Macintosh

Disclaimer: I am a capsuleer, not a wetware mainframe tech. Your results will almost certainly vary from mine.

Bottom line: It works very good for everything I tried except CQ. If you can afford the $50 for the latest version of Fusion and have a Windows OS license, you can kiss the Mac client goodbye.


Test System:

• MacPro 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Xeon (HT makes this 8-core)
• 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR 3 Memory
• 2 x 2GB RAID 1 SATA Disk
• 1 x LED Cinema Display 24" @ 1920 x 1200
• 1 x LED Cinema Display 27" @ 2560 x 1440
• ATI Radeon HD 5870

Software:

• Mac OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
• VMware Fusion 4.0.2
• Windows XP 32bit
• Eve Premium Windows Client Fully updated and patched

Each time a new version of Fusion is released, I try the Eve client on it. I typically have Windows installed on a VM so I can run EveHQ and various other Eve-related Windows-only apps. VMware touts this version of Fusion as having vastly superior graphics performance (they claim 3x the previous version). So I gave it a try.

I installed the Eve client and patched it up, then made sure "Accelerate 3D Graphics" was turn on on the VM, set the memory to 2GB, and the CPU to 4 cores.

The Eve opening screen was smooth, the ship warping in, the lasers, etc. The game loaded I selected a character and CQ loaded up. Not good. Mostly it was black with a pair of glowing eyes on my character. I played around with the settings but could not get more than a ghostly image of my character to appear.

Out into space I went. Everything looked good again.

Some more tests, first by orbiting a station with a planet in the background:

Optimize settings set to "performance". FFS = 100 - 120. Very good performance. Everything correct and very smooth.

Optimize settings set to "quality". Most of the time the FFS was about 60-70, but in certain circumstances it would drop to 10. In fact it would consistently tank whenever a planet was involved. This included PI in "Planet Mode".

Optimize for "memory". FFS = 100-120 again.

At this point I tried keeping the planet in the background and testing the effect of each graphic setting on the performance. What I found was that I could turn everything on, shader and shadow quality to "high" and everything else to medium and as long as I kept post processing to "disabled" I could still get 100 FFS with the planet in the background and/or station in the background. PI performance in Planet Mode was between 60 and 70 FFS.

The same settings in a busy asteroid field netted me 60 to 70 FFS as well.

So at that point I was convinced that Fusion 4 was viable for Eve play. But being a dual-boxer I had another evil plan in mind...

But before I tell you about that, a couple of notes. First of all, if you were hoping that running under Windows was going to give you consistent mining lasers or warp vapour effects you are mistaken. They appear to be as broken under Windows as they are on the Mac. Also I could no longer CTRL-click on something to target it. I could press the CTRL key once and then click on something and it would target (which it does on the Mac as well), but a CTRL-click produced a right-click menu. This may be something that can be changed with Fusion, I will have to look into it further. On a positive note, I can now switch sound outputs without having to shut down and re-start the client (so from speakers to headphones and back is no problem). I use "SoundSource" to do this on the Mac.

The other piece of good news in this setup is that you can run Windows in Fusion in full-screen mode and with a two monitor setup you can still use your other monitor for your Mac work. Mousing between them works fine.

Now back to the evil plan. I shut everything down and then made a copy of the entire Windows VM with Eve on it. I assigned it the same resources (4 cores of CPU, 2 GB memory, etc) gave it a new name, changed its IP address and then started that one up as well!

With both VMs running with the same settings, and both characters in busy asteroid fields I got about 65 FFS on the 24" monitor and about 50 FFS on the large one with no problems with planets or PI. In fact with both systems running in planet mode I was getting between 60 and 70 FFS.

What is brilliant about this setup though, is that you can run both VMs in full screen mode and simply mouse between them. So unlike running dual clients on your single Mac where both Eve clients need to be in Window mode and where you can never use up all of your screen real estate, you can run two completely separate full-screen clients one per monitor with this setup. As well, you can change up the performance characteristics for each client as needed. So if I wanted one to have more memory and access to more CPU cores, I could do that. In fact, since I have multiple Internet connections I dedicated one for each client so they would not be sharing the same bandwidth.

For my last test I loaded up my Mac client and matched up the settings for both clients and then headed back out to the asteroid field. FFS on the small monitor was 30-40 and on the large monitor (when it was selected) was around 60. If I selected the window on the small monitor the FFS on it stayed the same but the FFS on the large monitor dropped to around 20.

So, in fact, with my setup and with the exception of CQ, Eve runs better in VMware Fusion 4 even with two separate VMs running two separate clients. I still have not tried running a mission so I will post my experiences with that when it happens. If I find something that breaks I will let you know right away. If there is something that you want me to try, let me know and I will do my best.

Thanks.

-A

Running in a VM is never optimal, and I doubt most people can afford a Mac Pro to do this with and actually run it smoothly.

Billy Ocean above me is right, though, the fewer people using the Mac Client, the more likely the Mac client will go the way of the Linux Client, which is also the way of the Dodo.

With that Mac, though, you shouldn't have any issues running the Mac Client. I can run 2 clients, with settings at the lowest, on my 2009 MacBook, 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256MB, at around 40 FPS each, and could even run 4 clients on it at once with no issues. If my little white laptop can do that, then your big bad desktop Pro should be able to smoke mine.

What's the need to actually have them both be full screen? Why not just use SwitchResX to create custom resolutions that will fill the monitors? Menu bar and title bar are 16pixels, each, so make custom resolutions 32 pixels smaller for main and 16 pixels for secondary, and you should be g2g, just as long as you aren't going smaller than 768 pixels high.

I tried this out on a 2.4ghz MBP tonight, the 15" at 1280x800 and 4GB, plus a 256MB NVIDIA 320M.

I only run a single client atm, although I've successfully run upwards of 3 on this machine using the official mac client. I only have one account subbed right now, so if anyone wants multiple clients tested on this hardware, please feel free to send me a 30-day PLEX :]

I have it set for optimal performance, and am pretty happy with it. I cut VMWare back to 1.5gigs and a single CPU, and can do pretty much anything I need to in space at 35+ fps. Going to more RAM or using both cores kills things quickly.

I am not really trying to find an alternative to the Mac client, I am very happy with everything about the official Mac client except the inability to run fullscreen.

Having the ability to 4-finger swipe right to play Eve, left to view Dotlan/email/Chrome etc is awesome. Truly, impressively sweet.

Noone's talking about bootcamp, dunno where that came from.

I was just experimenting to see how it would work out, and I'm continuing to use it for the moment because it allows me to actually fill the screen with the Eve client without having to be in full-screen mode, so I can switch to other apps, spaces, etc.

Ideally, Eve would be in Lion's "full-screen" mode in a Space of its own that I can switch in and out of. The Cider client is the limitation on that, and I've heard nothing about Transgaming planning to take care of this (I even emailed them directly, and got back a response that basically said, "You are not a direct client of ours, CCP is, so we won't respond to you directly.")

Another interesting "perk" is that when my female avatar wanders around her CQ, her shirt doesn't render. So she's basically walking around in an unzipped jacket and bra. Nothing major, but kinda cool.