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Starcraft 2 Windows 7 vs Mac osx Snow leopard
- Thread starter waloshin
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core i7 330m w/ 512mb mac vs pc
Tested this out last night. First I played on my mac os x boot and at 1920x1080 resolution (geffen hdmi adapter to projector) I had to run on medium settings and I was the last to load the game every time. From my windows 7 boot I was able to bump the setting up the high and it still played better than it was on mac os x.
Tested this out last night. First I played on my mac os x boot and at 1920x1080 resolution (geffen hdmi adapter to projector) I had to run on medium settings and I was the last to load the game every time. From my windows 7 boot I was able to bump the setting up the high and it still played better than it was on mac os x.
Yeah the drivers for 10.6.4 are just completely FUBAR. Hopefully
can do something about it soon...Yeah the drivers for 10.6.4 are just completely FUBAR. Hopefully
Right now I think it's an intricate mix between 10.6.4s crap drivers and the SC2 Os x shader bug . Once one or both of those are taken care of it'll be a whole nother ball game....that's still behind windows.
SC2 runs fine on my i5 with 10.6.3 (10.6.4 -> bad FPS) at medium/high settings at 1680x1050 res.
My bro has a 2.26 unibody with 9400M and 4GB RAM, and it's running SC2 very fluid at low settings and 1280x800 res.
With only 2GB RAM and 1920x1080 res it will drop FPS from time to time even at lowest settings.
The one mention load settings might be because you have a slow HD, GPU doesn't affect load times that much, but HD and network increases load times a lot.
My bro has a 2.26 unibody with 9400M and 4GB RAM, and it's running SC2 very fluid at low settings and 1280x800 res.
With only 2GB RAM and 1920x1080 res it will drop FPS from time to time even at lowest settings.
The one mention load settings might be because you have a slow HD, GPU doesn't affect load times that much, but HD and network increases load times a lot.
moved my post elsewhere thought this was a win vs osx performance rather than specific hardware question =)
What exactly is the SC2 os x shader bug?
I'm running a 2.66 core 2 duo iMac with 4GB ram and a Radeon 2600 pro. I know that card isn't very good, but I'm able to run the game fine until I move the shaders up to any setting above low. Once I do that, even at lowest res with everything else on low, the game runs FPS in the mid-teens.
However, with shaders on low, I can run everything else on high at full res and get 30-40 fps. Sure, it's nice, but it kinda looks like Warcraft 3 with a graphics upgrade and some shiny effects.
Anything wrong with Radeon's drivers? We already know about the Nvidia issue. And I know the card sucks, so don't tell me again, please.
I'm running a 2.66 core 2 duo iMac with 4GB ram and a Radeon 2600 pro. I know that card isn't very good, but I'm able to run the game fine until I move the shaders up to any setting above low. Once I do that, even at lowest res with everything else on low, the game runs FPS in the mid-teens.
However, with shaders on low, I can run everything else on high at full res and get 30-40 fps. Sure, it's nice, but it kinda looks like Warcraft 3 with a graphics upgrade and some shiny effects.
Anything wrong with Radeon's drivers? We already know about the Nvidia issue. And I know the card sucks, so don't tell me again, please.
24-inch iMac
3.06Ghz C2D
4GB RAM
NVIDIA 8800GS 512MB
Snow Leopard 10.6.4
When loaded from within Mac OS X, the best I can do is medium graphics settings at 1280x720, and even then I get a lot of slowing and choppy framerate
If I bootcamp directly into Windows 7 and load from there, I can play on Ultra graphics settings, everything fully maxed out, at max resolution 1920x1200
At the time, my iMac was the highest end iMac available. I paid extra to get the NVIDIA 512MB graphics card over the ATI 256MB graphics card, and at the moment I'm getting pooped on by Apple. It makes me very angry. The NVIDIA drivers have been borked for a long time and Apple seems to be in no hurry to fix them. Apple wants the Mac to be seen as a viable gaming platform, but when the graphics drivers are this screwed up...
3.06Ghz C2D
4GB RAM
NVIDIA 8800GS 512MB
Snow Leopard 10.6.4
When loaded from within Mac OS X, the best I can do is medium graphics settings at 1280x720, and even then I get a lot of slowing and choppy framerate
If I bootcamp directly into Windows 7 and load from there, I can play on Ultra graphics settings, everything fully maxed out, at max resolution 1920x1200
At the time, my iMac was the highest end iMac available. I paid extra to get the NVIDIA 512MB graphics card over the ATI 256MB graphics card, and at the moment I'm getting pooped on by Apple. It makes me very angry. The NVIDIA drivers have been borked for a long time and Apple seems to be in no hurry to fix them. Apple wants the Mac to be seen as a viable gaming platform, but when the graphics drivers are this screwed up...
