10.6.7 gives very bad gaming performance

Well I would suggest you to read at least one of the topics about "rock solid" iTunes there:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2790878&tstart=0

(or there are a lot of them on the other forums as well) before blaming macbook hardware and developers. Do they all have damaged hardware now? If so, Apple should be issuing recall of all their products... sarcasm...

What is wrong there: "We do not even want to look at the problem, contact developers, your hardware is faulty, etc." Nice...

Thanks for that just proves the point.

seems the 2011 MBP's arn't the only ones to see reduced FPS in SC 2

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2267599143

10.6.7 is known for crashing Itunes simply read the forums.

How do you know this? How do you know the problem isn't some generic issue with a commonly installed application that isn't 10.6.7 compatible. If others can run 10.6.7 without issue with iTunes, how can it logically be the cause for your iTunes issue? The common denominator is not 10.6.7, if others are successful. You must find another common denominator. Once there is success in the face of failure using the same software, it must not be the cause of the failure, and another common denominator must be saught.

Gpu switching has been crashing EVERY 2011 mbp when you exit a game.

How do you know this? Do you have access to every single one produced? Apple produced over 100 thousand of them, possibly over 1 million. This forum reports maybe 100 of the people having problems and 500 at most. That's not even a percent of all the people who have them. To make such profound remarks you'd have to have access to every single one, or a vast majority. I seriously doubt that is a fact. Stop making generalizations based on forum activity. It is a hospital ward. It is NOT a place to rant about success. Rarely do people rant about success, and yes there are successful posts once in awhile here. But you have a skewed sample because of the nature of the forum, not because of the nature of the machine.

Susurs,
That proves nothing. Only 74 individual posts and many by the same people. Apple has over 1 million people who have purchased Macs in the past quarter alone:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jan/12results.html

That's a skewed sample by a longshot. Just because there are 5000 views, doesn't even mean that's 5000 individual views. I can rack up the view count simply by refreshing my browser window, or browsing the thread twice. Statistically it is insignificant.

What is wrong there: "We do not even want to look at the problem, contact developers, your hardware is faulty, etc." Nice

We are all end users. But we must learn when we are too quick to blame. I've troubleshooted Macs since the very first one. Lemons are really rare. They do happen, but they are not every single one.

Regardless, bad RAM, a memory resident program, or something else might be in the way. Instead of trying to blame the machine or the operating system, learn why others are having NO problems. Find a better common denominator that explains every single one.

A becuase i have used 10.6.6 for nearly 2 weeks and itunes hasnt crashed once. Upgrade to 10.6.7 and it crashes first time i've opened it. (must have opened itunes 50+ times prior ro 10.6.7)

Gpu switching is a known issue as i went in to the apple store and crashed all their Macbook Pro's on display by opening a game and Cmd-M ing it resulted in a crash 3 out of 5 times.

That was the only issue i had in 10.6.6.. 10.6.7 fixed that i havent had a game exit crash since.. but it created other issues. I would say there is over 50 different forums stating different 10.6.7 issues.. a brody, im an Apple fan as much as you man, i have an ipad an iphone 4 and now their top of the range laptop. But Jeez,their last updated was trash. Reminded me of a vista update.. i thought Apple products just worked but my first OSX experience is being faced with an OSX reinstall 13 days after purchase. At least my Windows machines lasted the first month without a re-install.

im not arguing, im saying what your offering is not a fix.

It is the only fix available to you. I suggest you stop resisting what experts tell you in favor of what you "know."

10.6.7 is known for crashing Itunes simply read the forums.

I don't need to. If I paid too much attention to what is said on the forums, I would "know" that every single version of Mac OS X is crap that crashes, eats data for breakfast and kills puppies. Such posts appear, and have always appeared, for each and every minor revision of Mac OS X. One needs to keep perspective and be aware of forum trends in order to be able to extract meaningful information from such things... such as the infamous guest account bug in 10.6.0 and 10.6.1, when thousands of people participated in discussions regarding a very real and serious bug in the OS.

