disgraceful Warcraft III performance in 10.2

[woodsey]

I love my wc III. I play on battle net all the time. The problem is that it runs really **** in OS 10.2 on my g4 733 with gforce 2MX 32mb and 512 mb ram. Even with the graphics settings switched to low, it is still choppy and unresponsive.

However the other day, my brother had the comp booted in OS 9, and i couldn't be bothered rebooting in to X, so i launched warcraft III. I could NOT believe my eyes. it played like a dream. Even with the graphics settings up full, it was smooth and very responsive. It felt like i was playing with a IBM 970, compared to what i was used to running it in jaguar!

Is there a problem with my set up, or does jaguar just make your games run like you have a 8 meg video card? If this is a problem for other jaguar users, i think apple has to pull their finger out and fix this fast.

[ollywilson2003]

Yeah I have a 800mhz iMac amd 32mb Geforce 4MX and 512 Ram and it still runs pretty crud.
Im just about to try it out in 9....

[QCassidy352]

I run war 3 on an ibook 900 with 640 RAM and 32 VRAM on a Radeon 7500 in OS 10.2 and it runs fine with all of the options set to mid level.

[woodsey]

Originally posted by QCassidy352
I run war 3 on an ibook 900 with 640 RAM and 32 VRAM on a Radeon 7500 in OS 10.2 and it runs fine with all of the options set to mid level.

maybe im over exadurating the slow performance of 10.2, but the point im trying to make is that performance it twice as good in os 9, which sucks hard.

[ollywilson2003]

Yeah it is noticibly faster in 9.
Its not thats its bad in 10.2 its just slightly better 9.

[woodsey]

For me its ok in os 10.2, when not much is going on. But i play 4 v 4 games, and when the two armies meet, the game grinds to a halt, and i cant controll my units properly. playing is os 9, the game the game continues to run smoothly, when there are many units on the screen at once. I guess ill just have to keep running it in os 9 until Panther when apple (hopefuly) fixes this.

[MrMacMan]

Yeah, WCIII runs quite bad under 10.2

Haven't playied on Os 9 Tho... I'll check ...

[Gymnut]

Well make no bones about it, Jaguar is a memory hog. Even though Apple claims it can be run with 128mb, ha! Of course, WCIII ain't no slouch either as it is quite a beast itself. Ram, ram, and more ram and your computer will thank you. After all Ram is dirty cheap nowadays.

[Nermal]

I had no idea you could even run it in 9! I'll give it a go when I get home and see how it goes - it's not too bad in X on my iBook 800 with a 32 MB Radeon 7500, but it does slow down when there's a lot of action.

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by Nermal
I had no idea you could even run it in 9! I'll give it a go when I get home and see how it goes - it's not too bad in X on my iBook 800 with a 32 MB Radeon 7500, but it does slow down when there's a lot of action.

Anything better?

[Nermal]

Originally posted by MrMacman
Anything better?

Yes, it runs MUCH better in 9.2.2 on my iBook. In X I had all the detail settings on low and it lagged a bit, now I can turn several of them up and still have the game running smoothly. I think I'll reboot into 9 every time I want to play, it's worth it.

[woodsey]

Originally posted by Nermal
Yes, it runs MUCH better in 9.2.2 on my iBook. In X I had all the detail settings on low and it lagged a bit, now I can turn several of them up and still have the game running smoothly. I think I'll reboot into 9 every time I want to play, it's worth it.

Yeah, thats what i do. Its the one thing i still use OS 9 for!

[sawaguchishinji]

Which version of 10.2 are you using?

[hvfsl]

The latest patch for War3 is meant to solve the speed issues in on OS X 10.2.

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by hvfsl
The latest patch for War3 is meant to solve the speed issues in on OS X 10.2.

Really? I'm away from my house so I can't play it now...

[QCassidy352]

Originally posted by hvfsl
The latest patch for War3 is meant to solve the speed issues in on OS X 10.2.

"the latest patch?" released how recently?

[Dont Hurt Me]

Maybe a little more video card would help, also if you have a quicksilver 733 you can bump it up to 800 or 867. Jag is a memory hog. i gained a lil performance when i went from 733 to 800. Good Luck and Good Gaming. Back to UT 2003.

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by Dont Hurt Me
Maybe a little more video card would help, also if you have a quicksilver 733 you can bump it up to 800 or 867. Jag is a memory hog. i gained a lil performance when i went from 733 to 800. Good Luck and Good Gaming. Back to UT 2003.

