[MAC] Vent thread? Vent thread! I payed for this.

Hi,

August 16th I posted this thread:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/mac-the-game-literally-cannot-be-worse.62967/

In it I described how my game did (and still does), not only freeze itself, already on the menus, but also managing to freeze too my entire computer! I am lucky if I can force quit after 5 mins after clicking the button. If not, I have to force restart physically with my computer.
Sometimes people say X game is unplayable, exaggerating ofc. Well, in my case, it is literally unplayable.
In the last thread there was the (valid) excuse of Beta. But now that this game has been released, this excuse no longer stands.

How can a program manage to freeze my entire 8gb ram computer??? It's the first time in years I see this happen.
As I already said in the title, I payed for this. Dude, come on...

Does the freeze always happen at the same point in the game?

All the complete freezes I experienced were due to buggy/out of date graphics drivers. That said I have no idea how you update them on OSX (is it even possible?).

If you haven't already, you might want to give SXX's How-to: decreasing UI memory usage tip a try.

For 8g, it shouldn't be necesary, but give it a try anyway, decreasing numbers of process might consolidate what could go wrong.

Besides that, troubleshoot with support@uberent.com. If you submit a ticket, they should get with you, mind the capacity is reached at the moment so it may take days. Usually it would be an instant thing though.

I haven't tried mac with the latest build - but I know prior to the linux killing bug, the only way for me to have a mostly playable game was with my work mac.

But playing on a 13" display suuuuucks.

Which version of OSX you running?

I have a similar problem on my Macbook Pro (8GB RAM, 512MB Geforce 9600M). My framerate at the main game screen never gets above 10fps, and actually playing the game has >1 fps. Utterly unplayable.

Booting to Windows via Bootcamp (a pain) gives me 60fps on the main screen, and a decent enough FPS in-game that I can play quite nicely, provided the unit count doesn't reach ludicrous.

Spent some time profiling and it looks like the slowdown is coming from the glDrawElementsInstancedBaseVertex_STD_GL3Exec() routine eventually calling gldRenderTriangles().

I was hoping for some low-hanging fruit for slowness on my machine, but I can't do much with a graphics routine.

If any devs are reading this, I'd be happy to work with them to figure out why it's unplayably slow...

I am not entirely certain who of the devs would be the best one to maybe help with this.
... @bgolus ? Blind guessing xD

If it's running fine on Windows it's not likely that developers can do a lot about that because game use OpenGL on all platforms and Nvidia drivers likely mostly the same except on Mac you get older version that can be only updated with OS X updates. Also as far as I can see in Google there is no Nvidia's "Threaded Optimization" for Mac.

Actually for Mac/Linux issues you need to tag jorgenpt because as far as I get he's work on most of things there. Unfortunately I don't think like there a lot developers can say about that.

Though I pretty sure they'll want to have Uber probe uploaded for them.

With the latest build I'm now getting up to 12fps, which is a few frames improvement from before. (Still 4x slower than on Bootcamp, and still not very playable.)

Here's the uberprobe. This is all when on the main game screen.

It's would be a lot better if you'll compare performance in system editor with same planet or with replay feature.
Main menu performance don't indicate anything at all.

I can do that, but my point is that even the main screen has a horribly slow FPS, while the same screen on windows has 4x the framerate, and experienced responsiveness. If even he basic opening UI is laggy...

Let's say fair main menu using some animations within UI which is worst-case scenario for how UI can be used on old and slow hardware just because UI isn't really optimized for it a lot. Performance in actual game might be a lot better than 25% of Windows client because UI in-game is really static and might not trigger performance loss.

In the system editor, with the smallest system selected, I get <=4ps.
UberProbe attached.

Can you check it on Windows for comparison? Thanks.

I'll do so as soon as I can find the time to reboot.

Of note – the System Designer upf log I posted above was from a non-standard driver configuration. I had been experimenting with old drivers direct from NVidia and had the system booted using either those old ones, or possibly the integrated Geforce 9400M (as I don't think the OS was able to make use of the old drivers). This had disabled OpenGL acceleration in a number of my other OS X programs.

Attached is another profile running with normal (OS X 10.9.4) drivers on the 9600M. PA ran at about 5-6 fps in the system designer, rather than the 3-4 previously. (The main screen UI was ~8.5 fps on the non-standard drivers, and ~10-11 on the normal ones.)

I haven't had a chance to get an UberProbe on Windows yet, but I installed some new NVidia web drivers (modified to work on my system), and while that might have given me another consistent +0.8 fps on the main menu / system designer, the actual game (1v1 AI, smallest system skirmish) still runs at 0.3 fps.

Attached is the UberProbe from that game (the first I've posted from a fully loaded game). Again, this is from a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 GB Ram, Geforce 9600M 512MB, and the latest NVidia Web Driver (334.01.02f02).

Also, a screenshot.

This sounds like a hardware problem -- I used to have a MacBook Pro that would completely freeze when starting 3d applications. I would recommend that after you have a freeze and the computer reboots, check out what Console says (in Applications > Utilities) for the time right around your freeze. You could post it here if you wanted me to take a look.

There's not an NVIDIA "Threaded Optimization", but there's an Apple OpenGL threaded optimization. We turned this on a couple of weeks ago -- as it's not enabled by default (for some reason.)

Hmm, the disparity between Mac and Windows is pretty bad. It's possible there's some driver path on Mac OS X that's not optimized, that is optimized on Windows. Do you have Xcode installed? If so, running Instruments with the Time Profiler could give us a good sample of what's going on. I can give you further instructions if you have Xcode installed.

Had you played around with non-standard drivers before you tried the game?