Macintosh

Been playing EVE on my MacBook Air i7 mid-2011 for about a year now and I've nailed a few performance boosts and heat lowering tips that may be of help to anyone using a MacBook like I am. If they help - great! If they don't - not so great.. But I welcome any lesser-known techniques that might make the experience that little bit less lap-burning and a bit more MacBook-lifespan-increasing.

• Use an application like smcfancontrol to preemptively cool down your CPU/GPU.
I set mine at 5250RPM (the default is 2200RPM) and although just about audible, it stops the fan kicking in at full whack and maintains a steady 60fps whilst playing EVE - temperatures when preemptively setting the fan speed don't rise about 75 degrees C for me when playing EVE.


• Run in a window - this is a hit or a miss tip.
Some people get much better performance gains than others. In my case, running in windowed mode kept the heat down as (I assume) the CPU wasn't working as much. Fullscreening it had the temperatures breaking 90 degrees C.


• Try these tips from Lifehacker.
I didn't think that disabling the dashboard/notification centre would have much of a difference but this definitely was the game changer for me. Before I disabled both, temperatures were steady at around 70 degrees C and sometimes peaked above 80 degrees C when I was missioning etc with lots of models on screen, shadows to render etc. Somehow disabling these OSX features freed up that little bit of extra resources and just gave the client more breathing room.


• The obvious - run everything at low
Don't use the preset "performance" - actually go through every graphics setting and set them manually. For some reason the "Optimize settings for performance" option sets one setting or two to "Medium". It's ugly for sure, but it will definitely go somewhere to have a smoother EVE client. It's a shame we can't turn of ambient occlusion and have a more refined graphics setting pane, as that's a big heat generator and performance hog.


• Consider BootCamp
No matter how much we want it to, OSX on average has not yet to date outperformed Windows when it comes to gaming. I did some tests last year, comparing a Windows 7 x64 BootCamp partition with an OSX 10.8 partition and seeing which one a) produced the most heat and b) had the most stable FPS in the EVE client. Not surprisingly, the Windows 7 x64 partition game out tops - by a long, long way. Temperatures on BootCamp were 60-70 degrees and never broke that 70 degrees figure, whilst temperatures on OSX were 90 degrees C+ and never dropped, despite fans being at full. We could argue all day for why these figures are as they are, but a definite temperature difference between them (in my experience). FPS was actually quite solid throughout both, so performance difference is negligible, but in a FPS:heat ratio, Windows 7 x64 BootCamp came out trumps. It's not for everyone as you do need access to a Windows disc image and key, but it's definitely worth trying if you have the resources available. I don't actually use BootCamp for EVE anymore as I only ever login on my MacBook now for checking sell/buy orders and the occasional autopilot trip, so rebooting into Windows just for that was just a pain!

My system specs are below. I hope that anyone running EVE on a MacBook can make use of at least some of the info here. Even though the client is terribly unoptimized and quite frankly an embarrassment on OSX, I think there is some hope for it being usable.

• Intel i7 1.8GHz
• 4GB 1333MHz DDR3
• Apple 250GB SSD
• Intel HD Graphics 3000 384MB
• OSX 10.9 Mavericks