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MY MYTH LOG - hopefully revealing why I get a slideshow.

Spa has been told to try this out. If anyone else is experiencing similar frame rate drop (choppiness) issue with 1.8.0 that you did not see in 1.7.2, reply in this thread and try out the poweruser option in that link above.

If you have the same or similar issue, please attach a copy of your myth_log file in a reply. It is a TXT file located in your Myth II folder. First load up any map to gather details on the settings Myth uses for actual games. Include any information that could help like actual FPS values.

Use the Delete (Forward Delete on Mac) key to see your FPS value in the top right corner of your screen. Values of 60 frames per second or higher are ideal.

I use the poweruser file and have tried every build of 1.8 that would actually run on my machine (ie, 410 and up). They all have the same problem. When the action gets intense, that is many enemies on the map, the frame rate drops down horribly slow. I've seen as slow as 6 FPS.

Well comparing Spa's Mythlog and mine I can see the poweruser setting have no effect. Since I have those three things shut off and Spa does not. Also Spa's video card supports Open GL 2.1 whereas mine only supports 1.2. I've played enough games with Spa for enough hours to know we are experiencing the same effects. When the game gets intense the frame rate drops out. Pretty much the death knell of a video game. Since that is the exact time you want the frame rate to be high.

It's highly unlikely that it's the same issue technically since the drivers and GPUs are so different here. Spa really needs to try those poweruser settings and see what happens. Any number of things could be causing that poor performance... performance drops when there is lots of action happen on every machine, just obviously to a larger extent in these cases.

Industry, your log indicates that you're already running without most the new features disabled due to having an old GPU. If this truly did run much better in 1.7.2, could you both verify that the settings are exactly the same (in particular, texture cache) and then post a log from 1.7.2 as well?

May I also suggest that if nothing else works, try it on windows in bootcamp on your machine, just for comparison. You have a pretty old GPU and and the drivers for those GPUs on MacOS are notoriously out-of-date/bad, so it's worth understanding if it's a driver problem or something more fundamental.

heres what pyro wanted

My Preferences from 1.8 build 427 and 1.7.2. And Mythlog from 1.7.2.

Industry, the 1.7.2 log shows you used resolution 1600x900 while you used 1680x1050 for 1.8.0. Use the same resolution for both to make sure that it is not a factor in why one might be choppier for you. Those resolutions are not even the same aspect ratio. So it could even be a factor for you. Did you set your texture cache to 144 MB or was it set on its own?


Spa, Industry, and Pallidice try this out on 1.8.0 so we can gather more information on what is causing your slowdown. Load up a game. Then go to...

Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor
Find the Myth II process in the list. Select it and click Sample Process.

It will open a window with a lot of technical information. Click on the save button and attach the text file to your reply on this thread.

Pyro wrote:Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor
Find the Myth II process in the list. Select it and click Sample Process.

It will open a window with a lot of technical information. Click on the save button and attach the text file to your reply on this thread.

This should be done in game while the choppy/laggy action is happening, so that it captures information about that. Also the game should not be minimized while doing this. Leave it running for at least 15 seconds.

I'd also recommend screwing around with the texture cache setting a bit... try and make it a bit bigger on 1.8. The accounting of the data in the texture cache changed slightly I believe (it was less accurate/inclusive in 1.7.2) so to be equivalent in terms of thrashing you may have to bump it up.

Well according to Industry's images and from what Spa and Pallidice have told me, these are their current values for Tex. Cache in MB.

Industry - 144
Pallidice - 432
Spa - 512

Right, the suggestion was mostly for Industry. I'm working on the assumption that there may not really be one root cause of "all slowdown ever" for these separate folks But we'll see.

I switched the resolution to 1600x900 on 1.8. I increased my texture cache to 512. I also turned Motion Interpolation back off (it was the first thing I tried originally, but was reset when I re-installed 1.. Still bad. Perhaps worse even. Got some straight freezes during camera rotation. This Mac Mini doesn't have any dedicated video memory, but it reports using 64MB of shared memory for VRAM so I've lowered my Texture Cache to that.

I forgot to run the Activity Monitor last time. I'll do that also.

1.8 works fine with my several year old mac mini - but it does have separate VRAM.

Hmm. I've lowered my Texture Cache to the same as the reported VRAM on this machine (64MB) and performance seems to have significantly improved.

Intel GMA 950:

Chipset Model: GMA 950
Type: Display
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 64 MB of Shared System Memory
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x27a2
Revision ID: 0x0003
Displays:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: Macmini2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 1.83 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 2 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MM21.009A.B00