/support/) for details on what to do.

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I haven’t noticed anything on my 27-inch Core 2 Duo iMac, but your mileage may well vary. If you haven’t updated to 10.6.4 yet, and if your Team Fortress 2 performance is more important to you than your Snow Leopard importance, it can’t hurt to hold off for now.

6 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Gaming, News |

kyle bellamy
Hurray! For once in my MacBook life, my old, outdated graphics card can run the games and not be othered by those high-end woes! lol Long live GMA X3100!
http://trimtab.ca dibs
Yup, this affects my late 2008 unibody MBP. After upgrading, there is frequent lag in both video and audio, sometimes quite severe.
http://web.me.com/bender.077/Site/ Pascal
Noticed a big performance hit playing Bioshock on my 24” iMac since upgrading to 10.6.4. It has the NVDIA GE Force 8800 GS.
Never had any issues with graphics performance before the ”upgrade”.
I’m sure it will get fixed soon, as it seems to be a pretty widespread issue.
Chris
I downloaded Torchlight from Steam after I upgraded my MAC OSx to 10.6.4, that was a mistake. Torchlight wont even run, it comes up with a fatal error everytime. Looks like steam is blaiming MAC, which to me doesnt seem right. Apple lays guidlines for developers to follow, and its in there best interest to communicate those guidlines so that all programs its customers use will function properly. Apple does this, you can go to their website and look under developer.apple.com. Seems to me Steam dropped the ball on this one, they need to update there software to be compatible with apples updated OS instead to finger pointing. Because that gets us nowhere and it seems like I’ve just wasted $20 on a game I wont be able to play.
Brett Brenneman
@Chris: First of all, Torchlight is not developed by Valve, nor by Steam, which is just a platform, a store if you will, to provide games. So how can they have “dropped the ball”?
Secondly, how can you not blame Apple if everything works fine before the patch, and after the update everything gets messed up? How is that the fault of the game’s developer?
md
yup, this killed all my performance on my mid 2009 MBP. stutters when looking around. on css, 40 fps looking at wall, 30 and under when moving, 25 and under when shooting, 20 and under other people moving in vision. before this i played css at medium settings with the odd jump, now even the lowest setting is just as jumpy as the highest setting.