You are certainly welcome to continue your hand-wringing and fussing, but that will not help you solve your problem. You might as well try some of the solutions. If you refuse to do so, we cannot help you at all.

just because iTunes didn't crash on 10.6.6 does not mean its crashing in 10.6.7 is caused by 10.6.7. Maybe
10.6.7 is more sensitive to bad RAM, maybe a memory resident program hasn't been tested with 10.6.7, maybe caches got corrupted during your upgrade. Regardless of the reason, 10.6.7 is not the sole cause. Otherwise this board would shut down with such complaints. Many are running 10.6.7 without issue. This is a hospital ward. Please start a new topic thread as suggested earlier. We will not detract from that advice, since adding more complaints to a thread takes us nowhere to solving the original poster's problem

The GPU problem you said happened 3 o 5 times. That is still not 100%. It is as idiosynchratic as bad RAM.
As long as it is idiosynchratic you can't say it is the operating system, since it protects memory by design. Only bad RAM can override such protection.

Vista has more reasons to be idiosynchratic including more viruses and spyware. If you didn't get any you are lucky. So please start a new topic thread so we can determine if a reinstall will solve anything or if the problem resides elsewhere.

Amen Brother

too many preachers in this thread. I am out of here

may as well lock it now 😟

I was playing Dragon Age (Origins, not the just released 2) comfortably on medium settings on my MacBook Air. It was a little slow in parts, but definitely playable.
After upgrading to 10.6.7, it's completely unplayable, even on the lowest settings.
I restored from my daily SuperDuper clone, performance shot right back up.
Installed the combo update while in save mode, and the frame rate takes a nose dive again. So back @ 10.6.6.

This has nothing to do with Dragon Age or other developers, OS X 10.6.7, on my 11" MacBook Air causes problems that do not exist if I leave the machine at 10.6.6. Clearly, I'm not the only one. It's probably not widely reported, because it's not an obvious machine to game on, but that's no excuse for this enormous performance drop.

Just adding my 2p to this thread.

I bought a 2010 13.3 inch macbook air and it arrived a few days ago. The machine came with 10.6.5 preinstalled (and a 10.6.5 restore usb flash drive). Out of the box I installed Valve's Portal as I'd already bought it on my desktop (windows) and as some of you might know a lot of games on steam allow you to install the mac version for free if you have bought the pc version.

It ran really well on the air, I was actually suprised how well. Completely playable even if the fan was a little loud. I was getting around 45 fps average on medium settings at native res (1400x900). I also installed starcraft 2 and fired that up, and that also suprised me at how well it ran on this ultra-portable machine. Very playable on medium/low settings with average 40 fps on a few of the single player missions I tried out.

I then upgraded the machine that night, doing the normal software update and just letting it do everything on the list - which included the combined 10.6.6 and 10.6.7 update.

After rebooting into 10.6.7 the difference was not apparent until I tried loading portal up again. I noticed right away that even on the menu screen there was noticable fps jerk. Going into a saved game, the fps was so low it was basically unplayable and the sound was stuttering (something that had not happened a couple of hours earlier on 10.6.5). Fps average in portal now was around 10 fps. I noticed that unlike earlier on 10.6.5, the system fan was not making a peep and the back of the laptop was not getting warm, and I couldn't feel any air being pushed out which was the case back on 10.6.5. It felt like the fan wasn't running at all (kind of like when you're just on the desktop not doing much).

The same situation in sc2, completely unplayable, and the fan isn't running at all. After reading stuff on this thread and other things google threw at me for searching under terms like '10.6.7 fps loss' it seemed like a lot of people were having this issue. Looks like apple did something in 10.6.7 which totally broke the performance of the air for a lot of people.

So I restored the machine back to 10.6.5 - and then applied the 10.6.6 stand alone upgrade manually. Now I can run portal and sc2 with the same fps I was getting earlier in 10.6.5 and the games are very playable again. The fan speeds up a couple of seconds into running the game from cold and remains a little loud but totally fine.

So certainly for any Macbook Air guys who like to run a few old games on the machine - do not upgrade to 10.6.7 would be my recommendation.

I've also noticed a major problem with 10.6.7 compared to 10.6.6 involving Valve games using Steam. Prior to updating to 10.6.7 Valve games ran flawlessly, with high fps, normal fan speeds. After the update, Half Life 2, and Half Life 2 episodes 1 and 2 crash before the New Game/Load Game screen appears. I've gone back and forth with Valve technical support with the same result every time. I've wiped Steam and the Valve games and downloaded and reinstalled each with the same result. I've reset the SMC, PRAM and VRAM with no success. Tried using Cocktail and Applejack to see if they could resolve the problem but to no avail. I'd rather not uninstall 10.6.7 and go back to 10.6.6 but I may have to unless someone has a workable solution.