Forums | MacLife

Ummm, if you've ever seen a 20fps game vs 60fps you'll be able to tell. Its not all how fast your eye can handle but how the machine maintains that speed with all the 3D churning. While 16fps is playable at a sustained rate, more often than not the fps on slow rigs like that tend to drop rather than get better. So the argument about "the eye doesn't need" is rather shallow unless your looking at a still image at that speed.

One question that needs to be addressed is what type of Mac it is. Then theres also whether Parallels is running the game full screen or windowed and since it's only DX8 still, what effects are on and what aren't. If that is an Intel GPU then I wouldn't be surprised with the difference in fps.

Yeah, I installed all the drivers.

I'm running a Macbook Pro 15" with the Santa Rosa chipset (so 8600M GT).

I've never been much of an fps guy, but for his game, it really does matter, or it's pretty much unplayable...

I guess I'll just run it off Parallels. My only concern with that, however, is that it makes my Mac hot. (~70-80C)

Thanks for your help!

blackzarg wrote:

Yeah, I installed all the drivers.

I'm running a Macbook Pro 15" with the Santa Rosa chipset (so 8600M GT).

I've never been much of an fps guy, but for his game, it really does matter, or it's pretty much unplayable...

I guess I'll just run it off Parallels. My only concern with that, however, is that it makes my Mac hot. (~70-80C)

Thanks for your help!

I'm getting crappy performance in games in general too. Something wrong with Bootcamp Drivers/Firmware I'd imagine.

Disable the drivers and run the game in software mode

Booksley wrote:

UPDATE YOUR SOUND DRIVERS

I was only able to play R6 vegas at 640x480 with the sound drivers Apple provides. With the latest Realtek HD drivers, I'm playing at native res with higher quality graphics.

A number of game processes run in parallel, so if, say, sound is running very slowly, it might slow down the whole game else everything would get hopelessly out of synch. Worth a try.

Booksley wrote:

Also, the reason updating your sound drivers might have an effect on a game is because they steal CPU cycles to do all their processing.

Host-based audio does steal cycles, but look at the above game- it's from the late '90s and only needs a Pentium 1. Any current CPU has cycles to spare... there's more at work here, even in your case.

Yup just confirming that sound does affect FPS.

A common tweak in the UTs was to lower the various sound settings like from high Q to low Q, drop channels down from 32 to 16, turn off EAX and so on.

That seems to be the consensus.  Buggy drivers can do weird stuff like that.  BTW, what OS are you running in Boot Camp and Parallels?

Mr. T wrote:

That seems to be the consensus.  Buggy drivers can do weird stuff like that.  BTW, what OS are you running in Boot Camp and Parallels?

Windows XP Pro w/ SP2.  I'm hoping this is a driver issue and will be resolved in the near future.  No worries, though, Aqua gives me enough eye candy already ;-)

I don't know much about games per se, but in your case I'd run some benchmarks, like 3D mark, and cinebench to see if it's an OpenGL issue, a DirectX issue, a ram speed issue, a CPU issue or a more generally unoptimised system issue.
Download sisoft's SANDRA and those CPUid type programs that report the various system bus speeds. If these check out OK, then it's probably a higher level driver problem, like the video or sound driver.

It sounds like a low level driver issue. By that I mean the way the mainboard chipset(s) communicate with the video hardware. You could be running in what's effectively a compatability mode, which means you're hardware isn't being driven fully.

I'd find the windows drivers for your mainboard chipset(s) and make sure they are all installed. You may have to do some digging on Intel support sites.