World of Warcraft 2.0 introduces Multithreaded OpenGL

On tuesday, Blizzard released its infamous 2.0 patch to its hit online role playing game, World of Warcraft. This patch is significant as it is the first main stream game to support multi-threaded OpenGL on the Macintosh. Support for multi-threaded OpenGL is limited to Intel users, and if you are a lucky owner of such a machine, people are reporting up to 2x better frame-rates with the new version.

From Inside Mac Games:

Here’s a list of Mac specific changes:

• Added support for Multi-Threaded OpenGL on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.8 or higher. Depending on hardware, scene and graphicalsettings, this can raise frame rates up to a factor of 2X.
• Improved video hardware detection and default settings, especially with Intel video.
• Vertex Animation Shaders have been disabled for systems with Intel video.
• Improved iTunes key-binding feature for smoothness and track name display.
• Fixed a bug where Tutorial Tips would not be marked as viewed correctly on PowerPC Macs.
• Fixed a rare crash bug in the audio code.
• Improved support for Weather Shaders.
• Added support for changing the mouse sensitivity in WoW. Previously, the Mac version ignored the value from the slider in the Interface Options dialog.