These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

EVE New Citizens Q&A

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
Previous page123Next page
 

Any hope for us Mac players?
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#21 - 2012-04-03 18:43:06 UTC
Quote:
It started at around 30 centigrades and after about 15 minutes of playtime the client froze at about 50 centigrades...WOW


Assuming you're talking about the temperature of the processor, that's not the problem at all. Intel chips start to freak out at around 75-90 degrees. 50 is actually rather cool.

I'd check out your GPU (graphics card) temperature.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#22 - 2012-04-03 22:14:22 UTC
For whatever reason, Apple chooses to let their hardware run hotter and quieter rather than cooler and noisier. Since the laptop bodies are solid blocks of aluminum, it really is worth using a laptop stand with built-in fan. No Mac that I have access to reports GPU temperature, so I just crank the fans up, point a pedestal fan along the back of the computer, and have at it.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#23 - 2012-04-03 23:43:47 UTC  |  Edited by: Kahega Amielden
Quote:
or whatever reason, Apple chooses to let their hardware run hotter and quieter rather than cooler and noisier. Since the laptop bodies are solid blocks of aluminum, it really is worth using a laptop stand with built-in fan. No Mac that I have access to reports GPU temperature, so I just crank the fans up, point a pedestal fan along the back of the computer, and have at it.


It's something to try at least. OP should try some sort of hackneyed solution to keep the GPU cooler, or perhaps try running some other graphically-intensive game (perhaps turning down EVE's graphics to see if that helps?) to see if the GPU is overheating.


Quote:
Oh yes...Direct X...the legal Microsoft monopoly.


Sorta. It's not like game devs couldn't write their games using OpenGL (an open equivalent which works on all OSes and isn't really any less powerful). It's just that Mac/Linux is such a small part of the market (or at least, used to be) that there's no reason to bother.
Markus Egdald
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#24 - 2012-04-04 06:02:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Markus Egdald
False alarm...the client still freezes.

Well...it's been fun till it lasted.

I guess you will see me in Dust 514 then :) (hopefully it won't freeze my PS3...but you never know).

Good luck guys and thanks again for your feedback.
Khanh'rhh
Sparkle Motion.
#25 - 2012-04-04 09:54:29 UTC
Kahega Amielden wrote:
Quote:
It started at around 30 centigrades and after about 15 minutes of playtime the client froze at about 50 centigrades...WOW


Assuming you're talking about the temperature of the processor, that's not the problem at all. Intel chips start to freak out at around 75-90 degrees. 50 is actually rather cool.

I'd check out your GPU (graphics card) temperature.


Yeah it's not the core CPU temp that is an issue, it's the fact that heat wells up inside and starts heating stuff up that shouldn't be getting that warm at all.

If you do something on most Macbooks that is both CPU and GPU intensive the tiny little fans and the stupidly small outlets can't keep up and it will start throttling the power to both to compensate. Usually programs (games) start crashing at this point. It's not just the Eve client, it's most games that make use of system resources heavily. See: Spore when it came out on mac.

If you use your macbook for anything other than a $2000 facebook reader then I would heavily recommend a laptop cooling stand. There are no vents to blow air into (fail) but you can keep the warm spots of aluminium cool so it works out pretty well.

"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." -Soviet infantry manual,

Markus Egdald
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#26 - 2012-04-04 12:16:16 UTC
So...to play EVE online on my iMac I should immerge it into liquid nitrogen...got it ;P
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#27 - 2012-04-04 12:38:36 UTC
Khanh'rhh wrote:
If you do something on most Macbooks that is both CPU and GPU intensive the tiny little fans and the stupidly small outlets can't keep up and it will start throttling the power to both to compensate.


I play EVE just fine on my MacBook Air. The cooling is just peachy if you either (A) turn the fans up full throttle (like on a Windows laptop), or (B) apply external air flow. Thanks to the built-in heatsink, things don't just sit there boiling. Blow air through or over any part of the case, the whole thing cools down. This is due to the magic of thermal conductivity.

If turning the fans up isn't solving the problem, I would suggest that it's the drivers at issue.

This has happened before and it will happen again: Apple accepts certain drivers from nVidia which have been tested to work with all the features of OpenGL that are officially supported. Then along comes EVE Online wrapped in Cider which turns DirectX 9 into some Frankenstein Monster of OpenGL commands, which end up doing something unsupported (or attempting to run a procedural shader which didn't translate correctly between the nVidia card Cider is built to support versus the nVidia card that actually exists in the Mac), and weird stuff happens.

