OS X Yosemite Games/Benchmarks

[Irishman]

Alright guys. This has almost become a tradition for me since Mountain Lion - to update to Apple's latest and greatest OS and run some game benchmarks - to see what, if anything, has changed. The one thing that's remained constant is the specs of my iMac - the 2.9GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 1 TB HD, 512MB nVidia Geforce GT 650M gpu.

This time, we're talking OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I'm going to largely focus on games which use OpenGL 4.x, because early reports are showing minimum FPS doubling, which seems rather exciting, especially for those of us who play action games online. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1734820/

I'll start with Unigine's Heaven, which runs OpenGL 4.1 and hardware tessellation on nVidia Kepler GPUs and newer:

Here are the results (default res for Heaven on my Mac is 1024 x 576)

Test one
Med qual
Tess Normal
All Options On
AA off
______________
34.1 FPS (8.8 min, 61.2 max)

Test two
Med qual
Tess disabled
All Options On
AA 4x
______________
36.4 FPS (13.1 min, 61.4 max)

These compare favorably to the tests I ran a year ago when Mavericks was first introduced: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1658798/

I've added a new test this time, including 4x AA and the lowest tessellation, just to see the impact it has.

Test three
Med qual
Tess Moderate
All Options On
AA 4x
______________
29.7 FPS (13.5 min, 61.5 max)

So, the latest version of Heaven running the latest version of OS X is showing not a minimum frame rate boost, but a maximum frame rate boost. It's also showing in this benchmark lower minimums in one setting, and higher minimums in the other.


Let's move on.

I'm going to run a simplified set of benchmarks for Batman Arkham City:

1024 x 768
Min - 28
Max - 60
Ave - 49

1920 x 1080
Min - 25
Max - 60
Ave - 43

Like last time, the only difference between these runs is the resolution:

Last Year's #s on Mavericks

1024 x 768
Min - 19
Max - 60
Ave - 48

1920 x 1080
Min - 7
Max - 56
Ave - 38

So, quite an interesting story here in Arkham City! At 720p, the game ran a dramatic increase in minimum frame rates. At 1080p, the minimum frame rate nearly quadruples (from 7 to 25). I'm curious to know if this delta would increase as the resolution increases. My 21.5" iMac maxes out at 1080p, so maybe owners of 27" models or Macbook Pro retinas/Mac Pros could chime in with their higher resolution experience.


Now, let's look at Tomb Raider, an OpenGL 4.1 game which features a built-in benchmarking tool:

Default settings at 1344 x 756
Min - 45.3
Max - 62.9
Avg - 56.5

Back in March, when I ran the benchmark in Mavericks I got 55 avg.

Not a huge improvement.


Hopefully, this will serve as a beginning of a discussion of performance with regard to Yosemite and modern games! Enjoy!

 

[saturnotaku]

Your 512 MB GPU is going to be somewhat of a bottleneck. I'm curious to see if the improvements are greater on systems with 1+ GB units, particularly the current GeForce GT 750M.

 

[davecom]

Anecdotally, I'm seeing some very clear improvement in Castle of Illusion on my Intel HD 5000 in Yosemite over Mavericks, but no benchmarks to share.

 

[edddeduck]

I have found Yosemite to be a little variable. Usually on the newer games you get a boost however there is this strange bug that causes games to slow down by upto ~30% compared to 10.9.5.

Once it happens the OS will not regain the performance again and it seems to be an issue in the OS. We are doing tests here to try and track it down, it's likely going to be fixed in an update but as with all initial OS releases you can expect minor issues on some machines.

Edwin

 

[Quinblade000]

I've found Xcom Enemy Unknown to stutter and lag in places since updating to Yosemite on my Rmbp with 750m.
It was running fantastic on Mavericks and I played it for many hours.

 

[h9826790]

The gaming performance for my old Mac Pro improve a bit generally.

Hitman benefit most from 10.10, it double the minimum FPS, make it totally playable in 1440P ultra setting now.

However, SIM 3 running extremely slow. It perform very well under Mavericks, and now it is totally unplayable in Yosemite. It's not just the graphics, but include loading, everything is extremely slow. There is no benchmark for that, but the feeling is something around 10FPS or worse. Something very wrong.

 

[edddeduck]

The gaming performance for my old Mac Pro improve a bit generally.

Hitman benefit most from 10.10, it double the minimum FPS, make it totally playable in 1440P ultra setting now.

However, SIM 3 running extremely slow. It perform very well under Mavericks, and now it is totally unplayable in Yosemite. It's not just the graphics, but include loading, everything is extremely slow. There is no benchmark for that, but the feeling is something around 10FPS or worse. Something very wrong.

There are some bugs in Apple's window manager that can drastically slow some things down. It's a little complex but usually these things shake themselves out in the first point release.