Guild Wars 2

It’s been over a year and a half and MAC is still in beta?!? What’s the deal? I’m getting tired of fighting just to play the game. Not all of us can afford both a MAC and a PC or don’t choose to use a PC. When are you going to come out with a REAL MAC version?

And I did search this forum for some information, but the search couldn’t find MAC Beta or anything similar.

You should stop fighting. The Mac version will never get out of beta (quality).

The Mac beta is no longer officially supported, every question concerning the status of the beta or news about a native client don’t get answered (or they will tell you they don’t know or can’t reach anyone working on the Mac team).

If the officials don’t even know if there is anybody working on a native client I am sure that there will never be a native client. And to call the wine port a Mac beta is just to get more Mac people to actually buy the game—the quality of a wine port can never become better than it is right now (let’s not talk about the poor quality and performance issues here).

My advice: Stop hoping. Either you deal with the poor quality of the so called Mac beta until a better native Mac MMO launches or you just play something else. I did the latter. From time to time I come here to check if there is any official info about a native client but so far I leave disappointed every single time.

Or just install Windows with BootCamp like I did.

Anet has such a potentially good game here and they keep making decisions to cut its feet out from under it.

Well I coped with lowest settings and try to avoid LA as much as possible

You’re better off using Bootcamp as suggested or Parallels and running it in a *VM(virtual machine) if you want to avoid bootcamp. The performance in Parallels is vastly superior than the mac beta client without the need to dual boot, you will still however have to install windows in the virtual machine itself .

Since ArenaNet no longer officially supports the mac client these are certainly better options.

*(don’t bother with it in vmware performance is half of what it is in parallels)

I’m actually surprised that you’re saying Parallels runs better than the cider port. What system are you using?

Yeah all signs would point to Parallels running far worse than the cider port. Cider is only mimicking windows when it absolutely MUST in order for the game to function. Parallels is full on emulating the whole of windows, so your CPU and GPU have to use resources running OSX, while simultaneously running windows, while simultaneously running GW2. There is no way that produces better performance than the OSX client >.>

I’ve ran it in Parallels on a Macbook Pro 2012, iMac(late 2012 version), Mac Pro (2012 update) before this post to make sure I was remembering properly. (I am using the maximum ram configuration on all machines) Running OS X 10.9.1.

Consistently across the board it showed higher frame rates and visual fidelity. The last couple of versions of Parallels have really increased it’s 3D acceleration/directx support quite a bit and it really shows. It maps the GPU acceleration on a per instruction level and the performance impact isn’t that bad as a result. Also keep in mind there is on CPU Hardware Assisted Virtualization on both modern Intel & AMD CPUs which has significantly lowered a lot of overhead people associate with VMs this started as far back as 2005 and has improved since then unfortunately a lot of people keep repeating incorrect and very old information and have misconceptions about how modern VMs function.

The only area I saw any kind of performance impact was load times between zones and stepping into a highly populated area and the ensuing texture loads happen and it may choke for a few seconds(wvw massive battles) but it was essentially on par with the Cider client in the majority of cases and once it was all loaded performance exceeded the Cider client. The slow load cases were mainly due to the file system being stored with in a single disk image. The load times were almost non-existant on the solidstate hd I have in the Mac Pro.

It’s worth keeping in mind Cider is poorly coded, very inefficient especially when dealing with memory handling. It still carries with it a lot of very old code from some early versions of WINE. Where the official WINE project has since deprecated a lot of functionality/old code/malloc garbage that Cider still carries with it from when it was forked. There are other areas where Cider performs badly due to the integration of some ‘necessary’ 3rd party licensed tools that let them run some protected games which adds a lot more overhead than you would think. There are a lot more areas where these performance issues can be real-world measured with proper tools but I doubt the average end user would want to get into measuring things at the process level, let alone deciphering the output.

I suggest you try it yourself your mileage may vary depending on your hardware configuration, in my case it runs quite well. The Cider implementation for GW2 is just that bad that Parallels actually outperforms it despite the virtual machine overhead.

To be fair to the folks at transgaming they have a good product. In some games it performs exceedingly well in others it requires a lot more effort to be tolerable. Cider does have newer code from WINE folded into it as well they also have projects out there with a more recently updated code base but unfortunately do to the way business works they can’t always back-port performance updates into other projects for a variety of reasons sometimes simply due to technical reasons as different games have different needs and each have their own custom code/performance tunes in place that conflict with each other. Most of the issues we experience could just be the result of ANet having no budget to pay the folks at transgaming to get things up to par for this title.

It’s really good to know. I’ll try it out and see what the comparison is.

It is just a joke, Mac client isn’t even a beta it is a mess, a cider quick dirty port.