Apple's MacBook Pro graphics update offering mixed results
To address a black-screen bug that some MacBook owners have been experiencing, Apple issued a software video driver update; however, this has not fixed the issue in all circumstances.
Yesterday Apple released a software update to address problems where some of the MacBook Pro systems from mid 2010 were displaying black screens when waking from sleep or performing some graphics manipulation tasks. While this update has appeared to fix the problem for some users, for others the issue is still occurring.
Intial reports on the issue and observation of the problem happening under multiple operating systems pointed in the direction of a hardware problem being the root cause, but Apple's update was a software approach that updated the graphics drivers and aspects of the OpenCL framework.
Overall the update does appear to help some people who have had the problem, especially for those for whom black screens were occuring at the log-in window. However, the black screens still occur for others, as described by some Apple discussion posters:
User "kspes" writes:
User "bmoodyvid" writes:
If this does not help, then for now at least you should still be able to keep your system stable by installing the graphics card management utility gfxCardStatus, which will allow you to keep using one graphics card. Many people with the problem have found that if they use only the onboard (aka "internal" or "integrated") graphics card as opposed to the dedicated or discrete one, the system ends up being a lot more stable and reliable.
Despite Apple's update, it is still possible that the problem is rooted in hardware, with the update only better handling the problem under some circumstances.
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