Support for Garbo Computers

[boshmi]

Don't get me wrong, I love the roadmap, and everything that will come with it, but just one thing was niggling at me when I read it. You see, as a filthy casual gamer (yes, lop my head off, members of the PC master race) I own simply a bootcamped MacBook air, which can run games on mid-to-low graphics depending on which game it is, of course.
The Long Dark, before tireless menace, my machine got me about 30fps on low graphics, which I consider "good." 
After tireless menace, the framerate dropped, leaving me with about 25-20 fps, depending on location on activity, which I consider "playable."
To rectify this I had to reduce my fov to the minimum and reduce resolution as well to get me back up to ~30. My game already looks garbage, meaning those beautiful settings and sunrises that all you expensive PC people get are unavailable to me. Where you see beautiful, atmospheric sunset, I see some red bricks falling into a black brick. This is what is worrying me. With all the new graphical improvements, the idea to make a seamless world, and the fact that the map is only getting larger, I'm becoming a little worried. If the fps drops much more I doubt the game will be playable which is very sad for me, because I love this game.

Before you tell me to get stuffed and go buy a better computer and stop whining, with your fancy PCs looming over me (I've experienced this countless times before on the internet) please understand that as a university student with little to no income, a macbook air is about the best I can do. I have barley enough money to keep food on the table, let alone buy a monster PC so that I can play games which look nicer.

If it's possible hinterland, it would be grand if you could consider optimizing the game for lower end systems. I wouldn't mind if the seams on areas were kept in, because honestly I kinda like them. I figure it's probably a lot to ask of you at this stage, but it's just a suggestion.

Thank you for taking the time to read

[ElvisHunter]

Hey - are you running this game inside of steam? If so try disabling the steam overlay when in game. It will free up a good amount of memory and should boost your framerate back to what it was before. 

[boshmi]

4 minutes ago, ElvisHunter said:

Hey - are you running this game inside of steam? If so try disabling the steam overlay when in game. It will free up a good amount of memory and should boost your framerate back to what it was before. 

Actually, my game crashes when I enable the overlay, so it's always disabled. Thanks for the suggestion though!

[ElvisHunter]

Just one more question/clarification (Maybe a silly one). Bootcamped macbook air is kinda ambiguous - are you running the game in OSX or Windows? 

[Pancrisp]

Heya boshmi,

How old is your MacBook Air? Anything pre-2013 (Haswell) won't run games too well unfortunately.
Intel's integrated graphics solutions have been lacking in those years. Things are starting to change now though.

As for in-game optimization, I doubt there's much the devs can do given how the game is built using a third-party engine (Unity).
Even if they were able to do just that, improvements would likely be minor. Unless... Unity releases version 6 of their engine?!
The game was originally made with Unity 4 but somewhere around this time last year, we got an upgrade to Unity 5 and saw HUGE performance increase in-game.

It would be best you take my words with a pinch of salt, I'm no game developer you see.

Nice to see an Aussie here in the forums. Now's not exactly the best time for students like us, I'm barely getting through myself. Hang in there, mate!

[hauteecolerider]

@ElvisHunter Boot Camp means an Intel Mac booted up in Windows. Not a Windows emulator, but actually running Windows as a PC would. 

@boshmi Hey, how old is your MBA? Intel processor, Intel graphics which ones?

I'm running this on a 4 year old MBP on OS X 10.11 (aka El Capitan). It runs fine in native Mac mode. Maybe you can try that instead?

I'm not a big fan of running Windows on a MBA because of the processor, Boot Camp or no Boot Camp. Currently I run Win 7 on a Boot Camp Mac Pro for TES games. 8-core processor, discrete graphics with 2 GB VRAM, 12 GB RAM. Runs well. I haven't tried TLD yet on that computer. 

I just think Windows is a bit of a memory hog, compared to the newer Mac systems. Maybe 10 is better, but I haven't upgraded yet. 

The newer MBAs are better, especially in terms of the Intel graphics cards. They're up to 6000 now. And they're still relatively inexpensive. 

I hear you about living on uni budget. Four years of college, four years of vet school, no computer until I was four years out of school. Ugh. I waited a long time for that first computer!

