Guild Wars 2

About week till new 10.11 release, so there is a question.
Anyone tried run Guild Wars 2 under El Capitan gold master?
Faster, slower, bugs, workarounds?

look up the last patch for mac you will see how supportive this ridiculous company supports its consumers. They just hide behind this bullkitten beta for almost 4 years. Sick of my client crashing every 20 minutes because of a failed development team. Cannot wait until something better comes along I am so gone at that point.

GreyCat.5823:

About week till new 10.11 release, so there is a question.
Anyone tried run Guild Wars 2 under El Capitan gold master?
Faster, slower, bugs, workarounds?

GW2 shouldn’t be any faster or slower in El Capitan: there is very little difference between Yosemite and El Capitan. While El Capitan introduces Metal that will only have an impact on OpenGL games and not GW2 which is running through a cider wrapper. It’s quite possible that bugs may be introduced, so I would advise not updating to El Capitan until after it has actually been released and people have had a chance to test it out (and for Arenanet to possibly patch it).

Installing a beta OS (or even the Gold Master) isn’t really advisable unless you’re doing so to test software or are a developer. Things can still go quite wrong. Things still go wrong with final released: I remember a couple of years ago (okay more than a couple) Apple released an update to either Snow Leopard or Lion (don’t quite recall) which ended up corrupting some people’s systems and forcing them to do a complete reinstall (losing all their things if they didn’t have a backup). So yeah. Always wait a couple of days at least xD.

I’ve tested it out and found it to be, in my opinion, actually running a bit better. It is slightly noticeable, but I personally feel as though there has been a slight performance improvement compared to where it was at previously.

I’m running on a 2013 iMac w/ 3.4 gHz processor, 4GB VRAM, 16GB RAM, etc. etc.

I see a slight FPS increase even in lions arch with graphics completely maxed out. LA has always been slow, and still is. But I can play on max graphics there on occasion with FPS up to 14 whereas on medium-near high I’d get maybe 11. More noticeable improvement out in the world with max graphics easily netting me 60-70 fps in low populated areas. WvW I always do on low graphics due to bug issues and crashing that has always been there, but I think there is still a bit of an improvement there to.

New bugs have come up, however. I’m getting occasional “model leaks detected” crashes now, sometimes/usually when I quit the game for the night/rest of the day. Didn’t get these before. However, crashing is definitely no more than what it was on the previous OS. Golden Master is extremely stable right now and I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT performance improvement on my mac as a whole. MILEAGE WILL VARY depending on computer specs, though. My perceived performance improvement (I went into this whole thing not really thinking there would be much of an improvement) may be just that; a perception. It may not be reality. The point still stands that during an LA night cycle I can stand looking at the mystic toilet/forge on max graphics and get 20-25 FPS. Turning and moving of course slows it down, but there ya go.

“model leaks detected” seems cider bug, happens on 10.9 as well

FlamingFoxx.1305:

While El Capitan introduces Metal that will only have an impact on OpenGL games and not GW2 which is running through a cider wrapper.

Well that is, actually, inaccurate. Metal and OpenGL are 2 completely different beasts. And Metal will have 0 (zero) impact on OpenGL games. Metal will only help if the game is specifically made for Metal, otherwise it won’t even be used.

That said, ArenaNet could update their wrapper to use Metal, as Transgaming has already said they will be updating Cider to support it. We must keep in mind, though, that DirectX 9 is just one of the Windows libraries that GW2 uses that are emulated on the Mac (albeit the “heaviest”).

There has also been discussions about translating calls from one API to the other. These new “low level” APIs work differently than the current generation (DirectX and OpenGL). So even if Transgaming and ANet update their client to translate DirectX 9 to Metal, the game would still be based on the usual (and higher level/low performance) DX9 calls. It is possible that DirectX 12 <-> Metal or DirectX 12 <-> Vulkan translations would work better, given the similar nature of these APIs. But I don’t see ANet redoing their engine to support DX12 any time soon.

TL;DR: There will be no noticeable performance improvements by using the new Metal API on El Capitain.

Currently I’m seeming little to no difference in El Capitan 10.11.1 vs Yosemite, so I don’t see any reason to update or not based on GW2 performance / crashing. That said I’m currently running a repair on my install since it seems to be crashing more since I came back than it did last I was playing. I might have been on a previous AMD graphics machine but been trying to get it resolved.

Late 2013 iMac i7 3.5ghz
GTX 780M 4gig
24gig system ram

Try answering the question, gw2 is not working on some mac´s. I tried to run it on mid2012 iMac27 (AMD Graphics) and Mac Book Air 2015 (Intel HD5000), with OS X 10.11 (german language version). The cider emulator crashes immediately. Not even the startup program shows up on the screen. Logfile only stats that the accelerated graphics cannot be activated, crashing the client. After writing ticket to the support, they tried to help, without success for two full weeks. Installing, Uninstalling, erasing Libfiles, adding new user, always the same error on both mac´s. Even tried the wine emulator, game starts, but dead slow and crash after 20 minutes repeatedly.
Maybe someone in the forum has the same experience and can give a clue. Thanks.