Inside Mac Games has posted a new interview with Advanced Micro Devices' Chris Bentley, the company's Mac 3D Manager. In the first of the two part interview Bentley discussed a variety of topics including AMD's relationship with Apple and Mac game developers, the transition to Apple's new Lion OS, and the design of graphics card and drivers.

IMG: Do you work closely with Mac Gaming companies?

CB: We work really closely with Mac game developers, especially Blizzard, Transgaming, Valve, Feral, Aspyr, Telltale, and Unity. I type like #$%@, so I'm on the phone with folks from these companies all the time. I sometimes joke that the phone is my best coding tool. Fundamentally, the only way users get a good out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-download) experience is if we work with game developers to resolve issues before the games ship. We worked for over a year with Blizzard on making sure everything worked in Starcraft 2. This included integrating a completely new shader compiler for the Radeon X1600 and Radeon X1900 cards! When Transgaming was working on Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 they told us they need us to support hardware accelerated texture fetches from within vertex shaders, so we added this support. When Feral shipped Bioshock our QE team practically functioned as an extension of their testing group, feeding back bug reports on the beta hardware and drivers that we had access to. Laminar Research has dropped us beta versions of X-Plane which we have included in our automated test suite, so we can make sure we don't have any performance regressions on any of our nightly builds. The Unity engine folks have done the same thing.

Chris Bentley AMD Interview

AMD

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