24-inch iMac
3.06Ghz C2D
4GB RAM
NVIDIA 8800GS 512MB
Snow Leopard 10.6.4
When loaded from within Mac OS X, the best I can do is medium graphics settings at 1280x720, and even then I get a lot of slowing and choppy framerate
If I bootcamp directly into Windows 7 and load from there, I can play on Ultra graphics settings, everything fully maxed out, at max resolution 1920x1200
At the time, my iMac was the highest end iMac available. I paid extra to get the NVIDIA 512MB graphics card over the ATI 256MB graphics card, and at the moment I'm getting pooped on by Apple. It makes me very angry. The NVIDIA drivers have been borked for a long time and Apple seems to be in no hurry to fix them. Apple wants the Mac to be seen as a viable gaming platform, but when the graphics drivers are this screwed up...
Roll back to 10.6.3 if you can. If you feel up to it you could download the 10.6.3 combo update, use Pacifist to extract the nVidia drivers in the /System/Library/Extensions folder (I think it's just all NV* kexts and GeForce* kexts), copy them to the /System/Library/Extensions folder on your root drive, run Disk Utility's repair permissions on your root drive and restart.
10.6.4's nVidia drivers are meant to be so bad that Valve warned users not to update.
I am also curious about this "os x shader bug" which I think is also referenced on the SC 2 Performance Guide in another thread here and stickied on the Battle.net forums. I'm running in 10.6.3 in a 2010 Macbook 13" (320m, 4gb ram) and find that I can manage medium shaders just okay (low 20s FPS), with some hitches and slowdowns (only playing the campaign at the moment).
I'm trying to determine how much improvement I can expect for my system under OS X, as I'd prefer not to Bootcamp if patches will eventually get the game up to reasonably fluid performance (30 FPS) on medium settings.
I'm aware of the Nvidia driver issues under 10.6.4 and have read that the new driver software being tested by Apple devs only improves things to 10.6.3 levels.
Is anyone aware of patches or updates in the pipeline that will improve performance beyond 10.6.3 levels? I mean things already being worked on, not the general hope that OSX graphics performance will reach Windows levels on comparable hardware.
Hey anubis, it looks like you have the same iMac I do. Try installing the Snow Leopard graphics update, I saw a huge improvement in Starcraft 2 on this machine after installing. I still wouldn't call it *great*, but it's much, much better and the shader bug appears to be fixed. (I saw no improvement on my MBP though).
I've got a 2009 MBP 13" with the 9400M, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.
Starcraft 2 under default settings on the Mac isn't anything to write home about. It's a bit slow, clicking on units isn't as fast as I'd expect. Sometimes in combat I'd have to click on a unit several times for the click to go through. Things will slow down significantly during battles, a few skipped frames.
Overall I'm very disappointed that this 9 month old MacBook Pro, the darling of its line, souped out with a solid state drive and 8GB of RAM, still cannot play Starcraft 2. What's shocking also, although in a sense encouraging, is that I can dual boot it into Windows and it will play just fine.
Why have nVidia, Apple, and Blizzard (or some subset of the three) forsaken us? Why do I need to boot into Windows to play Starcraft 2?
Is there any solution coming? Is it a problem with OS X? The graphics drivers? Starcraft 2 itself? Who will fix this?
I'd really prefer to NOT have to boot into Windows, but I suppose if I have no other choice, I should start looking into the option. I'm amazed that none of those companies have acknowledged the performance issues and voiced their plans to fix them.
Starcraft 2 under default settings on the Mac isn't anything to write home about. It's a bit slow, clicking on units isn't as fast as I'd expect. Sometimes in combat I'd have to click on a unit several times for the click to go through. Things will slow down significantly during battles, a few skipped frames.
Overall I'm very disappointed that this 9 month old MacBook Pro, the darling of its line, souped out with a solid state drive and 8GB of RAM, still cannot play Starcraft 2. What's shocking also, although in a sense encouraging, is that I can dual boot it into Windows and it will play just fine.
Why have nVidia, Apple, and Blizzard (or some subset of the three) forsaken us? Why do I need to boot into Windows to play Starcraft 2?