On one of my Macs (17" iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo w/X1700), certain planet shadows end up being infinite black triangles in space that load the GPU and the CPU to 100%. Warping away from some stargates can only be done on autopilot. On my MacBook Air, certain textures (or shaders? I don't know) end up being replaced with bright green surfaces.

Sometimes, EVE will just stall. No more graphics updates, but drones in space keep doing what they were told to do. Shield boosters keep running, shield hardeners keep running, the ship keeps orbiting whoever it was told to orbit. If I force quit the application, the character logs out. For me this only happens once every dozen hours or so. For others, it apparently happens very soon and very frequently.

I mentioned heat as a possible issue because it has caused me problems in the past. Heat is not the only issue affecting the Frankenstein Monster that is EVE Online for Mac, but it is something that is easy to address and only requires the player to spend a little time trying out (as opposed to months of debugging and rewriting by CCP and Transgaming).

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Jouron
Hadon Shipping
#28 - 2012-04-04 14:32:55 UTC
Dont forget guys there is mac forum you can post these reported bugs too.

If you want to help grow a better mac client you need to post some of your woes there.
Markus Egdald
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#29 - 2012-04-04 18:12:57 UTC
Jouron wrote:
Dont forget guys there is mac forum you can post these reported bugs too.

If you want to help grow a better mac client you need to post some of your woes there.


I can't, I'm on a trial account...actually I think it just expired ;)

Hope CCP will solve the Mac client problem.
Khanh'rhh
Sparkle Motion.
#30 - 2012-04-05 09:00:22 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
The cooling is just peachy if you either (A) turn the fans up full throttle (like on a Windows laptop), or (B) apply external air flow


This defense is silly, sorry. It's fine as long as you take deliberate steps to counter it? Isn't that saying that is not fine, out of the box?

Quote:
Thanks to the built-in heatsink, things don't just sit there boiling. Blow air through or over any part of the case, the whole thing cools down. This is due to the magic of thermal conductivity.


This is not how things work. Yeah, it helps slightly, but there is no contact between your thermally sensitive parts and the case (no conductive link). That is actually happening is you are heating the air inside by a large amount, and then cooling the case which is in contact with the air.

If you have a significant heat issue, then you can make the case 10centigrade and still be melting the internals.

"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." -Soviet infantry manual,

Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#31 - 2012-04-05 09:08:09 UTC
Khanh'rhh wrote:
Mara Rinn wrote:
The cooling is just peachy if you either (A) turn the fans up full throttle (like on a Windows laptop), or (B) apply external air flow


This defense is silly, sorry. It's fine as long as you take deliberate steps to counter it? Isn't that saying that is not fine, out of the box?


It gets hot otherwise, since these laptops aren't designed for gaming. They'll end up stalling or shutting down due to thermal overload. My Windows laptop just shuts itself off randomly when running EVE too. It doesn't even have a metal case, so I can't use the external fan trick :\

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Remistor Callaway
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#32 - 2012-04-06 02:42:18 UTC
I own a 13" Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo running Lion and Windows 7.

The Mac client runned without any major bug for 6 months.

I installed it in boot camp only too see and I seen a increase in FPS from 30 to 45-50 when "working"(even with better graphic settings than the ones I used on OSX). Badly, the Mac client sucks, like almost any game, Windows runs smoother. I recommend you to install it on Windows partition.
Jouron
Hadon Shipping
#33 - 2012-04-07 20:35:20 UTC
I think the moral of the story is this:

Mac players deserve a high quality or as high quality version of eve as pc players have.

Apple due to liscensing issues always creates more hoops for content providers to jump through.

Because of this Mac players dont have as good a client. But there is more reason to point the finger at apple then at CCP.
Remistor Callaway
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#34 - 2012-04-07 20:41:44 UTC
Jouron wrote:
I think the moral of the story is this:

Mac players deserve a high quality or as high quality version of eve as pc players have.

Apple due to liscensing issues always creates more hoops for content providers to jump through.

Because of this Mac players dont have as good a client. But there is more reason to point the finger at apple then at CCP.


You're probably right, but whatever the reason, Eve on mac, and gaming in general, sucks. The best way to make Eve better on Mac is to install it on Windows partition.
Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#35 - 2012-04-09 11:33:59 UTC  |  Edited by: Kahega Amielden
Quote:
But there is more reason to point the finger at apple then at CCP.


