The Rough Story Of Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics For Mac OS X

Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1 and the latest Intel HD 3000 driver was significantly faster running the ioquake3-powered OpenArena game than Mac OS X 10.7. The Windows driver was more than twice as fast as Intel Apple driver for OpenArena, but it looks like for this particular game under Mac OS X Lion it may have around a 60FPS v-syncing issue. In past Mac OS X tests with other graphics hardware/drivers, however, there has not been such an issue.

Urban Terror failed to run on the SNB Mac Mini at resolutions above 800 x 600, but in that lone test, the Windows frame-rate remained twice as fast as the Mac OS X 10.7.0. The Mac OS X average in this case was 43 FPS.