Guild Wars 2

Just wondering if anyone else is disappointed that this is a cider port and not native?

As long as it runs well on your system, does it really matter?

There is a significant performance drop using the windows emulator.

A drop you have noticed? And don’t forget its still a beta. Tweaks incoming.

In any case I’d gladly give up 5% performance to not have to reboot all the time.

From a “purist” POV – sure I’d like a native 64-bit client.

From a “practical” POV? If it works, it works.

Agreed, do you think there is a chance that they will eventually go native? I understand it would require a switch away from dx, but Im wondering if it is in the long term plan at all.

Would I like them to move away from Cider? Sure. I’m happy with this though (more than some other games which either get a Cider port in the twilight years if at all).

No idea about eventually going native.

Probably depends on how much of a Mac fan their president is (seems he is…) and on how much resources his programming team tells him they need for this.

I doubt it’ll happen soon, since I am betting they are very focused on launch issues right now and don’t want to divert significant resources to other endeavors.

And if the port ends ups working well for most users, it’ll probably stay like this.

Getting parallel fps from Windows to Mac on my early 2011 17" MBP and mid 2012 13" MBA. I doubt they’ll commit to rewriting everything for OpenGL anytime soon, if at all.

Edit: I actually get slightly better fps on Mac which is surprising considering on the 2011 MBP I overclocked my GPU on Windows

So, people who are ok using BootCamp, will continue to use Windows to play. I, for one, do not care if the performance is less than running it that way. I do not want to be forced to reboot to play.

As for a ‘native’ app, as long as the performance is acceptable, I couldn’t care less how they do it. I’ve played MANY games using this method including GW1. There are quite a few Windows games being released on Steam and in the App store which use this exact same solution. You just didn’t know that because no one told you

Not to be “that guy” but Cider or Wine IS NOT EMULATION. It is merely a system call translation which is completely different. “Wine Is Not an Emulator”

This has been a public service announcement from the Technical Correctness Police.

There’s only so much you can get out of a wine port. That being said, a lot of us have been trying like mad to get it to work through various wineskins, porting team, crossover and so on. This is, by far, the best mac port with good FPS at medium settings on a high-end mac. Lousy on laptops though but.. c’est la vie.

Props to ANET for responding to the community and delivering the best that could have been delivered on such short notice! GOOD GAME!

Now – Improve this port while, in parallel, please go native. There’s good chances, I’ll see better performance in MacOS than Bootcamp if done properly.

it’s more likely they will spend time creating a dx10+tesselation renderer, before writing a completely new opengl renderer…

Not to be “that guy” but Cider or Wine IS NOT EMULATION. It is merely a system call translation which is completely different. “Wine Is Not an Emulator”
This has been a public service announcement from the Technical Correctness Police.

An admirable attempt, but I’ve given into try to convince people of the truth.

When you compare FPS between Windows and the Cider Mac client, remember that the graphics defaults are different.
Once I upped the Mac settings to match the native Windows ones, I had about half the frame-rate.

Not to be “that guy” but Cider or Wine IS NOT EMULATION. It is merely a system call translation which is completely different. “Wine Is Not an Emulator”

Well, technically Cider is more an emulator than Wine since some of the things are emulated and/or virtualized. In essence it’s all the good things from Wine¹ and a few layers of closed source above, below, and inside the application to make things work that wouldn’t in a pure non-CPU-emulation setup.

¹ Disclosure: As one of the coders on Wine I was around during the Transgaming fiasco and dislike the way TG handled the MIT license spirit. I am a little biased against Cider.

If it was a only a measly 5% hit then sure i’d stay in OS X. But it probably isn’t. Not tested yet and also i’ve OCed under windows.

If it were only a 5% performance hit, as others have mentioned, this would be a great day for Mac users and GW2. But unfortunately, after my experience on Mac Pro hardware, the performance degradation is at least 50%. I’ve also read a few people saying that a user wouldn’t notice the Cedar layer unless they were told; not quite true. I have played games on my Macs that are truly native, and apps that have been run on top of Wine and it’s offshoots. The performance is not there and it is obvious.

I am glad for a few fellow Mac users that have actually seen a performance increase (although this is suspect). Some call it playable, most don’t.

@AN I hope for the sake of Mac users, this is a BETA test to see if you are going to actually deploy this substandard product, or invest time into a quality release on the Mac platform.

There are many problems:

FPS performance is drastically reduced on most systems. The game was beautifully done, and will likely not allow Mac users to enjoy it to it’s fullest.

Audio Problems with some Mac hardware (this is the fault of the emulation layer, what these users will find, is that the audio will work out of the headphone output jack but not the system speakers or digital ports). Transgaming can fix the audio issue easily, but in the years I have seen this product used, they have not.

Although the game is generally stable and most things function now, opting to use this product is going to result in a perpetual need to chase bugs with each change in the game. Some will be fixed, while others simply will remain. I would hope that AN takes the time to review the complaints from users about their experiences with this product in other games and quickly find another way to bring the game to the Mac. The problems mainly are the FPS hits, and Transgaming has had a long time to work on that, with no improvement. Short of a native application, there is no product out there that is going to work. Nothing but harm can come to the game’s image by putting this out to the player base.

How bad is it? My FPS was 60 (v-sync enabled) on the Windows side using Bootcamp on Ultra settings. My FPS on low settings varies currently between 15-25 depending on proximity to other players or water. Sure this is a BETA release. But I fear this will not change based on past experiences with Transgaming’s product.

I was optimistic when I saw the post about the Mac client.
I was optimistic when I saw it was emulated.
I was disappointed when I saw how bad the performance hit really is.

I got about a 5 fps drop but the stuttering I got under Windows is gone. The later was more annoying so I’m happy. Hope they continue to improve it.

What FPS are you seeing?

My guess is that there won’t be many that exceed 30-35.

I would love a native client and not just a Cider port from TansGaming :-(

@aaron.1470

Granted, a Cider port isn’t as good as a pure native one, but I’ll take the former now over the latter next year.

As for the water issues, that’s not unique to Cider. My native Mac client for the-game-that-must-not-be-named-for-fear-of-rousing-trolls also suffers near water compared to the Windows version.

DirectX is just better at some things than Open GL.

I am disappointed but not surprised. As much as I would love to see a native (non-port) client for the game, I don’t see one in the immediate future. However, I will try whatever ArenaNet is throwing out as a Mac client just out of curiosity’s sake.

Regardless of how Cider works, it reduces performance and introduces possible compatibility issues. As is the trend with many similar ports (like Civ V), there is a very noticeable performance difference (20-40% depending on settings). It seems the higher the settings, the more performance suffers.

Not only that, but features are missing. Windowed-Fullscreen is a feature that many of us with multiple displays enjoy. I’ve noticed that the Mac client lags the system a lot more, preventing multitasking such as music (stutters).

Though honestly, you know what disappointed me the most in the WINDOWS version? The checkbox in the Trading Post (‘Show Available Only’) which looks like a normal Windows styled checkbox? Really? You’re going to have an entire user interface designed and just not do a checkbox? Come on ArenaNet, that’s such an eye-sore.

Anyhow, I digress. I have a feeling ArenaNet did the port out of convenience and speed (development-wise). However, I think they will also find out that this is not the answer and eventually go to a native client. How long it takes them and how dedicated they are is yet to be seen.

lunabaguna.8293:

Just wondering if anyone else is disappointed that this is a cider port and not native?

very disappointed. they should’ve worked on a native app instead of wasting time with this cider crap.

This subforum is for tech support of the mac client, not mac client discussion.