10.6.7 gives very bad gaming performance

Agreed! Shawn's answer works!

I had a brand new MBA Ultimate bought a month ago and portal 2 played terribly on lowest settings with all other apps closed. I followed Shawn's suggestions and voila, portal 2 now runs at 40fps min on MED settings at native resolution and i have 10.6.7. Awesome!

Thanks Shawn!

I have a 17" i7 Quad 4GB with 1GB Radeon 6750M.

Ran Cinebench and see little difference between the 10.6.6 and 10.6.7 updates.

Must be a "integrated graphics" issue.

I thought the new MBA's had dedicated Nvida 320GM grpahics chipsets....

I think its just a MBA issue for whatever reason. Doing a 10.6.7 combo update kills graphics performance in most games.

Nope .. it's definitely a bad driver in the 10.6.7 Combo update. See:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3033131

You're welcome, Steve. Glad to hear it was helpful.

Just wanted to add that the same problem occurred for me when updating my MacBook Air using the Software Update control panel to go from 10.6.5 to 10.6.7 so it's, apparently, not just the Combo Updater.

Thanks for your fix. It worked to correct the problem.

Regards,

Gary Nunes

P.S.

I filled a bug report about the problem. Would suggest others do so as well if so inclined and have the time.

There are some clear regressions in the graphics support for 10.6.7 versus 10.6.6. I have a MacBook Pro 13" from 2011 with the Sandy Bridge GPU. To demonstrate this problem try my OSX raycasting software and choose View/ShowGradient

http://www.cabiatl.com/mricro/raycast/

The image looks fine for the low resolution default Borg image, but on 10.6.7 the texture is all wrong for the larger images (e.g. the UNC image is shown, with correct 10.6.6 on top and 10.6.7 below).

The OpenGL command I use to load the gradient map image (since OSX does not support glTexImage3Dext) is...

glTexImage3D(GL_TEXTURE_3D, 0,GL_RGBA, Xsz, Ysz,Zsz,0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,@VolRGBA[0]);

This appears to fail for 3D textures of ~128^3 or larger. I would be curious whether users with discrete GPUs also have problems with these large textures on OSX 10.6.7... The problem is not only for GL_RGBA, you also see it for GL_ALPHA8 if you have larger textures (RGBA consumes four times the memory of A only).