Posts with tag leopard

Ever since a few WoW patches ago, many of us Mac users have been, honestly, suffering with much lower framerates than we should be seeing, given the hardware we're on. Fortunately, it looks like the just-released 10.5.2 system update will give a lot of help in that department, along with many other system fixes. Tipster Jason went from 27.5 FPS to between 45 and 60 FPS on his iMac after installing 10.5.2 and the Leopard Graphics Update (which also just came out today and requires 10.5.2), and our own Adam Holisky went from 30 to 50 FPS on his own first-gen Intel iMac. I didn't have the presence of mind to test my WoW before updating, but it's certainly running silky smooth now on my MacBook Pro. Go now, good Leopard-using readers, and run your Software Updates (always a good idea to back up before major updates, though). Those of you who have updated, are you seeing performance benefits?

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.