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

When running the Warsow game, Mac OS X 10.7 was approximately 12% faster than Windows 7 SP1 on the same hardware.

With this investigation only just beginning and currently no Linux results due to serious hardware issues with the Mac Mini after Linux was attempted to be installed, no conclusions will be drawn in this article. To quickly sum up the situation, however, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion appears to at least have a stable (read: no crashes / GPU hangs like has been common under Linux, except for Nexuiz on Mac OS X) Sandy Bridge driver that is provided "out of the box" (obviously, that's expected from Apple's OS on Apple hardware). Separately, if you care about your brand new Mac hardware if purchasing one of the models that was released last week, you may want to avoid attempting to install Linux to the system until more information is available. Also worth noting is that the current Intel GPU driver under Mac OS X is presently limited to OpenGL 2.1 compliance.

Hopefully more information will be learned early this week, otherwise in two weeks after heading off to Oslo and then the Berlin Desktop Summit.