Dear AMD technicians,

Here a cry fromout the Mac community. I think it is time for AMD to act for a change. The Mac has a few hundred games  which are nativly for the Mac. thats quite a low amount. Luckily there is a way out called "Wine". Wine is opensource program to play windows games on the Mac. This expands the range of games tremendous! This also means that because of the variaty of games the drivers needs to be advanced.

Before yelling that Wine is under constant development and a lot of graphical glitches are the fault of wine itself which I agree in some cases it is true because of the development. Still there are quite a number of things which is the fault on the AMD driver part. And as owner of paulthetall.com and representitive of about 6000 Mac users a day I cry for help. Because there are a quite number of games which do work fine on an Nvidia and Intel graphicscard using wine and not on AMD which should be not the case because AMD Radeon graphics should rule!

I made a video of some of the important games with the glitches up here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1aSEH3mQg

I talked with a very experienced directx wine developer and he said that this specific is issue has to do with: " the driver falls back to software rendering if more than 1024 vertex shader uniforms(or 246 4-component vectors) are used. The driver advertises a lot more than 1024 uniforms and the hardware should be able to do more than 256(it does on other drivers) The 256*4 uniform limit is mostly fine for Wine's purposes, but the driver needs about 10 vec4's for its own use, which pushes the amount of usable uniforms way below the limit of 256*4 that should be available for d3d9 games *technically* it is not a bug it is a valid driver limitation that applications are supposed to deal with the problem is that d3d9 applications expect to have 256 uniforms available, and the only way they deal with a smaller amount is refusing to run and wine can't magically increase the uniform limit either"

It seems in the past there has been a mail correspondence with AMD but there has been done nothing about it. on the ever enduring todo box.

So please I urge you guys to update the Mac Apple AMD drivers for this cause and work more closely with the Wine Developers so more and more games will be running on AMD graphics card.

Although this issue is on all AMD radeon gfx cards. The one I tested is my AMD radeon 6770M gfx card with 512mb with 10.8.3 Mountain Lion.

 

many Many thanks in advance from the Mac community

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Mac gaming is the best

Generally, one post is enough. Notice the delete function.

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Yeah did not know exactly what section would be most effective to bring this issue under attention. Did not have much comments yet though of the technical devs what I would expect....

Oh: here some info of the gfx card. This are older results of OSX 10.7.3 but issue is still there in 10.8.2. This is just for the technical info about the gfx card.

 

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Mac gaming is the best

Edited: 01/23/2013 at 03:27 AM by paulthetall

Hi hehe @ Mac gaming is the best. For the price of a mac I can build you a pc that would be at least twice as fast with win 7 and would run all the new games like far cry 3 in ultra  don't fall for the apple hype. Or build the pc and install mac os on it.