Gah, overclocking is a no-no for my iMac, worst part being the case is a hella hard to get into.

Soldering itself is easy.

[mattmack]

Also there are going to be issues because it operates in both OSes if it was designed from the ground up as an OS X game the preformance would probably be much better

[Vlade]

Thats odd... I have the same config and it runs GREAT under 10.2, except I have 896 megs of ram.

10.1 was unplayible almost compared to 9, but 10.2 is actually faster than 9 for me.

I have noticed that the expansion beta runs much faster... maybe they changed the code.

[8thDegreeSavage]

867 QS here and the game runs great in 10.2.6

[Vlade]

I havent tested this yet, but I was talking with a few other programmers and we realized that sound is a limiting factor sometimes. Macs without a sound card do not have 3D sound, so when you enable that on war3 it makes the CPU do all that work.

Also, what resolution are you in? I found that 800x600 is the best if you need to micro, 640x480 blurs stuff while 1024x768 is to much for a GF2 MX

[markjones05]

Never had a problem with this game. One of the few "new" games that actually run the way they are supposed to for mac.

[Vlade]

Originally posted by markjones05
Never had a problem with this game. One of the few "new" games that actually run the way they are supposed to for mac.

Thats because it was made by the developing company in OpenGL instead of being made in Direct X and then ported by some other company to Open GL.

[Beigean]

interesting. i have an imac 800 w/ geforce4mx, and the game runs better at 640x480 in OS 9 and better at 1440x900 in X.

sucks for those who get junky results in 10.2 though.

[Jaykay]

Havent checked it out yet, but in both UT2k3 and WIII, performance on my 17inch PB is miles ahead of my 15inch PB even though they have the same processor speed, must be the graphics card and VRAM. Huge difference though.

[cubist]

1GHz cube, 768MB RAM, Radeon 32MB graphics card, WC3 ran very poorly. The scene in which the goat-guy invokes an earthquake to block off the centaurs locked the machine. I took the disk out after rebooting and never put it back. Didn't occur to me to try it in Mac OS 9!

[ThoughtKriminal]

that is really weird.

i have a 1ghz 64mb geforce4 imac with os x 10.4 (havent upgraded to 5 yet, on a modem) and in 1440X900 with all graphics on MAX the game runs spectacuarly beautifully. infact, its probably the best looking game ive ever seen, crisp and only a little laggy in huge 2vs2 battles with lots of necros and skeleton warriors ect. with quake3 on very awesome visuals i still get 90fps. i dont know if its the 1ghz g4 or if you guys are just having some kind of problem with your machines. i dont think that 200mhz would make that huge of a difference, and beyond that.. i could even run warcraft 3 enough to play single player on a pentium 2 with 8mb ragepro... and when i got a 32mb pci chip, it ran pretty damn nicely considering.

its gotta be some kinda glitch, maybe something is hoging your cpu or your Os is buggy???

EDIT -- BTW, 768 RAM

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by ThoughtKriminal
that is really weird.

i have a 1ghz 64mb geforce4 imac with os x 10.4 (havent upgraded to 5 yet, on a modem) and in 1440X900 with all graphics on MAX the game runs spectacuarly beautifully. infact, its probably the best looking game ive ever seen, crisp and only a little laggy in huge 2vs2 battles with lots of necros and skeleton warriors ect. with quake3 on very awesome visuals i still get 90fps. i dont know if its the 1ghz g4 or if you guys are just having some kind of problem with your machines. i dont think that 200mhz would make that huge of a difference, and beyond that.. i could even run warcraft 3 enough to play single player on a pentium 2 with 8mb ragepro... and when i got a 32mb pci chip, it ran pretty damn nicely considering.

its gotta be some kinda glitch, maybe something is hoging your cpu or your Os is buggy???

EDIT -- BTW, 768 RAM

Somehow 200 MHZ and a slightly better Geforce 4MX makes all the difference?

What the hell is this? :confused:

I think you mean 10.2.5 not 10.4/10.5

[kiwi_the_iwik]

WCIII runs beautifully with no lag or jitters on my G4 Cube 450Mhz w/768Mb Ram and Radeon 7500 - with the details set between mid and high @ 1024x768 (OSX.2.6).

WOW!

I think it may have something to do with memory - whack more in!

