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Or to be more specific, poorly optimized. Not to sound like an elitist asshole, but I have one of those new 24" iMacs from early 2009 (an $1,800 value), and I doubt that it has been outmoded in so little time. For the sake of comparison, I get roughly 100-125 frames per second in normal Myth, but only 20-25 frames per second in the new (amazing) Wind Age demo. Is this just my machine, or are the graphics really that much better in the Wind Age?

Incidentally, I also get about 25 frames per second in Crysis while it's on maximum detail.

We've gotten this from a lot of mac users - either myrd or melekor suggested that it may have something to do with a specific video card in (as far as i know) iMacs and Macbooks.

It also doesn't help that opengl generally runs poorly on macs - I am no longer able to play myth at all on my old G4. Before RAVE support was pulled (the video card in my old G4) I would get very good frames (above 60) - but when the only option left to me was OpenGL, I would get under ten frames a second - effectively raising the game's system requirements.

I would like it if more was done to optimize OpenGL on the mac, or to somehow address the issue that may or may not be a result of certain mac video cards - but that lies in the hands of Magma.

Have you tried going into preferences and raising the texture memory cache? Ive heard conflicting values of what to set it to -either 50% of what your video card's texture memory is, ot 75%. Try toying around with it and you may be able to squeeze some more frames out of it.

Sadly the only thing I could do on my end (the fear/loathing side of it) would be to re-render at a smaller size or shrink with photoshop, but that would be anathema to the ideals our project holds to. It is, first and foremost, a technology demo.

My machine is by no means a supercomputer, and I get good frames while playing - your computer sounds as if it would be if not an equivalent, comparable to mine in terms of its capabilities (I can play crysis on medium with OK frames), so for something like loading large-resolution sprites you'd think both our computers would be up to the task - making me think there is something about the way myth or opengl handles things that is bottlenecking the process.

-ooga

I'm away from my Mac right now, so I can't try anything. I remember playing around with my texture cache settings and I don't think it made much of difference.

oogaBooga wrote: It also doesn't help that opengl generally runs poorly on macs - I am no longer able to play myth at all on my old G4. Before RAVE support was pulled (the video card in my old G4) I would get very good frames (above 60) - but when the only option left to me was OpenGL, I would get under ten frames a second - effectively raising the game's system requirements.

RAVE is not supported in OSX. If you boot to OS9, you should still be able to use RAVE with latest version of Myth II. By the way, have you tried running Myth II 1.7.1 Public Beta #2 (PowerPC) on that machine with OpenGL. I made a change that should give better FPS on low-end machines. My 350Mhz iMac G3 with an 8MB video card now gets better performance with OpenGL under OSX than with RAVE under OS9!

As for the issue with Wind Age stuff, I am afraid it's likely because video card makers don't optimize their cards / drivers for the sort of thing Myth is doing. Which is rendering a bunch of high-res sprites on the screen. Modern games don't do this - they render lots of polygons with shaders instead. So new graphic cards don't do such a good job with the sort of work-load Myth does. I think the specific bad Mac performance issues have been limited to Nvidia 9400m cards on new iMacs - but correct me if I'm wrong.

Thats good news about opengl - i'll have to update to PB2 and see if it makes it playable on my G4.

RAVE is not supported in OSX. If you boot to OS9, you should still be able to use RAVE with latest version of Myth II.

Unfortunatly, Apple dropped support for OS 9 back in 2007 with the release of os 10.5 (Leopard), so that's no longer an option.

I am afraid it's likely because video card makers don't optimize their cards / drivers for the sort of thing Myth is doing. Which is rendering a bunch of high-res sprites on the screen. Modern games don't do this - they render lots of polygons with shaders instead. So new graphic cards don't do such a good job with the sort of work-load Myth does.

Thanks for the help, Myrd, but that doesn't really explain my 100-125 FPS while playing regular Myth. I'll give the new public beta a try though.

The RAVE suggestion was aimed at Ooga's comment about his old G4 Mac.

