OS X, Still Maturing
Yesterday, I wrote:
Some "hard-core" testing at wired news (yes, the news staff does their own testing...), revealed some pretty pathetic performance for many OS X apps (web browsers in particular). Why is this important? Not because the OS is slow but because these application manufacturers (Microsoft included) are taking a shortcut in porting apps to the new OS, utilizing OS9-native methods. Of course, Microsoft says it's that OS X is missing graphics acceleration. Who knows. The point, I think, is that caveat emptor applies in picking up performance-sensitive apps...did the vendor port the app in a slip-shod manner? Ah the joy of X.
To which our very own Darrin Woods responded:
There is some amount of truth to the graphics stuff. Still having friends in the game industry I hear about it all the time. Currently there are still a lot of pieces missing for graphics acceleration within OS X. This is making it hard for game developers to get games running under OS X -- it's much easier to do so under OS 9. Apple is slowly getting all aspects of OS X optimized. And I believe that the graphics portion is next in line. They've found several instances where the OS was redrawing the screen 5-6 times and are working to squash those. 10.2 should have the optimized graphics system.
With 10.2 due out this summer, at least browser-addicts and game lovers won't have long to wait.
While we're on the subject, Apple released yesterday (via Software Update) an incremental OS update, 10.1.4, which quashes a particularly nasty security oversight:
BSD-based TCP/IP connections now check and block broadcast or multicast IP destination.
Posted by Brad Shimmin at 12:25:41 PM
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