;)

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by kiwi_the_iwik
WCIII runs beautifully with no lag or jitters on my G4 Cube 450Mhz w/768Mb Ram and Radeon 7500 - with the details set between mid and high @ 1024x768 (OSX.2.6).

WOW!

I think it may have something to do with memory - whack more in!

;)

What is this massive BS!

I have 350 MHZ on you with the same amount of ram and you say it plays well, what the hell is this?

[mattmack]

Originally posted by MrMacman
What is this massive BS!

I have 350 MHZ on you with the same amount of ram and you say it plays well, what the hell is this? He also has a better video card than you (IMO) that might have something to do with it. Also i have heard that the refresh rates of lcd monitors are not the greatest for game playing

[deadpoet]

I recently bought a new iBook 800Mhz (the one with CD-ROM only, and 32MB Radeon 7500) and I love it! I'm a switcher and this is my first Mac. I too was disappointed with the performance of WC3 on the iBook... it would jerk a lot no matter whether I chose 640x480 with all settings low or whatever. I have 640MB of RAM installed, so it's not a memory issue.

Then I discovered that if I set "animation details" (forgot what it's called exactly) to HIGH, the whole game plays much more smoothly for some reason! I have no idea why... but I keep all my graphics settings at LOW except for animation details, and the game plays just fine at 1024x768 with 32bit colour. It's more than smooth enough to be able to click and use the interface properly, which just wasn't possible before.

(I have an Athlon XP1800 Windows machine with Geforce4 which runs the game smoothly, so yes I do have a reference point to compare with).

I also found that if I had music on, the game would pause for a second every now and then, which was majorly irritating. So I leave music off now.

Additionally, I made a Disk Copy .dmg image of the WC3 disc, so I don't actually need the CD anymore which is very convenient.

[celaurie]

To be frank, I found this game over-rated and repetitive.

The first few levels were fine, but as I progressed my machine got slower and things started to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

[Golem]

I have found no difference between os 9 and 10.2 in Warcraft performance. OS 9 seemed to crash now and then but I went back to OS X for playing and have had no problems since. The only time i have a problem is a max food battle in 4x4 games.

Still Diablo II is still abyssmal under Open GL 5 fps compared to 40+ in software mode.

800mhz g4 tower.

[Dont Hurt Me]

Well my son has been playing warcraft3 for the past 2 hrs on my powermac 800, geforce3 1 gig memory and it runs pretty well at 1024 x768, he gets lag in very very heavy battles but i think its ping rates and somewhat my mac. also running 10.2.6. remember you gamers out there Jag is a memory hog , the more the better.

[thanatos]

JayKay what 15" PowerBook do you have? I don't see how there could be any difference between the 1Ghz model and the 17" 1Ghz model. I have the 1Ghz 15" and WC3 performance is not what it should be in 10. OS 9 performance is still a good bit better.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

Originally posted by woodsey
I love my wc III. I play on battle net all the time. The problem is that it runs really **** in OS 10.2 on my g4 733 with gforce 2MX 32mb and 512 mb ram. Even with the graphics settings switched to low, it is still choppy and unresponsive.

However the other day, my brother had the comp booted in OS 9, and i couldn't be bothered rebooting in to X, so i launched warcraft III. I could NOT believe my eyes. it played like a dream. Even with the graphics settings up full, it was smooth and very responsive. It felt like i was playing with a IBM 970, compared to what i was used to running it in jaguar!

Is there a problem with my set up, or does jaguar just make your games run like you have a 8 meg video card? If this is a problem for other jaguar users, i think apple has to pull their finger out and fix this fast.
I have an exact same set-up (cept i got GF-3) and only thing i can complain about is that with the new patch, it crashes NON-****ING-STOP...other than that, if i have all the grahpics settings to low or off, it runs beautifully...

[Falleron]

I have the same sort of problems. In large battles, I cant fight!!!! My mouse point disappears until things have calmed down (+ I am most likely dead!!!) I have a Dual 1Ghz, 1Gb of RAM + with a 32Mb Raedon 7500.

[Ayre]

I noticed the same problem under my 500 MHz Cube. When I got 10.2 (my first version of OS X, I immediately played WarCraft 3 to see how much it's improved, but to no avail. The thing ran so crappily, so I resorted back to rebooting to OS 9 to play my beloved RPS. Diablo 2 had the same problem, but I never thought about using software rendering. I suppose I just need to invest in a whole bunch of RAM if I ever hope to solve my gaming problems.

