OS X To Feral and Aspyr about Mavericks

[syrinxx]

i know there are a few Feral and Aspyr gys in this forum active. as a customer of their games i would love to read about their plans of upgrading their products for Mavericks.

i have the feeling (yeah just a feeling) for example that Borderlands 2 is running not as smooth as before on the same system with the same settings. (maxed out imac mid 2011 ati 6970 2 gb i7 3,4).

will there be updates get better usage of the new OpenGL extensions will there be better drivers?

i would love to hear some good news

cheers and thx

 

[Washac]

i know there are a few Feral and Aspyr gys in this forum active. as a customer of their games i would love to read about their plans of upgrading their products for Mavericks.

i have the feeling (yeah just a feeling) for example that Borderlands 2 is running not as smooth as before on the same system with the same settings. (maxed out imac mid 2011 ati 6970 2 gb i7 3,4).

will there be updates get better usage of the new OpenGL extensions will there be better drivers?

i would love to hear some good news

cheers and thx

Lesson I learned was that when ever Apple bring out any update then never ever install it straight away, wait until you know what software people/ developers are doing or going to do.

 

[Nightarchaon]

i found after upgrading to Mavericks that everything was OK until the "memory compression" thats being used in mavericks kicked in, it was causing EVERYTHING to stutter on my system (12gb ram apparently is not enough for what i do, will need to up to 16 and see if thats any better)

System ran smoothly as it always did until the memory compression starts, then system has random hiccups and lockups that never happened with the old "straight to disk swapfile" memory management

 

[cerote]

Thought I saw a statement from Aspyr the other day say something about not fully taking advantage of new OpenGL till 10.9.1 or .2

 

[antonis]

i found after upgrading to Mavericks that everything was OK until the "memory compression" thats being used in mavericks kicked in, it was causing EVERYTHING to stutter on my system (12gb ram apparently is not enough for what i do, will need to up to 16 and see if thats any better)

System ran smoothly as it always did until the memory compression starts, then system has random hiccups and lockups that never happened with the old "straight to disk swapfile" memory management

How do you know when this new memory compression kicks in ? Does it show in the activity monitor ? I'd like to know since I have an older iMac and I'd like to see if it is affecting anything.

 

[Cougarcat]

i found after upgrading to Mavericks that everything was OK until the "memory compression" thats being used in mavericks kicked in, it was causing EVERYTHING to stutter on my system (12gb ram apparently is not enough for what i do, will need to up to 16 and see if thats any better)

System ran smoothly as it always did until the memory compression starts, then system has random hiccups and lockups that never happened with the old "straight to disk swapfile" memory management

This doesn't make any sense. The new memory management should be more efficient, not less. Are you sure it's not something else?

You can see if you are maxing your ram by going to activity monitor and taking a look at the memory pressure graph.

 

[edddeduck]

i know there are a few Feral and Aspyr gys in this forum active. as a customer of their games i would love to read about their plans of upgrading their products for Mavericks.

Most Feral games will just work with no issues.

A few will need updating to support some changes Apple have done in Mavericks (like support for 4GB graphics cards).

Finally some games run slightly slower/minor issues due to bugs in the OS that will likely get squashed in the first few releases.

will there be updates get better usage of the new OpenGL extensions will there be better drivers?

It doesn't really work like that, Mavericks has newer drivers that overall run faster than before (with a few regressions that will likely get fixed in point releases). This means games will just be quicker. In our testing we have found this to be true F1 2012 for example is about 8% faster in Mavericks on AMD cards (AMD 6870 is the card I checked for this example).

We could re-port games to start using all the newer technology in Mavericks but in most cases that would involve a huge amount of work better spent on new titles and would mean support for all older systems would be lost. So it's a balancing act.

Brand new games will use a lot more of the latest technology available in Mavericks, with it being free the adoption should be higher. The more users that are using Mavericks the easier it is for us to start using Mavericks technology.

i would love to hear some good news

cheers and thx

New games using more new technology, performance boosts for free and guaranteed fixes for any crashes should be the news you want.

Edwin

 

[Nightarchaon]

This doesn't make any sense. The new memory management should be more efficient, not less. Are you sure it's not something else?

You can see if you are maxing your ram by going to activity monitor and taking a look at the memory pressure graph.

more than maxing, i using 12gb of 12gb real ram and have on average 3gb "compressed", everything runs fine until the ram starts getting "compressed" then the machine stutters and freezes which it never did before using just ram and swapfile.

 

[Cougarcat]

more than maxing, i using 12gb of 12gb real ram and have on average 3gb "compressed", everything runs fine until the ram starts getting "compressed" then the machine stutters and freezes which it never did before using just ram and swapfile.

Yeah, it should definitely not be doing that. On the Apple forums it seems other people are also having memory issues. In any event, I wouldn't expect adding another 4 GB on top of 12 will solve anything. 10.9.1?

 

[edddeduck]

10.9.1?

Unless you like living on the edge I always recommend users wait until 10.x.1 or 10.x.2 until they upgrade as the 10.x.0 release always has a few bugs that get squashed in the first few updates

Mavericks has been pretty well behaved considering the complexity of the changes.

Edwin

 

[Cougarcat]

Unless you like living on the edge I always recommend users wait until 10.x.1 or 10.x.2 until they upgrade as the 10.x.0 release always has a few bugs that get squashed in the first few updates

Mavericks has been pretty well behaved considering the complexity of the changes.

