Major performance issue in coastal highway (OS X)

[Eames]

OSX 10.9.5

iMac with 4 cores of 2.5GHz i5

12 GB DDR3

Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB

The game used to run just fine. Although there were some weird, drastic framerate drops to ~5 FPS when using High settings in fullscreen, while on Medium it would be near 60. Anyway, after the last few hotfixes that were supposed to increase performance the game is now unplayable. It's literally a slideshow with the aforementioned 5 FPS being everywhere unless I look at the map's edge. Medium, low, fullscreen, windowed – doesn't matter. Framerates are unacceptable (on all maps).

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

Some Macs are having a little bit extra difficulty with performance. We are currently working towards getting Macs up to par with the fixes. I test on a Mac and I've haven't had issues, but we tried another Mac and it did. So the issue is that some Mac setups are having troubles playing the game and we are trying to figure out why.

Jeremy

[aurora]

Some Macs are having a little bit extra difficulty with performance. We are currently working towards getting Macs up to par with the fixes. I test on a Mac and I've haven't had issues, but we tried another Mac and it did. So the issue is that some Mac setups are having troubles playing the game and we are trying to figure out why.

Jeremy

hey,

i've now had to possibility to try it on a different mac, and what can i say ... the performance is great: i am able to play all maps without lag even with better quality. i am really puzzled. the mac, that is working for me is a:

MacBook Pro (15", Mid 2012); 2,3 GHz Intel Core i7; 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3; NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB

can it be an general issue with either the generation of the mac and/or the builtin graphics card?

thanks for your efforts!

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

I'm as puzzled as you on why different Macs acting differently with the game. The one I use is an iMac that doesn't have the greatest graphics card and i was running fine, the other one we tested on had a good graphics card and had 7 fps. So... it might be a generation thing, or it could be maybe an OS or CPU thing. I don't know, but we are working on it so hopefully all Macs can work fine and not just some. I don't know Macs very well, I hadn't used one for work purposes or gaming till I started working here. Macs have such weird things about them when it comes to games.

Jeremy

[Orwell 1984]

Software - drivers?

[Eames]

So... it might be a generation thing, or it could be maybe an OS or CPU thing.

It was the 2nd or 3rd hotfix that came after Pleasant Valley update. The ones that were supposed to increase the performance. Something was changed and it broke the game for some people.

[DonMugg]

After every update I try everything again to see if the game would run just a little bit smoother in coastal highway. But with every update I believe the performance in the first area gets worse too...

And of course coastal highway is unplayable as before. I couldn't even try pleasant valley out (I can't get there because of the lags).

Could it be something with the main light source (the sun)? Because in coastal highway - when I look in a special direction, no matter which graphic settings - it begins to lag bad (even on the lowest resolution). Very bad. But when I'm looking on the ground, in the sky or in the opposite direction, it doesn't lag at all.

I mean it's all alpha, and I know that Macs are very special, but I think I speak for all of us Mac users who have difficulties in playing this game that if you would just talk to us once in a while and say that you working on the problem, the confidence would grow up

[Eames]

Could it be something with the main light source (the sun)? Because in coastal highway - when I look in a special direction, no matter which graphic settings - it begins to lag bad (even on the lowest resolution). Very bad. But when I'm looking on the ground, in the sky or in the opposite direction, it doesn't lag at all.

You may be onto something, there's also less chance of crippling lag in evening/morning. In my case, I look at a distance – there's lots of objects to render and the framerates are fine. Then I look sliiiiiightly to the side and it falls to a crawl even though the amount of object to render remains the same. What's even stranger is that I get lags even if I look at the same angle while facing a wall. No objects in FOV, still lag. So weird.

[DonMugg]

I just did a small clip to show the performance issues in Coastal Highway.

Hopefully it will help you a little bit.

And I don't know anything about programming a game or something like that, and I mentioned in a post before that it could be the sun which causes be the problem, but there is also a chance the mountains in the background are to high resulted (they are 2D, aren't they?).

Perhaps they don't switch to a lower resolution (in data amount) when switching it to the lowest in the graphic settings?

As I said, I don't know anything about programming

https://youtu.be/YX4hap1iyas

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

You are right about it depending on where you look. If you look out from high up you see more of the map, thus more drawcalls, thus more thinking for the computer. Also the Game currently is CPU bound to a single core (Unity 4 thing)

The thing I've noticed about Macs while testing is, some work fine. The in house one we have runs not the greatest 24 - 35 depending on where you are on medium graphics.

Mac is a strange beast to tackle for games, so it's harder to get things to work well. That said PC users are having similar issues so don't feel left out Mac users. Also we want the game to work for both PC and Mac so we will get this sorted by the time we Final.

Jeremy

[aurora]

i am still experiencing a massive frame drop on my imac with the latest update (including unity5) ... my impression is, that it's better than before, though. i can now play with medium settings ...

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

That's good your able to play now. We are still optimizing with every update so our hope is you'll be running smoothly by the time the game is fully released.

Jeremy

[aurora]

That's good your able to play now. We are still optimizing with every update so our hope is you'll be running smoothly by the time the game is fully released.

Jeremy

Indeed ... checked with the iMac after a long time and the performance is great in all maps. Great work & thanks very much for putting so much work into it.