[Jimong5]

The Game runs Very nuce on My Dual 867 Gig RAM(and even with only 256MB) Radeon 9000... With everything at Max and running at a res of 1280x1024.... Another person with a dual gig(QS), 512 RAM and Geforce 4 Ti has the same results as me.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

@falleron
your problem is quite obviously your grahpics card. the 7500 is, by today's standards, crap. get yourself a 9000, 9700, or gf-4mx/ti. your peformance will sky-rocket.

it slows down for me pretty bad in big battles, but i play RPG's mostly, so it really doesn't bother me that much :D

[Falleron]

Originally posted by G3-Pwnz-G4
@falleron
your problem is quite obviously your grahpics card. the 7500 is, by today's standards, crap. get yourself a 9000, 9700, or gf-4mx/ti. your peformance will sky-rocket.

it slows down for me pretty bad in big battles, but i play RPG's mostly, so it really doesn't bother me that much :D
Your right about my graphics card. However, I can play Quake 3, unreal tournament at reasonably high frame rates. I think its more to do with the game. But, I could do with a better graphics card.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

lol, saying you can play q3 & UT isn't all that facinating. i can play q3 & UT perfectly with my 500mhz g3 with a voodoo5 5500, but i don't think any of you quite realize why wc3 is slow.

each unit in wc3 have about 1/5 the detail of your standard ut and q3 unit (this is assuming both are in high everything) but since in wc3 ther are a bajillion little units, not to mention trees, ground, and each unit has an AI, and that also takes up computer speed.

q3 and ut have very simplistic AI's, and they are only performing about 10 of em, while wc3 demands well over a hundred AI's to be running at one time, not to mention all the graphic stuff....it's a very demanding game.

[Falleron]

Originally posted by G3-Pwnz-G4
lol, saying you can play q3 & UT isn't all that facinating. i can play q3 & UT perfectly with my 500mhz g3 with a voodoo5 5500, but i don't think any of you quite realize why wc3 is slow.

each unit in wc3 have about 1/5 the detail of your standard ut and q3 unit (this is assuming both are in high everything) but since in wc3 ther are a bajillion little units, not to mention trees, ground, and each unit has an AI, and that also takes up computer speed.

q3 and ut have very simplistic AI's, and they are only performing about 10 of em, while wc3 demands well over a hundred AI's to be running at one time, not to mention all the graphic stuff....it's a very demanding game.
I was just doing a quick comparison. You only have to look at the OS9 performance compared to the OSX performance to see that there must be some optimisation that can be done to improve it. It runs great in OS9. I take your point that its a complex game. However, games such as Unreal Tournament 2003 have other complex graphics that are a lot more detailed than warcraft. This levels things out in terms of complexity.

[Golem]

Originally posted by Ayre
I noticed the same problem under my 500 MHz Cube. When I got 10.2 (my first version of OS X, I immediately played WarCraft 3 to see how much it's improved, but to no avail. The thing ran so crappily, so I resorted back to rebooting to OS 9 to play my beloved RPS. Diablo 2 had the same problem, but I never thought about using software rendering. I suppose I just need to invest in a whole bunch of RAM if I ever hope to solve my gaming problems.

Well I received this back in Oct 2001 and little has changed since... btw I was playing on 450mhz cube at the time.


The nVidia drivers for Mac OS and some PC opperating systems appear to have
a high latency in handling texture loads and purges. This does not effect
games which infrequently load a few textures. However, it is a most
noticable problem in Diablo II, because the game loads and purges dozens of
textures frequently. At this time, we are working with nVidia and Apple to
resolve the issue. However, our only recommendation at this time is to run
Diablo II in Software graphics mode.


{MA347}

Collin Smith
Online Support Representative
Blizzard Entertainment
http://blizzard.com

[thanatos]

Does anybody know if the WC3 expansion is going to help with OS X performance? Has apple not updated the drivers in the 10.2.6 version? I thought they fixed them for UT03? The beta Demo of UT03 runs better than the final version of WC3. lol

I think blizzard just has not learned how to right good software for OS X yet...

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

who knows....all i know is that on my dad's dp 1ghz g4 (the first one) it runs great...then again, he also has like 1.5gb of ram and a gf-4ti...sooo, that prolly helps a little...