Edwin

I've always upgraded right away and have never had any show-stopping issues. IMO 10.9.1 is just as likely to have bugs as 10.9.0. And even though there are a ton of changes, I see Mavericks as 10.8.6, as it runs far better than ML ever did on my aging laptop.

The better case for waiting is that you may run into compatibility issues with apps.

All that said, Apple needs to hurry up with the gmail fix to Mail...

 

[Aspyr-Blair]

Ditto on everything Edwin said above.

The current state for Aspyr's titles are almost identical. About a 8-15% jump in performance on AMD, while a slight dip in performance on NVIDIA. Edwin is right, bugs will get ironed out with Mavericks updates and our games will perform better as a result. We will continue to optimize in places where we can, and look forward to new tools on upcoming titles.

I too am quite happy with how well this OS launch has gone and have seen relatively few bugs. For those of you that are seeing issues, please ping our support team so that we can assist Apple and the hardware manufacturers with our data after digging into it.

 

[edddeduck]

I've always upgraded right away and have never had any show-stopping issues.

Never seen any show stoppers but seen plenty of issues that got fixed improved in the later OS updates.

IMO 10.9.1 is just as likely to have bugs as 10.9.0. And even though there are a ton of changes, I see Mavericks as 10.8.6, as it runs far better than ML ever did on my aging laptop.

I have to respectfully disagree, in my experience every 10.x.1 update I have ever installed / tested has always fixed a large number of minor issues (and a few major ones), that's just as true for 10.0.1 as it is for 10.8.1

Mavericks does run faster but it is also slightly buggier too, it's to be expected and compared to many new OS releases it is a very good .0 release. However nothing is ever perfect when it is this complex!

The better case for waiting is that you may run into compatibility issues with apps.

Compatibility issues with apps, many of these are caused by bugs in the OS. Sometimes it's due to changes in the OS that require a code update but many of the compatibility issues are caused by changes to OS behaviour that require the developers to work round them.

It's not always the case but a large number of compatibility updates when you look into them are issues with the new OS and are not technically bugs with the application.

That all said if you have a problem with any Feral game in Mavericks email our support ninjas and we will investigate faster than you can say shuriken!

Edwin

 

[Cougarcat]

Compatibility issues with apps, many of these are caused by bugs in the OS. Sometimes it's due to changes in the OS that require a code update but many of the compatibility issues are caused by changes to OS behaviour that require the developers to work round them.

It's not always the case but a large number of compatibility updates when you look into them are issues with the new OS and are not technically bugs with the application.

True, but from the user's perspective there is no difference--the developer still needs to update the app.

Perhaps you are correct about the .1 updates. I guess I am seeing Mavericks differently after the slow dogs that were Lion and Mountain Lion, good riddance––it was about time for a Snow Leopard-style release. (And it's been bug-free for me besides the Mail issue.)

 

[edddeduck]

True, but from the user's perspective there is no difference--the developer still needs to update the app.

Or you can wait for Apple to fix the OS, that usually works too just not as quickly

I agree with your user perspective comment, from a decade in Mac games development I have learnt any performance gains in a game in the new OS are "amazing work by Apple" but any bugs are "bugs by developers". It's how it works

Feral (and other companies like Aspyr) test games in the pre-release OS to log as many OS bugs and issues as possible so when the OS is released it is as good as possible for our titles and you don't see any problems.

We do have legitimate bugs in our games that a new OS will expose no matter how hard we try. Bottom line if we can fix the bug we do no matter the cause, the only difference is if it is a bug in the OS we work around the issue for customers then log a bug with Apple and hope they fix it properly in a future update.

Edwin

 

[Solomani]

more than maxing, i using 12gb of 12gb real ram and have on average 3gb "compressed", everything runs fine until the ram starts getting "compressed" then the machine stutters and freezes which it never did before using just ram and swapfile.

You submitted this (Mavericks) memory issue to Apple, right? If this is really a problem with Mavericks, rather than some isolated issue affecting only yourself, then this should be brought to Apple's attention ASAP. The sooner they realize this, the faster they can release an update/fix.

 

[Nightarchaon]

You submitted this (Mavericks) memory issue to Apple, right? If this is really a problem with Mavericks, rather than some isolated issue affecting only yourself, then this should be brought to Apple's attention ASAP. The sooner they realize this, the faster they can release an update/fix.

i would just like a setting that allows me to turn memory compression "off"

Rolled back to ML and all is well again, so its definitely mavericks causing the stuttering horrible performance issues, thank god i imaged my disk prior to the "upgrade"

 

[N19h7m4r3]

The only gaming issues I've had with Mavericks are ones where I try to use WINE, or Play on Mac.

Other than that, I've only noticed some odd random stuttering on Serious Sam 3. I have noticed lower FPS on games, which is odd, hopefully drivers will get updated more and things get fixed.

My Specs are in my signature.

 

[davecom]

Can either of you comment on improvements to Intel integrated graphics drivers in Mavericks?

 

[edddeduck]

Can either of you comment on improvements to Intel integrated graphics drivers in Mavericks?

I don't have any specifics but they are faster and have less bugs from our testing. Graphics driver crashes that caused stability issues in some titles like Mafia 2, Tomb Raider Underworld and Deus Ex appear fixed in Mavericks.

Edwin

 

[Hintze]

I got a ~20 fps increase in League of Legends on my rmbp (650m)
so i am very happy with Mavericks so far

 

[Aspyr-Blair]

Can either of you comment on improvements to Intel integrated graphics drivers in Mavericks?

We too are seeing jumps of about 8-15% on Intel. Crashes seem to less prevalent too, but its still early in testing. We have a lot of games to get though.