[ElvisHunter]

 

11 hours ago, hauteecolerider said:

Windows is a bit of a memory hog

Which is why i asked osx or windows. I know what bootcamp is. I used to and sometimes still run TLD on a mid 09 macbook pro running el capitan. So i know a thing or two about using a somewhat underpowered mac to play.  I mostly play it now on my 27 inch Imac. The sunrises are much nicer and still no "PC master race" equipment.

 

[boshmi]

On 5/13/2016 at 8:14 AM, ElvisHunter said:

Just one more question/clarification (Maybe a silly one). Bootcamped macbook air is kinda ambiguous - are you running the game in OSX or Windows? 

I run it in OSX as it is the native system, and generally seems to perform better for games that support it. I basically use Windows for smaller games like TIBT6 or Starwars Battlefront (The good one XD), and it actually runs Payday 2 alright as well, but like I said, generally better on mac.

On 5/13/2016 at 9:01 AM, Pancrisp said:

How old is your MacBook Air? Anything pre-2013 (Haswell) won't run games too well unfortunately.
Intel's integrated graphics solutions have been lacking in those years. Things are starting to change now though.

As for in-game optimization, I doubt there's much the devs can do given how the game is built using a third-party engine (Unity).
Even if they were able to do just that, improvements would likely be minor. Unless... Unity releases version 6 of their engine?!
The game was originally made with Unity 4 but somewhere around this time last year, we got an upgrade to Unity 5 and saw HUGE performance increase in-game.

Nice to see an Aussie here in the forums. Now's not exactly the best time for students like us, I'm barely getting through myself. Hang in there, mate!

Age is Early-2014
The other thing with Unity 6 is that it may not actually support performance increases, over graphical enhancements, but one can hope.
Nice to see you too!

21 hours ago, hauteecolerider said:

@ElvisHunter Boot Camp means an Intel Mac booted up in Windows. Not a Windows emulator, but actually running Windows as a PC would. 

@boshmi Hey, how old is your MBA? Intel processor, Intel graphics which ones?

I'm running this on a 4 year old MBP on OS X 10.11 (aka El Capitan). It runs fine in native Mac mode. Maybe you can try that instead?

I'm not a big fan of running Windows on a MBA because of the processor, Boot Camp or no Boot Camp. Currently I run Win 7 on a Boot Camp Mac Pro for TES games. 8-core processor, discrete graphics with 2 GB VRAM, 12 GB RAM. Runs well. I haven't tried TLD yet on that computer. 

I just think Windows is a bit of a memory hog, compared to the newer Mac systems. Maybe 10 is better, but I haven't upgraded yet. 

The newer MBAs are better, especially in terms of the Intel graphics cards. They're up to 6000 now. And they're still relatively inexpensive. 

I hear you about living on uni budget. Four years of college, four years of vet school, no computer until I was four years out of school. Ugh. I waited a long time for that first computer!

System specs below:
Processor: 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3

I've also got a imac made of wood back at my Grandma's place (she lives a few blocks down, perks of being in Hobart) which runs it worse anyway, but might be cheaper to upgrade than buying a whole new computer. Even so, I don't know if I have the money.

It's always fun to hear people complain about ONLY being able to get 60 fps on MAX graphics, in some games. Oh no, how unfortunate you must be for you computer to be so garbage XD.

[SteelFire]

I don't know much about Macbooks, but hardware is hardware. A two year old i7 with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 shouldn't be something you call garbage. One thing you didn't list though was what your graphics processor is, and that's a big one. Integrated Intel graphics can be a problem for graphically intensive games, especially non-optimized ones, so knowing what chipset series your MBA is running will help others help you troubleshoot.

The other thing to check is make sure you don't have other stuff running in the background chewing up your processor and RAM while you're running TLD, or any game. So comb through your active processes and figure out what's running, what needs to be running, and what doesn't need to be. (I have no idea how to do that on an MBA or if you even can.)

[boshmi]

9 hours ago, SteelFire said:

I don't know much about Macbooks, but hardware is hardware. A two year old i7 with 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 shouldn't be something you call garbage. One thing you didn't list though was what your graphics processor is, and that's a big one. Integrated Intel graphics can be a problem for graphically intensive games, especially non-optimized ones, so knowing what chipset series your MBA is running will help others help you troubleshoot.

