Valve’s Source engine games run fantastically on the Mac already, but the performance hasn’t quite been up to the level of what they’ve come to expect under Windows, mostly due to issues inherent to Snow Leopard’s graphic drivers. We posted last month that Valve was working closely with Apple to remedy that issue, and now the fruits of their labors have been released, courtesy of a new Snow Leopard Graphics Update.
Here’s what the 69MB update fixes:
Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.
Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.
Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.
It’s really good to see Apple taking Mac gaming seriously enough to specifically call out new games in their patch notes. Cupertino’s long sent the message that it doesn’t really care about gaming under OS X, but perhaps all that was missing was a passionate advocate like Valve.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