As for your issue, it seems you're SOL - seems the Nvidia 9400m is just not good enough to drive the large display of the iMac when using high-res sprites. I'm not sure what can be done. Can always file a bug-report with Apple (bugreporter.apple.com) with the hope that they can fix it with a driver update, but I doubt it would do anything.

EDIT: You can also try using a lower resolution in the Myth II preferences. I know its sucky advice, but I don't see a way to fix your underpowered video card.

Myrd wrote:EDIT: You can also try using a lower resolution in the Myth II preferences. I know its sucky advice, but I don't see a way to fix your underpowered video card.

reagarding the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 not being able to drive that big a screen, i've dropped down to 768x1024 AND turned off the detail textures and can get acceptable framerate with units moving around and a bottle or two (acceptable being in the 30fps ballpark, but that's not dozens of units with multiple missle attacks and body parts and arrows and fire and exploding bottles.

fyi: the late 2009 Mac Minis also have the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 chip in them.

So basically since Macbooks, iMacs and MacMinis can't run The Wind Age, it is apparently a Windows technology demo.

Personally I've given up on The Wind Age project. I bought a new mac less than a year ago in large part so I could play with the 1.7 features - like the detail textures. Sorry dev team, but there's no way I am going to buy another computer just to play TWindA on.

And as much as I have been looking forward to this conversion, and as much as I would like to, I can't support a project that if widely adopted is going to drive a large wedge into the Myth playing community.

I can't support a project that if widely adopted is going to drive a large wedge into the Myth playing community.

That's ok, you never did. This doesn't really change anything.

Anyways blame apple for poorly optimized video cards, not us.

oogaBooga wrote:

I can't support a project that if widely adopted is going to drive a large wedge into the Myth playing community.

That's ok, you never did. This doesn't really change anything.

Nice attempt to rewrite history ooga.

I've been URGING you guys to get something out for people to play with and have said on NUMEROUS occassions that I've BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO PLAYING this plugin. My frustration in the past was with the fact that Ren was always on here claiming how great it was but there was never anything to show for it - NOT because I didn't support the project. In fact (you can check with Ren if you don't believe me - or I can post the pms he and I exchanged) - I volunteered to help you guys get the multiplayer beta out before xmas (or shortly afterwards) and Ren had sent me the overview of what he wanted for FFA maps then the next day he said to never mind because you had a quick way to get the maps ready for release.

Does that sound lile someone who "never" supported the project?

Really? Does it?

btw, I am not BLAMING you for anything, I am just saying that if macs have a systematic problem with your plugin then it doesn't matter whose fault it is, the FACT is that Mac users (in general) aren't going to be able to play TWindA. If you don't have a problem with that, that's your business, and I can be as mad at Apple as humanly possible but that doesn't make TWindA run any better on my machine. So TWindA is like any other software I try out find out it doesn't run well on my machine and then discard. Nothing personal, it's just a hardware issue.

Give me a friggin break.

well, actually it's not a wind age problem
it's a high res units problem in general

the greek tagset and WWII HD I'm doing will also suffer from the same problem

I won't resize sprites for the greek tagset because it's an insane job, but for WWII HD
what would be the size of sprites limit that wouldn't have the problem?

I specifically said it's a hardware issue, not TWindA specific.

It depends, carlinho, on the computer running it. 300 tall (based on a thrall) for every unit is going to lag a lot of people. 200 tall less so, 150 tall even less. It's all just a matter of how much quality do you want to sacrifice so that people with old computers, or computers with video cards that are not optimized for the kind of sprite handling myth requires, can play it with relatively little slowdown.

150 should _probably_ run great on a lot of systems, but 150 is only approx. 2x the size of normal bungie units. (a thrall is about 68-75 pixels tall).

And vr no rewriting required - you were all too eager to jump on the bashing bandwagon during a particularly forgettable thread.

So if one were to be planning to buy a Mac Pro when he became suddenly and unexpectedly rich, would it be better to go with the ATI graphics card rather than the NVIDIA?

Well, I installed 1.7.1 Beta #2 and performance is great at full 1920x1200 resolution. Thanks for the advice guys. By the way, I should mention that I'm using an Nvidia GeForce 120, not a 9400m. This is a higher-end iMac than the ones with the 9400m.