This doesn't surprise me for two reasons (both of which are speculation, btw...I am not privy to what goes on inside Apple):
- Both of these cards are "next-gen" in a major way: DX-10 compatible hardware. That means they have a lot of cool new features. My speculation is that this larger jump in functionality of the hardware means more changes (and more bugs) in the drivers.
- We're getting closer and closer to the next major OS upgrade (10.5), but this new hardware has to run 10.4. So I wouldn't be surprised if everyone at Apple is fighting two fires at once, limiting resources.
3 comments:
Do you publish a bug list somewhere? It requires quite a bit of effort to draft a meaningful bug report: among other things, to make the bug genuinely useful to the software developers, you need to provide definitive instructions that allow them to replicate the problem. I've seen some rendering problems with a new MacBook Pro with NVIDIA graphics, but I really don't want to invest the time in preparing a report if you already know about the problem.
We don't publish such a list...I wish all of our bug reports were so detailed -- if the bug report is complex to write up, one option would be to send a description with "details on request".
But...once the product is in final release most of our bug reports that really turn out to be bugs are due to compatibility issues, and come in via tech support requests.
(E.g. a user with a new machine that happens to have funky drivers says to our tech support guys "I tried it and it blew up, help!")
I was experiencing just this problem until I upgraded to 10.5.2. The OpenGL drivers seem to have been fixed, and a little patience has paid off.
Thanks for posting this, Ben.
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