Anyone Else With a New MacBook Pro 13" (2018) That Can Share Their Settings For Best Play/FPS

[skchurch.3047]

Hi :-) I have been playing GW2 for a couple of months and I am really having fun. Unfortunately, all I have to play it with is my new MacBook Pro (2018, 13", 2.7GH i7 Quad, 16GB RAM, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 1536 MB (integrated). Does anyone else have the same/similar that is willing to share their settings (Screen Shot?) for best play/fps? Mine is constantly dropping frames, and sometimes it get very frustrating.

 

 

[skchurch.3047]

Here's what I have so far and I can get up to 50 Fps (spikes), but it usually keep falling down to 15 Fps, and drops frames during riding around, battle, etc.:

 

Resolution: 1440 x 900

Refresh Rate: Default

Frame Limiter: 30

DPI Scaling: Off

Animation: Medium

Antialiasing: SMAA Low

Environment: Medium

LOD: Medium

Reflection: None

Textures: Medium

Render Sampling: Native

Shadows: Medium

Shaders: Medium

Post Processing: Low

Character Model Limit: Medium

Character Model Quality: Medium

Ambient Occlusion: On

Best Texture Filtering: Off

Depth Blur: Off

Effect LOD: Off

High-Res Character Textures: Off

Light Adaptation: On

Vertical Syn: On

 

If anyone has it running better on a similar MacBook Pro, can you share your settings with me?

[SpectralHorseman.1962]

I have a base model 2018 MacBook Pro Touch Bar. You will definitely have higher frames than me because GW2 has a heavy reliance on upon the processor, and you have a better processor (my i5 vs your i7). However, I have noticed that the 64 bit client is very badly optimized at this point, it seems. I tried the game on the 32 bit client when that was available, and I had a better experience and higher frames than the 64 bit client. You could probably get away with a decently higher frame rate if you put a bootcamp and installed windows on your Mac, and run GW2 on that side! :smile:

[skchurch.3047]

Thanks for the feedback...I really wish they would make the 64-bit Mac version more efficient. I know PC's are better for games, but there sure are a lot of Mac users out there :-)

[skchurch.3047]

It actually doesn't seem to matter if I put all of the settings to "Low" same performance, so what could be affecting performance, and what other settings/changes could I make (or look into)?

[mikexg.7329]

Hiya, I am in the market for a new laptop, I primarily play on my gaming PC but was wondering how playable GW2 is on the 13 inch with the integrated card? Trying to decide if I need to spring for the 15 inch that has a dedicated GPU... again this isn't what I mainly play on, so just curious how viable it would be to run around and harvest nodes, map completion, maybe some roaming in WVW?

 

Thanks!

[skchurch.3047]

My experience is that it hasn't been great. I have pretty fast internet (4oo Mbps), and I et an FPS the dips into the teens constantly. I don't know if it's jut not a very good Mac client, or if the MBP13" 2018 is just underpowered, but I might get a PC just for gaming, which is a disappointment. WoW runs better, but it also doest' look very good. All of my settings are Mid to Low, with High it really can't keep up at all. Not sure if the 15" would fair any better. A Mac just might not get everything a PC gets out of this game, and I don't know if there is any incentive for AN to make it any better?

[SpectralHorseman.1962]

It is basically due to the engine that the game runs in. GW2 still runs in OpenGL, and Mac has now adopted something called Metal. A new smaller framework that is more efficient. Since Mac is not super optimized to run OpenGL (I don't know if it ever was optimized), GW2 just needs to adopt the Metal framework for their client. WoW adopted the Metal framework soon after it released, which is why it runs much better.

[SpectralHorseman.1962]

My suggestion, to bide your time until something usable for Mac comes from Anet, what I did was purchase a $700 mid tier gaming PC, and I use that for GW2. Why settle for less? Plus, you can get 10 times better frames you could ever get on a Mac, probably even with it optimized with Metal. I think of it as a definite investment because I love the game and I play all the time. Plus Plus, you can play many more games on there, and rid yourselves of a gaming console if you ever had one, like me, and use the PC for the games instead. Saves money over the long run to compared to consoles, since you can just update the slightly outdated components as they age, costing you less, and making your experience last longer. :)

[Towelie.9504]

> @"SpectralHorseman.1962" said:

> It is basically due to the engine that the game runs in. GW2 still runs in OpenGL, and Mac has now adopted something called Metal. A new smaller framework that is more efficient. Since Mac is not super optimized to run OpenGL (I don't know if it ever was optimized), GW2 just needs to adopt the Metal framework for their client. WoW adopted the Metal framework soon after it released, which is why it runs much better.

 

GW2 uses DirectX, not Open GL. It has no capability of using OpenGL as well (unlike other games like WoW which can run on either).

 

While things like Wine mimic the DirectX API calls to OpenGL on GNU systems, there's no direct OpenGL support from the engine. The engine is based on DirectX9.

 

The answer the OP question, Guild Wars 2 already is a severely unoptimized game when it comes to FPS on windows platforms. If you're trying to run it on what is essentially translating DirectX calls to OpenGL and then passing it off to the GPU it's even slower not including all the efficiencies when it comes to the threading issues that this engine has. That's the sad state of things, of which Anet doesn't seem to care. It would've been nicer if Anet had supported OpenGL in some way directly or made a jump to at least a new DirectX API that isn't a decade old that was known to have severe overhead issues and limited amount of draw calls to what today's graphics require.

[HippieJoel.9537]

> @"Towelie.9504" said:

> > @"SpectralHorseman.1962" said:

> > It is basically due to the engine that the game runs in. GW2 still runs in OpenGL, and Mac has now adopted something called Metal. A new smaller framework that is more efficient. Since Mac is not super optimized to run OpenGL (I don't know if it ever was optimized), GW2 just needs to adopt the Metal framework for their client. WoW adopted the Metal framework soon after it released, which is why it runs much better.

>

> GW2 uses DirectX, not Open GL. It has no capability of using OpenGL as well (unlike other games like WoW which can run on either).

>

> While things like Wine mimic the DirectX API calls to OpenGL on GNU systems, there's no direct OpenGL support from the engine. The engine is based on DirectX9.

>

> The answer the OP question, Guild Wars 2 already is a severely unoptimized game when it comes to FPS on windows platforms. If you're trying to run it on what is essentially translating DirectX calls to OpenGL and then passing it off to the GPU it's even slower not including all the efficiencies when it comes to the threading issues that this engine has. That's the sad state of things, of which Anet doesn't seem to care. It would've been nicer if Anet had supported OpenGL in some way directly or made a jump to at least a new DirectX API that isn't a decade old that was known to have severe overhead issues and limited amount of draw calls to what today's graphics require.

 

Actually this is not true and has not been for quite some time. Guild Wars 2 does indeed natively support OpenGL, at least on the Mac client, and it does not use Wine or any other kind of translation layer.

 

Unfortunately, as others have noted, the performance isn't particularly great regardless.

[skchurch.3047]

Yeah, sadly I kind of gave up on my Mac and purchased a PC. It can kind of run on my Macintosh at the lowest settings, but it gets pretty choppy (often down to 10 fps) and it's sad that more games are written for the Mac better (I think a lot of us have them at home), but since I really wanted to play GW2 and a few other PC games, I just bit the bullet, lol. I appreciate the discussion though and hope that Anet does continue to improve the Mac client (and that Macs get better hardware for games...probably not though lol).