Is there any solution coming? Is it a problem with OS X? The graphics drivers? Starcraft 2 itself? Who will fix this?
I'd really prefer to NOT have to boot into Windows, but I suppose if I have no other choice, I should start looking into the option. I'm amazed that none of those companies have acknowledged the performance issues and voiced their plans to fix them.
i have the late 08 macbook alu' and i can barely manage low settings under OSX. i upgraded the RAM to 3gb and the HDD to 320GB, (which by the way tripled hdd xbench scores, if there are any other macbook pro 13" users out there i strongly urge to get a 7200rpm 3rd party hdd.) i can turn up terrain and texture to ultra, and the gives a slight, maybe 5 fps hit to my gameplay. unfortunately i only have 10gb left on my windows side so i cant put starcraft on there to see ther difference. i was thinking about backing up and restoring after re-partitioning, but im not really sure about how windows does all that so i'm leaving it alone for now. not worth 2 wasted hours just to play a game i can already play. i applied the SL gfx update, and that fixed the constant crashing. the thing is, i just cant get over how apple has been marketing mac since my late 08 model as real gaming machines, considering how horrible the drivers are. you all remember the charts saying 5x better performance from the 9400m? well, turns out 5x better just isnt good enough; i can run CoD4 mac at low settings, medium is pushing it, and i have to play at 800x500 to get acceptable fps. now comes starcraft which i got the impression would be pretty low-spec, but the mac version barely handles on apples low-end machines. they have it all over their site about how macs are great gamers, but the only gaming your going to get done is medium settings on the top of the end $2000 imac. (and the $2500 mac pro, but i dont know of anyone who is dropping that kind of cash unless they are doing something besides gaming on their mac pro.) i've seen the macbook pro 15 getting acceptable frames on many games, but i honestly dont want to go top of the line to play games. my mac does everything i want, and for the price difference between the base macbook pro and the 15" one, i could go customize a nice gaming rig on newegg! okay, enough of my ranting, anyone know a program to get my windows to my external drive while i reformat my internal hd?
i was thinking about backing up and restoring after re-partitioning, but im not really sure about how windows does all that so i'm leaving it alone for now. not worth 2 wasted hours just to play a game i can already play. i applied the SL gfx update, and that fixed the constant crashing. the thing is, i just cant get over how apple has been marketing mac since my late 08 model as real gaming machines, considering how horrible the drivers are. you all remember the charts saying 5x better performance from the 9400m? well, turns out 5x better just isnt good enough; i can run CoD4 mac at low settings, medium is pushing it, and i have to play at 800x500 to get acceptable fps. now comes starcraft which i got the impression would be pretty low-spec, but the mac version barely handles on apples low-end machines. they have it all over their site about how macs are great gamers, but the only gaming your going to get done is medium settings on the top of the end $2000 imac. (and the $2500 mac pro, but i dont know of anyone who is dropping that kind of cash unless they are doing something besides gaming on their mac pro.) i've seen the macbook pro 15 getting acceptable frames on many games, but i honestly dont want to go top of the line to play games. my mac does everything i want, and for the price difference between the base macbook pro and the 15" one, i could go customize a nice gaming rig on newegg! okay, enough of my ranting, anyone know a program to get my windows to my external drive while i reformat my internal hd?
I realize this -- and unfortunately I didn't get a chance to choose the graphics integration when I bought my 13MBP. My point is that I have everything else tricked out, so it's obviously all on the graphics, and from everyone else who say they can dual boot into Windows and run SC2 on the same hardware at higher fps and higher quality, then clearly the problem lies in either nVidia, Apple, or Blizzard software. Are any of those companies going to do anything about this?
I don't intend to get a new machine just to play SC2, as this laptop is not even a year old but is perfectly fast and fine for everything else. It's just sad that the hardware itself seems to work with SC2 fine on Windows, just not Mac.
The cheapest solution is the dual boot, but an ideal solution is some mythical upcoming software update.
dual boot
MS has spent 15 years on DirectX and it runs rings around OS X for gaming. OpenGL gaming died around the time John Carmack started using DirectX
and Apple has a habit of gimping slightly older hardware to make you buy new hardware. on Windows hardware is usually supported longer than Apple wants to support it
MS has spent 15 years on DirectX and it runs rings around OS X for gaming. OpenGL gaming died around the time John Carmack started using DirectX
and Apple has a habit of gimping slightly older hardware to make you buy new hardware. on Windows hardware is usually supported longer than Apple wants to support it