I don't think this is entirely fair. The issue here is that game developers decide to make their games using a Windows-exclusive graphics API (directX). It's a bit unusual that putting EVE on Mac OS or Linux should even be possible. It would run fine on Mac OS had CCP used OpenGL instead, but they didn't.
Khanh'rhh
Sparkle Motion.
#36 - 2012-04-10 11:39:54 UTC
Kahega Amielden wrote:
Quote:
But there is more reason to point the finger at apple then at CCP.


I don't think this is entirely fair. The issue here is that game developers decide to make their games using a Windows-exclusive graphics API (directX). It's a bit unusual that putting EVE on Mac OS or Linux should even be possible. It would run fine on Mac OS had CCP used OpenGL instead, but they didn't.


OpenGL has all manner of performance and reliability issues when compared to DirectX.

All you would achieve is swapping all the players who suffer glitchyness and report issues from the Mac platform to the PC; and in doing so cause a larger group of players to be affected.

It's a bad move.

"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." -Soviet infantry manual,

Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#37 - 2012-04-10 20:02:11 UTC
I'm not going to comment on the relative merits of OpenGL vs DirectX (mostly because I would have no idea WTF I'm talking about), I'm just saying that it was CCP make a conscious decision to write the EVE client in with a Windows-specific API and thus you can't really blame Apple for this.
Khanh'rhh
Sparkle Motion.
#38 - 2012-04-11 16:18:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Khanh'rhh
Kahega Amielden wrote:
I'm not going to comment on the relative merits of OpenGL vs DirectX (mostly because I would have no idea WTF I'm talking about), I'm just saying that it was CCP make a conscious decision to write the EVE client in with a Windows-specific API and thus you can't really blame Apple for this.


No, they chose to write the game in a very well documented, very well supported and very well implemented API which caters to the largest possible potential audience.

If you want to play a game where 2/3rds of every graphical suggestion is knocked down because it can't be implemented in OpenGL, then go find their forums. It's not pretty.

To explain the difference in the best way I know how:

DirX: Emulates the graphical hardware to the OS. You write your game / program to use the DirX API, and forget (mostly) about specific hardware restraints. Your game runs on any machine / hardware combination that can run DirX

OpenGL: Is essentially a hardware-accelerated renderer and engages the hardware on an implementation level.

Basically, it is much easier to write a reliable game on top of DirectX than it is OpenGL - you will nearly always see improvement in actual performance and development time to implement.

Legacywise, OpenGL was poorly supported when Eve came out, also.

tl;dr - you do *not* cater your entire development for the edge case of users wanting to access it from different hardware, especially when those users have a solution open to them.

You cater for the majority.

"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." -Soviet infantry manual,

Jouron
Hadon Shipping
#39 - 2012-04-12 13:33:45 UTC

CCP made this game PC and linux only.

Then they dropped linux support and added the apple client.

They made the effort. They cant change the deficiency's that are in inherent in open GL
Gen Fesslenski
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#40 - 2012-06-11 12:41:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Gen Fesslenski
Markus Egdald wrote:
Jouron wrote:
Dont forget guys there is mac forum you can post these reported bugs too.

If you want to help grow a better mac client you need to post some of your woes there.


I can't, I'm on a trial account...actually I think it just expired ;)

Hope CCP will solve the Mac client problem.



This is not CCP's problem, its Apples. This has been tested on every other game brought to the Mac, direct comparisons have even been made with OGL runtimes of Half Life 2 on Mac and Windows. Mac's simply use much much more processing power to do the same things as far as GPU is concerned. Hell Linux is far faster at doing OGL than Mac. It's simply not a priority, and I suspect its a marketing ploy to keep you upgrading.

You combine that with the appaling cooling problems that Macs have (My gf's 2012 MBP has only one fan opening for air to get out... IN THE SCREEN HINGE!!!11 and she gets freezes in Final Cut all the time. I get graphical glitches with my 2010 Mac Mini just on the desktop with running Logic session that tax the CPU cos the heatsinks pass air from one to the other etc.)

tl;dr
Mac's OGL processing sucks.
Mac's cooling sucks.
If you want to have most of these issues fixed you need to Bootcamp (and run a cmdline smc control to turn up the fan like i did)
Alternatively you can complain fruitlessly to Apple about cooling (won't work because they design products to break within 3 years hence the yearly refreshes)
Previous page123Next page