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Weird lags while gaming on MacBook Pro

R

reallux

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 5, 2010
4
0
Hello,

I have some trouble gaming on my mac book pro (mid 2009).

After playing some minutes of CSS or L4D2 (online and offline) I often got weird lags, my FPS dropped from 40-60 to 10-25. The lags are a bit different now however, the FPS don't drop constantly but vary from 40 to 20, looks like my character would stop walking every 1-2 seconds or so.

I reinstalled all my source-engined games but no change, now I found out these lags are also occurring in an non-steam game; Minecraft (Java based game?).

Looks to me the lags are due to some software problem on my mac? I'm not 100% sure but I think my hardware is ok.

Oh yeah, I upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard without any results regarding my lags.

Do I have to reinstall the whole os? I hope someone maybe knows what I can do to fix it, anyway thanks a lot in advance for helping me :)
 
haven't tried under bootcamp.

And no it hasn't been like this all the time, I have played CSS lagfree for some time. Can't really remember if I changed/installed anything that may have caused the game to lag.

For Minecraft, it only lags when I start the game AFTER I had the lags in a Source game. I just have no idea what could cause these lags :(
 
ok now I re-installed the osx on my macbook downloaded steam and still got lags. Do I have a hardware problem, or is there a way to test my hardware?

Edit: I did the hardware test with the install cd: the faster one didn't find anything, the longer one took too long so I tried to abort it with the result of my macbook freezing. does that mean there is something wrong with the hardware?
 
It isn't a hardware problem, it's a heat problem. I had the same issue along with many other people who reported it on the Steam forums.

What happens is when the computer gets to a certain temperature, it underclocks the processor to try and cool it down. For some reason when 10.6.4 came along, it screwed up something in this underclocking procedure which causes erratic frame rates once you get above a certain temperature, which is the temperature that the computer normally gets to when playing Games. This is more speculation since there is no official word on why this happens, but from the data collected from the thread on he Steam Forums, heat is the most common factor.

What helped me was downloading iStat Pro or smcfancontrol and turning up the fans to max speed before playing a game. Also 10.6.5 helped this issue out a lot.
 
actullay 10.6.5 didn't change anything for me but I'll try the fan control, thank you for your hint.
 
Yeah, as mentioned earlier, it sounds like the GPU/CPU's throttling.

Try SMC fan control. Works like a charm.
 
Hey,

had the same problem on my macbook pro 2009 while playing call of duty 4 or games under bootcamp. (its strange because that never happened just after i bought my macbook? anyone knows why?

I installed SMC fan control for mac, and for my bootcamp (Windows XP)I installed macfan.exe or something. Works fine but i'd like to solve the problem so i don't have to use these programs each time i play a game. Can a macbook control the fans itself and adjust itself?
 
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