Poor Steam Performance Under 10.6.4 w/ nvidia GPUs

Question

Poor Steam Performance Under 10.6.4 w/ nvidia GPUs

Valve Software has documented a known issue that causes severe performance degridation for 10.6.4 users with nvidia GPUs. Valve Software is advising that users avoid updating to 10.6.4 to avoid experiencing this issue. Unfortunately many of us patched before becoming aware of this issue. The performance hit has been very drastic between 10.6.3 and 10.6.3 and sometimes makes games unplayable.

Valve states this is an issue with 10.6.4 and not with Steam:

+The recent 10.6.4 update from Apple has noticeable performance issues for NVidia graphic chip owners running high performance games.+

+If you wish to avoid this, you should consider waiting to install the 10.6.4 update until Apple has had the opportunity to address this issue.+

+Full details of what is contained in the 10.6.4 update can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4150.+

+If you have already installed this update and believe your graphic performance is affected, please contact Apple support ( http://www.apple.com/support/) for details on what to do.+

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1314406

Thanks!

24" iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jun 21, 2010 12:25 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 24, 2010 6:42 PM in response to Adam Ruddermann

I am going to go back using time machine back to 10.6.3 and see if that solves the problem for now. I will be back shortly.

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Answer 2

Jun 24, 2010 9:39 PM in response to EMactastic

http://appletoolbox.com/2010/06/mac-os-x-10-6-4-opengl-graphics-performance-arti fact-problems-vmware-steam-starcraft-2-etc/

He suggests booting into safe mode, then booting normally, in order to get some housekeeping done. But his ultimate suggestion is to back off to 10.6.3 using Time Machine.

Just curious, what games were you having trouble with under 10.6.4?

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Answer 3

Jun 26, 2010 7:40 AM in response to Adam Ruddermann

On my mid-2009 Macbook Pro (2.8 GHz) I tried switching graphics from the 512 to the 256MB card and there is a marked improvement over the performance of the bigger nvidia card on Steam games, particularly Half-Life 2. Only problem then is, sound drops out every five minutes or so and the game "stutters" every few moments - for want of a better description.

At last we've got some more PC games on the Mac platform and we can't play them because of the latest update. Who now works on the problem: nvidia, Apple, or both?

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Answer 4

Jun 28, 2010 8:50 PM in response to Egbokalaka

Portal: The First Slice

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Answer 5

Jun 28, 2010 8:56 PM in response to Barry Lane

Barry Lane wrote:
…Only problem then is, sound drops out every five minutes or so and the game "stutters" every few moments - for want of a better description.…

I'm getting that too, every so often, the sound “stutters” for a few seconds, and sometimes GLaDOS' voice is completely muted for a while.

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Answer 6

Basic101

Level 1

1 points

Jun 28, 2010 9:01 PM in response to TC (Techno Cat)

I'm having similar performance issues with Half-Life 2 after upgrading to 10.6.4, unfortunately I did not see the message from Valve until after the upgrade. My issues are an overrall frame rate decrease, textures randomly drop out, and the game occasionally stutters as the other posters describe. The game ran perfectly prior to this update.

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Answer 7

Jul 2, 2010 1:19 AM in response to Basic101

Hi all.

I'm suffering very very poor performance watching H264 1080p videos on QuickTime X: one frame each 2 seconds!!!

When watching the same videos on VLC de performance is much better.

QuickTime is taking 60-70% of CPU and 40-50% of GPU. With VLC the CPU is over 80-90% and GPU is over 50%. But VLC for OSX is not programmed to take advantage of H264 HW acceleration of Nvidea's chipsets...

I've the same performance under 10.6.4 as under 10.6.3 before upgrading.

Any idea?

Thanks in advance, David.

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Answer 8

andy_mac

Level 1

4 points

Jul 4, 2010 9:15 AM in response to Adam Ruddermann

I have the same problem 😟

I had to roll back to 10.6.3 (which fixed the issue)

I rang Apple Support who were unaware of the problem.

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Answer 9

eibbor7

Level 1

4 points

Jul 6, 2010 11:37 AM in response to andy_mac

Any updates on what's happening with this? I updated to 10.6.4 before I saw that Valve announcement. And, I'm not running Time Machine or anything, so, as far as I know, I have no means to roll back to 10.6.3. I have a Windows desktop set aside for gaming, so this isn't too big of a deal for me. But, it's still a shame that every game I try to run on my Macbook is completely unplayable.

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Answer 10

andy_mac

Level 1

4 points

Jul 12, 2010 11:11 AM in response to Adam Ruddermann

I've been going back and forth on this for a couple of weeks now.

The game I play regularly doesn't work with 10.6.4.
I rang Apple Support, they said the game developers have to fix it.
I contacted the game developers, they said Apple has to fix it.

As this is only affecting Macs with nvidia cards, Im tempted to believe the latter.

Does anyone have any further info?
As a temporary fix I rolled back to 10.6.3 (which runs the game fine), but now hapf my other apps don't work.

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Answer 11

Troy L.

Level 1

0 points

Jul 12, 2010 8:52 PM in response to andy_mac

I haven't found any information either. A thread at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2464438 says the question has been "answered". But I haven't found any solutions.

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Answer 12

nbetham

Level 1

0 points

Jul 13, 2010 2:17 PM in response to eibbor7

Ok, so I have been having the performance issues with Steam and the Valve games as well with my early 2010 MacBook Pro. I stumbled across this article http://appletoolbox.com/2010/06/mac-os-x-10-6-4-opengl-graphics-performance-arti fact-problems-vmware-steam-starcraft-2-etc/ and it suggested that if you reinstall the 10.6.4 update that it would likely correct the problem. So I went and downloaded the update from here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1048 and after I installed it and did a reboot everything was back to normal if not better than before.

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Answer 13

Troy L.

Level 1

0 points

Jul 13, 2010 9:32 PM in response to nbetham

I'll try that right now. Is it consistently better, or just after the reboot?

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Answer 14

Troy L.

Level 1

0 points

Jul 14, 2010 8:42 AM in response to nbetham

It didn't seem to make it better for me. I could play a little, but every now and then I'd have some strange color distortion on the right part of my screen, and the frame rate could have been better. But that's just my testimony.

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Answer 15

nbetham

Level 1

0 points

Jul 14, 2010 11:42 AM in response to Troy L.

Hmm... I'm not quite sure what the problem is but, after I did the update again it seemed to do the trick for me no lag issues or artifacts in the game rendering. I have experienced in the past how poorly the update manger can install updates. Did you also try booting into safe mode as well?

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