When we launched Steam on Mac OS X back in May, there was a lot of buzz about performance, particularly relative to Windows running on the same machine. While we met our goal of making sure all of our customers had an acceptable gaming experience at launch, we have spent a large chunk of effort in the intervening months working with Apple and their GPU vendors to close the performance gap with Windows. The combination of changes in our code and the latest graphics update available from Apple today removes a variety of software bottlenecks, resulting in significant graphics performance enhancements for Mac gamers.
Feature Improvements
In addition to low-level implementation changes which have improved performance across the board, Apple has also removed some implementation inefficiencies which allow us to improve visual quality, most notably in the area of GPU occlusion queries.
Occlusion Queries
When we first released our Source engine games on the Mac, we had to turn occlusion queries off but, with the latest update to 10.6.4, we can turn them back on, giving players higher visual quality.
There’s more… Â Read it here…