Valve: Frame Rate Improved by up to 120% after Snow Leopard Graphics Update

Valve has posted a technical note explaining how Apple’s Snow Leopard Graphics Update improves frame rates by 15% to 120% on some newer Mac hardware. The game developer has worked closely with Apple to achieve these results.

“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,” Valve says in a statement posted on Steam.

“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 post reads.

However, it’s not just the latest graphics update from Apple that removes software bottlenecks, resulting in significant graphics performance enhancements for Mac gamers.

It’s actually a combination of this, and changes in Valve’s own code that enables better graphics on Macs with OS X 10.6.4 installed.

“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,” Valve adds.

As a result of this, “We are seeing dramatic performance improvements 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) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models,” the creators of Half Life outline.

“Depending on the game, video settings and the hardware, we have measured frame rate improvements from 15% to 120% on these systems,” Valve ultimately reveals.

The video games developer notes that older systems are already pushed to their hardware limits, therefore performance improvements are not so visible on older Macs.