[rob_ART]

According to the Apple documentation, the update "...includes general improvements to gaming performance." I'm going to do some before/after tests on the Mac Pro, iMac, and MacBook Pro to see if that's really true. If you have any change to do before/after testing on your Mac, please post it here.

[charmin]

I've heard from a top secret source that 10.5.6 definitely does at least one good thing for at least one game.

So there.

[rob_ART]

I've run "before and after" test on several games using the Mac Pro 3.2GHz with GeForce 8800 GT.

Prey at 1920x1200 "High" runs 1.3% faster.

ET:QW at 2560x1600 "High" runs 0.0% faster.

CoD4 at 2560x1600 "High" runs 0.0% faster.

Halo at 2560x1600 "High" runs 0.6% faster.

As you can see, no significant gains. I'll run the Radeon HD 3870 next.

[Kalki]

Not a single FPS more with an OpenGL 2.1 benchmark.

[teflon]

It could be that these general improvements were mainly targeted at the new MBs and MBPs, and/or the UE3 engine...

[rob_ART]

teflon, on December 17th 2008, 02:14 AM, said:

It could be that these general improvements were mainly targeted at the new MBs and MBPs, and/or the UE3 engine...

I'll do some testing on our MBP 2.8 to see if anything shakes.

[rob_ART]

I ran some game benchmarks on the MacBook Pro 2.8GHz.

The only game that was faster was Call of Duty 4 -- 15% faster at 1440x900 High Quality.

These ran the same as under 10.5.5:
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Prey
Halo UB
WoW

[teflon]

maybe that was all they targeted. Apple arent really in the habit of pointing out a specific game that theres optimisations for. Just saying General Improvements means that its better somewhere but not everywhere.

[DaveyJJ]

X-Plane isn't any faster at all on my settings.

[rob_ART]

One non-game improvement is the 900 frame "Blocks-Detail" HD Template in Motion 3. When I upgraded from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5, the RAM Preview render time for the GeForce 8800 GT doubled. I checked and rechecked and then reported it on my site. (I usually contact the company before posting bad news but did not have access to Apple or nVidia engineering.)

I'm happy to report that someone in both "camps" took note and contacted me. They duplicated my test scenario and subsequently identified a bug in the driver. So the "Blocks-Detail" template was the first thing I tested when I upgraded to 10.5.6. The bug is fixed and the render speed is back to the original time.

This, obviously, isn't mentioned in the documentation, but it is a welcome "silent" fix.

[Janichsan]

Interestingly, some other guy reports a significant increase in performance of Halo on his Mac Pro with the NVidia 8800GT: allegedly, the FPS jumped from 99 to 169 after the update.

[FragUPlenty]

I fired up Quake 4 and noticed a noteable improvement in the online performance over wireless.

[ltcommander.data]

Did anyone check to see if more extensions were added in GLView? Maybe they are incorporating better OpenGL 3.0 support. My X1600 is still reading support of 102 extensions which is the same as 10.5.5, but the X1600 wouldn't support OpenGL 3.0 anyways. nVidia said that the 8xxx series and up supports OpenGL 3.0 once drivers are updated (they are out for Windows and Linux now), so it'll be interesting when that support is added to Mac.

I didn't notice any performance speedup with the X1600 but I mainly play UT2004 which is plenty fast already. Personally I'd be interested to see how game performance in Crossover, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels changes with driver revisions, although it'd probably be harder to test and may well be more CPU and I/O limited, but you'd hope that it's one area that Apple tries to pay attention to.

[teflon]

I get 112 extensions, up from your 102.
going into the OGL tab it says 100% of everything up to OGL2.1, but only 52% of OGL 3.0 (11/21).

Personally I dont expect any real changes in the OGL implementation until 10.6 is released. It generally seems to be Apple's way.

[Togglemeister]

Hey guys, try looking at http://www.barefeats.com he always has interesting benchmark scores on various mac systems, video cards, etc. Maybe theres something there that can give you a basis on.
Heres some interesting answers about 10.5.6 with his tests. Its not complete but it might give you an idea.
http://www.barefeats.com/harper21.html

[Floxwoop]

rob_ART is the guy who runs barefeats.com so I doubt it will add much to this thread. It is however the best Mac gaming benchmark site I know of.

[Togglemeister]

Floxwoop, on February 2nd 2009, 05:37 PM, said:

rob_ART is the guy who runs barefeats.com so I doubt it will add much to this thread. It is however the best Mac gaming benchmark site I know of.

I agree, hes pretty fast on his email replies. He mostly does, software (rendering), hard drives and video card tests. His tests are helpful though as he gives choices on video cards for my g4's.