A glimmer of hope for Mac players

[RyTEK]

I should start by saying that I play on two Win 7 machines with the game maxed. The caveat being that these machines are 2 and 3 years old. My mobile option is a brand-new MacBook Pro that is having framerate issues. The Mac forums on battle.net are absolutely flooded with poor FPS threads. For an example, the Mac that I am talking about has a core i7 @ 2.9GHz, an AMD 6490, and 8GB of RAM. Such a machine in Win 7 would easily max out the game. Heck, you could probably run two instances of the game no problem. Instead, I turn shadows and AA off and still only get around 25fps gameplay. If I turn shadows to low, the framerate falls to about 10!

Imagine the frustration if you have a similar machine, let alone a machine from just a few years ago.

I should also mention that this MacBook Pro ultra's WoW vsynced at 60fps. Some will say that isn't impressive, but the number of particle effects and polygons pushed with an ultra draw distance is pretty insane. In bootcamp it runs Skyrim on high. It also runs PoE beta at 60 vsync.

The glimmer of hope:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5235703519

On the first page, a blue owns up to the abject failure to code for Macs and offers the following nugget:

OpenGL 3.2, GLSL are features that we will use eventually and we hope to get better performance with them. We are currently looking for short term solutions that we can deliver to players as soon as possible.

[Felix]

What kind of screen are you using? If its a 27" IPS screen with a 2550x1440 resolution (Which Macs sell with), then a 6490 GPU will be brought to it's knees whether in a Mac or Win7 machine.

Edit: Personally I think you are staring yourself blind on the i7 processor. But the processor don't run any games, all it can do is get in the way because it's too slow, or be strong enough and not make any trouble. It can't make a game run any better. The 6490 GPU which runs the games is not very good, and I think you vastly overestimate it's ability to play games.

[Raesene]

I have a mid-2010 iMac which runs modern games just fine, but has some issues with Diablo. I get decent framerates (decent, not great, but very playable), but I run into issues where the hard disk will start crunching for no discernible reason and the game takes a back seat until it is over. When playing hardcore, this leads to some very dicey situations, and it is not fun.

I turn off time machine when playing, and I suspected that maybe spotlight was indexing at bad times. I disabled spotlight completely and still have the issues.

I restarted in Windows 7 on my bootcamp partition and the difference is night and day. Much better framerates, with higher graphic settings, and I have not run into the I/O issue yet.

I'm disappointed that the OSX version has such issues, but at least I have a solution and can play flawlessly. It sounds like this GLSL thing might help on the framerate issues in OSX, but I don't believe it will do anything about the disk I/O.

I should note that I play other games in OSX and don't run across the I/O issue.

[Felix]

I have a mid-2010 iMac which runs modern games just fine, but has some issues with Diablo. I get decent framerates (decent, not great, but very playable), but I run into issues where the hard disk will start crunching for no discernible reason and the game takes a back seat until it is over. When playing hardcore, this leads to some very dicey situations, and it is not fun.

I turn off time machine when playing, and I suspected that maybe spotlight was indexing at bad times. I disabled spotlight completely and still have the issues.

I restarted in Windows 7 on my bootcamp partition and the difference is night and day. Much better framerates, with higher graphic settings, and I have not run into the I/O issue yet.

I'm disappointed that the OSX version has such issues, but at least I have a solution and can play flawlessly. It sounds like this GLSL thing might help on the framerate issues in OSX, but I don't believe it will do anything about the disk I/O.

I should note that I play other games in OSX and don't run across the I/O issue.

If the HDD starts crunching, then it's because your GPU has run out of RAM and starts using the HDD as memory. This will bring a game to a halt. High resolution and AA is what uses alot of RAM on the videocard.

[Raesene]

My vid card has 1 GB of RAM, I don't think that's the issue. I don't use AA and I don't max the resolution. Also, why would it not be a problem on the windows side, or with any other game?

[RyTEK]

Felix, my resolution is 1440x900. I feel like you didn't even read my post... the 4690 is more than powerful enough to feed the display in more demanding games like WoW and Skyrim. And they certainly do not manufacture 27" MacBook Pros (laptop).

I appreciate you trying to help, but some of the things you stated are not accurate - if your vRAM on your GPU is full, it will swap textures from the main system RAM, not the HDD. Please, I have been building computers for decades and I assure you that Blizzard has their interface with the OpenGL API all screwed up post-BP16.

My post was to simply show that Blizzard's Mac devs are looking at optimizations with a new OpenGL version.