Posts with tag 10.5

For those of us who are both Mac users and WoW fans, there are two very important types of software release: a new patch for WoW and a new version of Mac OS X. Patch 2.3 may not be out yet (although we can always hope for next Tuesday), but Mac OS X 10.5, AKA Leopard, is released today! This is no place for a comprehensive review of the OS refresh (you'll have to head over to TUAW for that), but I would like to talk a bit about how 10.5 and WoW interact.

To put it bluntly, it's exactly the same. On my MacBook Pro, I'm not perceiving any difference between 10.5 and 10.4. The good side of that is that there are no crashes, stability issues, incompatibilities, or anything like that (at least not that anyone's come across yet). The bad side is that I'm not seeing any performance increase, which is a bit of a disappointment, since 10.5 apparently comes with a new version of OpenGL. There have been mumblings in the WoW Mac Tech Support forum that this update might help some people for a little while now, but at least for me, that does not seem to be the case. It still plays fine, certainly no worse than it did under 10.4. And the "stuttering" issue reported by players with the NVIDIA 8600 graphics card is, according to multiple forum reports, gone.