Big graphics driver improvements ahead?

[savvos]

Barefeats cloned the new iMac i7 drive and stuck it in last years i7 model to do some benchmarking of how driver improvements affect gaming performance. The drivers shipping with the new iMacs give a huge boost to the performance of last year's model in many games, especially Portal (and probably Valve's other games.) Hopefully this means an update with similar improvements for the rest of the Mac line!

Check it out:

http://barefeats.com/imac10g.html

 

[redraidermacman]

hopefully this means good things for those of us waiting for better drivers....

 

[aki]

Wow, this is really interesting data, thanks for passing it along.

Although it's what everybody has been saying, it is quite startling to see the difference in the performance of the i7 iMac '09 (ATI 4850) before and after new drivers.

Very exciting!

 

[savvos]

What I'd be really curious to see is a comparison of 10.6.3 drivers and the new ones. While it doesn't state it specifically, I suspect all of the Macs in that shootout were running 10.6.4. Supposedly the ATI drivers weren't affected by the update to 10.6.4, but the over 100% increase in FPS in Portal make me think otherwise. Or were the ATI drivers always that horribly optimized for Source Engine games?

 

[senc01a]

Awesome news!

 

[senc01a]

Can someone post the driver file to see if I can replace my current driver with that one?

 

[aki]

Can someone post the driver file to see if I can replace my current driver with that one?

Well you may not have long to wait anyway. Frontpage right now says that a graphics update has been seeded to devs. Wheee. Just in time (almost) for StarCraft 2 .