Guild Wars 2

I have been searching the forums as to why I feel as if my performance isn’t as high as it should be on the Mac. Problem is besides ANET mentioning on their website about the minimum specs required to run it, there have not been any threads or comments I have seen them mention as to what the beta client is and how it should be running on macs. The only thing I’ve seen is one Developer say that increasing RAM is not what makes it run faster on the Mac, but thats about it. I understand but is it even optimized?

To put it in a better perspective;

Will ANET be telling us if its not optimized and thats why some people aren’t getting as good of a performance as others?

When would the ETA of the optimization would be?

Will ANET mention what specs (or early 2010 MacBooks, 2011, etc…) should be getting what fps?

-They mentioned on someones post they specifically would make their own thread asking people for specs, and I have not seen this done yet.

With all that, people will have something to compare it too, and see if they are getting the performance they should, and if not we could make adjustments to fix the issue.

I reckon that would be super useful.

It’s possible they haven’t done it because they are collecting information – that they don’t really know what good looks like (or should look like) just yet. Still, a bit of comms either way would go a long way.

the problem is for optimization we have two points of failure.

-Anet has already said they aren’t doing any more optimization (atleast for windows) so if the problem doesn’t concern getting the same data as would come back from windows they might not do much.

-TransGaming, as this is a cider port they also play a role in updating the wrapper and making sure it plays to the best that mac has to offer (something they don’t have a great track record with).

I don’t think they just took our money and decided to leave us in the cold but when you consider there is no one point for the game to rest on it may stagnate foor a great period of time

I am a firm believer that running software in its native environment is 1000 times better than through an emulator. Technically this is not an emulator, but it is still constrained by the very same limitations that an emulator is.

Ultimately, if it’s not written specifically for the Mac platform, it will never be optimized for the Mac platform. Your best option is, and always will be, bootcamp for non-Mac native games.

@pmiles: you are wrong. Sometimes running software via Wine can be actually faster. Now, of course native software is better – because its more reliable and has more opportunities for platform-specific optimisation.

The biggest problem with OS X gaming is that OS X drivers are often badly optimised. The DirectX emulation done by Cider shouldn’t be a big performance hit as the conversion between APIs is straightforward. Shader conversion is a bit more problematic but can be done as well. The thing is, graphic drivers are a bunch of hacks designed to speed up common usage patterns found in games – and OS X often misses those hacks in contrast to windows. This is the main reason why the OS X client runs much slower.

One big problem with the current implementation seems to be GPU-side updates (geometry etc. streaming to the GPU). When I rotate my camera quickly, I experience heavy FPS drops. I suppose that the DirectX emulation code is not using modern OpenGL capabilities in an optimal way yet.

To OP, if you tell us what your specs are, I should be able to make an educated guess what your performance should be

I have also been experiencing these same issues, outrageous FPS drops when taking a quick turn, too much going on the screen may cause my game to freeze…spent $20 on OS X Mountain Lion because it was the req. minimum stats…I played on Snow Leopard before and felt I had an average of 1-3 MORE frames than with Mountain Lion. I am hopeful that this is simply due to the fact that GW2 is still in beta for Macintosh. Here’s to hoping for the best…Optimization would cause me to actually buy gems from the gem store…Just saying Anet.