Elite: Dangerous Mac Beta 5.0 Released

Frontier Developments has recently released a new Mac Beta, version 5.0, of Elite: Dangerous.

Taking another step towards the quality of the PC version of the title, version 5.0 of the Mac Beta improves a number of areas where Macs were falling behind. New optimisations and tweaks to how shaders and caching are used have allowed the team to deliver an improved experience. Syncing issues between PC and Mac gamers which involved asteroids have also be solved, a bug that was known since the launch of Mac Beta 4.0.

Community Manager Edward Lewis has revealed the full changelog for the new Mac Beta of Elite: Dangerous, adding that these are only the most important changes and that there are “other various optimizations”:

• Better caching for shaders for planets and stars, improving on stalls and stutters while exploring. This is especially effective on Nvidia Macs – you’ll see this in the flow at the start of the game. This process can take around a minute – this delay only occurs the first time you run the game, and again when the game or OS X is updated.
• Shaders fixed on AMD Radeon HD cards (if you’ve previously had to enable the ‘Disable Planet Shaders’ feature to play the Beta on your Mac, please try turning this off)
• Fix for asteroid stalls on Nvidia cards
• Asteroids are now synchronised between Mac and PC
• Asteroid rings are now visible during supercruise transitions
• Shadow optimisations while inside star ports
• Improvement on shadow quality related pop-in
• Fix for hardware cursor implementation
• Launcher update: the launcher now handles the Mac going to sleep mode more gracefully