[QCassidy352]

maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think that graphics card is the biggest factor with war 3 performance. It's not really a graphics intensive game... much more so than starcraft, but really, like G3-Pwnz-G4 said, the strain on the computer with this game really comes from having to manage all the units doing so many things at once. That means that processor and RAM should have more impact than graphics card...

Now before you jump all over me, *of course* the graphics card makes a difference, a big difference. But, I think, not the same level of difference as with unreal tournament or quake 3.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

woot, finally somebody who's seen da light

[thanatos]

I email blizzard about OS X performance and the upcoming expansion pack. This is the reply I got:

-----------------,

CFM apps and apps which use Open GL via the Carbon API in Mac OS X are at a
bit of a handicap in terms of performance. This has to do with application
thread reentrance, thread priority and a few other issues Apple is still
addressing. We are always looking for performance wins, and will continue
to work with Apple to get Warcraft III performance up under Mac OS X. The
expansion should actually perform better than the game due to further code
optimizations. We will bring the game up to par with expansion performance
in a later update to the game.

With the iMac you also had a few other factors working against you. The
first was the lack of level 3 cache on the processor. The second factor was
a much more limited video card.

I hope this helps explain some of the performance issues you saw with the
iMac.

{mac0wr345gn}

Collin Smith
Technical Support
Blizzard Entertainment
<http://www.blizzard.com/support>
When responding to this email, please include your full name and attach any
relevant, previous email correspondences.


-----Original Message-----
From: -------------------[mailto:pendaran@mac.com]
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 9:54 AM
To: Online Support
Subject: Mac OS X performance

I have a few questions about Mac OS X performance and would love a
few
honest answers. I used to own an iMac G4 800 with 512MB, and I could
never get WC3 to play well in OS 10.2.x. However, in OS 9 the game
would play just fine. I loved playing the game, but I got tired of
rebooting all the time...so I stopped playing. I recently bought a 1Ghz
Tibook for college and tried playing WC3 on it. The performance in OS X
is quite good now; however, I noticed that it still runs better in OS
9. I realize that OS X is a new OS and that you guys probably need a
little more practice coding for it. I also realize that Apple may need
to still fix a few things. Do you guys know if the expansion pack for
WC3 will provide any better performance under OS X than the original
did? Have you guys been working on this problem or is it just a problem
with the OS that apple needs to work out. You have no idea how much I
would like to know the answer to this question. I really hope you guys
have straightened out the performance issues. If you have not you
really should raise the system requirements for OS X. It really does
take a new PowerMac or PowerBook to play the game in OS X. However, in
OS 9 the minimum requirements seem to work just fine. Thanks you guys.

A blizzard fan,
---------------

[adamcz]

I certainly understand why warcraft sucks on my 400mhz G3 that doesn't meet the system req's, but it's really dissapointing to read that those of you with fast G4's aren't running the game smoothly with everything on max. I'm going to buy a new comp in the next few days, but I definately don't want to pay $1500 for a machine that can't run a year old game at full settings.

If I bought a Dual 1.2 G4 with a 64 meg card, do you guys think I would be ok with every setting on max? If not, I may be buying a Dell with 3Ghz P4, and 128 meg graphics for the same price. Would be nice to have another Mac, but I just can't justify paying more for less.

[Dont Hurt Me]

take your favorite game requirements then double them. There you are where you want to be for gaming. Warcraft3 will run great on any 800 or greater mac. But what will you need for future games? anyone say Doom3?? I wonder how this will play on a 1.6 , 1.8 ,2? edit -- whatever you do you will want a lot of memory for the mac OS 256-512 or more also it runs great with my son playing it on 10.2.6 and a gig of mem and geforce3. He's a master but i wont go there.

[AppleMatt]

Well I'm glad I read this thread.

In massive online battles I basically lose the ability to control my units, so I just use groups and hero buttons. I've got a 12" PowerBook at the moment, and I can see that the lack of L3 cache and poor graphics card impact it, but not this much. I notice the Mac graphics RAM requirement is twice that of PC.

I hope that they will infact release a new patch shortly with further OS X optimisations, and that they weren't lying there. It was 1.03 that "added PowerPC optimizations and MacOS X 10.2 specific acceleration to the graphics engine" last.

Finally surely if Panther is going to improve overall performance, game performance should go up with it?

