Apple has pushed a new Snow Leopard Graphics Update that aims to bring stability and performance improvements for games and graphic intensive applications. It mainly fixes issues with games from Steam including Portal and Team Fortress 2. Steam had said in the past in reply to slow gaming frame rates on Mac that they’re working with Apple, Nvidia, and ATI to improve the gaming performance on Macs. This update seems to be a part of their work.
Here’s what the update contains according to Apple:
The Snow Leopard Graphics Update contains stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games:
- Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.
- Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.
- Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.
This update is for OS X 10.6.4, the latest release of Snow Leopard. The update is targeted towards the following Mac models:
- MacBook (13-inch, Early 2009)
- MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)
- iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009)
- Mac Pro (Early 2009)
- Mac mini (Early 2009)
- Mac mini (Mid 2010)
- iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2010)
- iMac (27-inch, Mid 2010)
- MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2010)
The update is available by going to Software Update in OS X or it can be directly downloaded from the Apple website from here.