The other thing to check is make sure you don't have other stuff running in the background chewing up your processor and RAM while you're running TLD, or any game. So comb through your active processes and figure out what's running, what needs to be running, and what doesn't need to be. (I have no idea how to do that on an MBA or if you even can.)

I never have anything open when running games, or any application for that matter, I make a point of only ever having one app running at a time unless it is necessary not to do so, in order to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the machine.
Someone told me once that partitioning my hard disk and installing windows on one partition would split the processor and reduce performance on both partitions, I don't know if that's pseudo-computer science or not, but it had me worried for a while. Do you know anything about that?
The graphics card is a Intel HD 5000 1024MB, I'm not sure why I didn't include that in my first post, sorry.
Activity monitor (You can check processes being run on this) also isn't recording any "hidden" processes being run, so I don't think it's a matter of other apps chewing up RAM.

[hauteecolerider]

I've run Skyrim in Win7 on both BootCamp and Parallels. It performs much better in BC, so I don't recommend Parallels for gaming. BootCamp is the way to go because you are booting up into Windows, not running both Windows and Mac OS. So no, using BootCamp does not "split" the processor. Parallels does. 

It sounds like the problem is your Intel graphics processor. You actually have a decent machine as MBAs go (I know, I sell them), however for this kind of gaming I prefer a Mac with a dedicated graphics card because it takes the strain off your system RAM. I suspect that the Intel graphics card is hogging the 8 GB memory and stealing that away from your processor. Unfortunately, it is not possible to fit a dedicated graphics card (i.e. NVIDIA or AMD Radeon) into a MBA - there just isn't the room. In fact, of all the Mac laptops only the most expensive ones (MacBook Pro 15" which start at $2500) have the room for such a card. Likewise only the 27" iMacs (the all in one desktops starting at $1800) and the super high-end Mac Pro ($3000 for just the CPU!!) have the graphics to support this kind of gaming. 

I know everyone says TLD is low-resolution, but I suspect it is not all that low resolution. I think it is high-resolution pretending to be low. It's beautiful, but it does demand a lot from the graphics card. It's more than just the looks, it's the motion - the particle effects especially. Think multiple tiny snowflakes drifting across the screen and showing amazing depth of field. Think tree branches swaying in the breeze. Think rendering of animals at incredibly far distances (in fact, I have often mistaken a speck of dirt on my screen for a distant wolf on the ice in CH). 

My MBP has a 1GB NVIDIA card. There are times, since the update, when I notice a tiniest stutter in the animations. This seems especially true during snowfall. 

I'm sorry I can't offer you much more hope at this point. So sad to realize that your computer (which isn't all that old, BTW) just isn't up to speed for high graphics in this game. 

[boshmi]

10 hours ago, hauteecolerider said:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to fit a dedicated graphics card (i.e. NVIDIA or AMD Radeon) into a MBA - there just isn't the room. In fact, of all the Mac laptops only the most expensive ones (MacBook Pro 15" which start at $2500) have the room for such a card. Likewise only the 27" iMacs (the all in one desktops starting at $1800) and the super high-end Mac Pro ($3000 for just the CPU!!) have the graphics to support this kind of gaming. 

I know everyone says TLD is low-resolution, but I suspect it is not all that low resolution. I think it is high-resolution pretending to be low. It's beautiful, but it does demand a lot from the graphics card. I'm sorry I can't offer you much more hope at this point. So sad to realize that your computer (which isn't all that old, BTW) just isn't up to speed for high graphics in this game. 

A friend of mine who works in VMware (essentially the same as parallels) said that there was a way to plug in graphics card externally, or something like that. Despite taking ICT for four years through IGCSE and IB, I'm really garbage at this aren't I?

I know, I do believe the strain is much greater than you'd think. Similarly, I've noticed the odd stutter mostly during snowfall, which is most likely because of the particles. My partner has an Xone and I'd get TLD on that; if IT WAS AVAILABLE IN AUSTRALIA *Wink wink nod nod nudge nudge devs*