AppleMatt

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

actually, on the computer in my sig running os 9.2.2 it runs just fine. not smoothly, but i generally get about 10-15fps. it works :)

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by adamcz
I'm going to buy a new comp in the next few days, but I definately don't want to pay $1500 for a machine that can't run a year old game at full settings.

If I bought a Dual 1.2 G4 with a 64 meg card, do you guys think I would be ok with every setting on max? If not, I may be buying a Dell with 3Ghz P4, and 128 meg graphics for the same price. Would be nice to have another Mac, but I just can't justify paying more for less.

After Monday, a new Mac may perform better than you think. :D

[iJon]

i find warcraft 3 to perform better in os 9 if you are on a computer like the imac. on my powrmac it will run fine.

iJon

[Jimong5]

Originally posted by iJon
i find warcraft 3 to perform better in os 9 if you are on a computer like the imac. on my powrmac it will run fine.

iJon
That seems to be a general consensus, and only the iMac G4, I have friends that can tolerate it on a 600 G3

[job]

Originally posted by Jimong5
That seems to be a general consensus, and only the iMac G4, I have friends that can tolerate it on a 600 G3

That ain't nothing. ;)

I ran it on 450Mhz, 320MB RAM, and an 8MB Rage card at 800*600 at 16 bit color with min graphics settigns. And as far as I could tell, it ran just fine. Almost no slowdowns I could detect. I was playing in 9.2.2 though...and I never had many units at any given time. Small squad action is more my taste. :)

[ddtlm]

I'd like to support what G3-Pwnz-G4 and others have said: the WC3 problem is a processor and memory problem (partly caused by inefficient software). My Mac is a dual 800 G4 with 1.5gigs of RAM and a Radeon 8500, yet performs much less smoothly than the Athlon 1.4 with 512mb of DDR RAM and a GeForce2mx that my friend had (and has since upgraded).

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

well that and mac os x being completley new just hasn't had time to weedle out all the bugs yet...hopefully that will be fixed in panther.

[ddtlm]

G3-Pwnz-G4:

OSX is more than 2 years old... not new at all. Cmon, you shouldn't try to make it seem like a reasonable problem. Between the hardware and OSX, something is seriously screwed up with respect to WC3.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

no, it is new. first off, it's 2 years old if you start back when it was still in beta form, and that counts for nothing. and osx 10.1 was, imho, crap. 10.2 is much better, but definatly has some bugs.

although, to be completely honest, my dad's old computer is a 733mhz g4, 512mb ram wit geforce-3, and i get excellent frame rates. not entirely sure what you guys have done to your machines to get such bad performance....

[ddtlm]

G3-Pwnz-G4:

OSX is more than two years old (launched on March 4th 2001). You're just making excuses to defend Apple.

not entirely sure what you guys have done to your machines to get such bad performance....
We've done nothing. I obviously don't know about everyone, but I can assure you that at least one of the people with severe performance problems knows how to not screw a machine up. I tried it on a fresh as can be 10.2 install, and I tried it on my 10.1 install, and I've played it mostly in OS9, until I just got tried of it and played on my Athlon.

I think the situation is that everyone who thinks WC3 performance on current Mac is good falls into one of these categories:

1) Missing some element of motion detection that the complainers have.
2) Has never played a game above 1v1.
3) Unaware of what smooth is.
4) Biased.

(Edit: I'd be willing to believe that performance is somewhat better on a DDR-sporting 1.25 ghz or faster G4.)

Edit: Added exact date 10.0 was released.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

now, i have all the graphical settings to low or off, and i'm running it at 1024x768 32bit. I, unlike what seems to be most of you, don't really care what it looks like as long as it's a good game. it runs just fine. it does slow down when there are a good number of units on the screen, but other than that it's fine. i DO know that if you have alot of Computer Insanes in the game, the AI puts tremendous stress on the cpu, and for the games that i play (mostly online DOTA... so i'm ****in addicted, sue me..) the AI is pretty simple.

[AppleMatt]

Originally posted by G3-Pwnz-G4
i believe your a moron.

Do NOT post personal insults. It's immature and unacceptable. If arn see's this he'll warn you.

Also it's "you're" as in "you are", not "your" as in ownership.

Matt

[Golem]

Originally posted by ddtlm
G3-Pwnz-G4:

I think the situation is that everyone who thinks WC3 performance on current Mac is good falls into one of these categories:

[b]1) Missing some element of motion detection that the complainers have.
2) Has never played a game above 1v1.
3) Unaware of what smooth is.
4) Biased.


I have played from 1v1 to 4v4 and ffa on battle.net and never found any issues apart from 4v4 with near max food armies.I have played ffa against the computer with 4 other players no real problem but it does have massive problems with 9 oppenents.I found very little difference between 0S 9 and Max os X and so play by preference in OS X.

The only definition I could possibly seeing applying is "smooth" and its smooth enough for me. Or is it the quake players definition of smooth? "Dude you only have 98 fps. if nots not 100 its unplayable"

800 mhz Quicksilver, geoforce 2mx, 512 mb ram

[couch potato]

I have Jaguar, and all of my games (except UT2003) run great. im using a 1ghz iMac, but i have like 700mb of ram :P

yeah, even though my geforcemx, and other's 7500 are crap, it seems as though apple doesnt give, because they keep putting them in these computers. partly, because if an 800mhz had a geforce ti, the ti's performance would greatly decrease because the cpu is so slow:( but i somehow manage on this card

[adamcz]

I recently bought a 1.25GHz G4, and I have 768 MB of ram. I can run the game perfectly with all settings on max, so I have no idea what the rest of you are talking about. You all had me unjustly scared.

[thanatos]

Well based on some advice I went out and bought WC3TFT yesterday. The game runs much better in OS X than the original did. The mouse no longer lags like hell and only in big battles does the scroll lag up; however, you can still see the mouse and click on your units. So even when the scroll lags the actuall mouse does not. The game still runs better in OS 9 because is is a carbon app and not written just for OS X. Carbon apps will not run as well as OS X only apps. However, I am pleased to say that the game is now playable under OS X. And TFT is a lot more fun than the original.

Anyone else notice an improvement in performance?

[jimthorn]

I just replaced my old iBook with a new 900MHz model, and as a test, I downloaded the WC3 demo. It ran great and is a lot of fun. But I have a couple of questions for you WC3 players.

(1) Do you need to buy the original WC3 to use WC3: Frozen Throne, or are they basically seperate games?

(2) Is it easy to make disk images of both the game CDs, so that I don't have to bring them with me to play them on the road?

[job]

Originally posted by jimthorn
(1) Do you need to buy the original WC3 to use WC3: Frozen Throne, or are they basically seperate games?

You will need to purchase WCIII before you can play TFT. TFT is an expansion pack to WCIII and thus depends on the original resource files (while adding new units, maps, etc.) and game engine.

(2) Is it easy to make disk images of both the game CDs, so that I don't have to bring them with me to play them on the road?

I tried that the other day but Warcraft III does not see a disk image as the actual game CD. The app will ask you to insert the physical CD every time.

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by job
You will need to purchase WCIII before you can play TFT. TFT is an expansion pack to WCIII and thus depends on the original resource files (while adding new units, maps, etc.) and game engine.

OK, I guess I'll pick up the first one. Thanks.

Originally posted by job
I tried that the other day but Warcraft III does not see a disk image as the actual game CD. The app will ask you to insert the physical CD every time.

I know it can be done, but I just don't know if it's easy or not. Someone earlier in this thread said they just used OS X's Disk Copy, but they didn't mention what settings to use. I'm wondering if you need to apply some sort of hack to make it work...

[Dont Hurt Me]

Originally posted by thanatos
Well based on some advice I went out and bought WC3TFT yesterday. The game runs much better in OS X than the original did. The mouse no longer lags like hell and only in big battles does the scroll lag up; however, you can still see the mouse and click on your units. So even when the scroll lags the actuall mouse does not. The game still runs better in OS 9 because is is a carbon app and not written just for OS X. Carbon apps will not run as well as OS X only apps. However, I am pleased to say that the game is now playable under OS X. And TFT is a lot more fun than the original.

Anyone else notice an improvement in performance? my son did after we bumped our quicksilver to 1.4 gigahertz. runs in osx smooth as silk, doesnt matter if there is 40 guys fighting it out and everything blazin, very nice.

[job]

Originally posted by jimthorn
I know it can be done, but I just don't know if it's easy or not. Someone earlier in this thread said they just used OS X's Disk Copy, but they didn't mention what settings to use. I'm wondering if you need to apply some sort of hack to make it work...

That's odd. I used Disk Copy as well. I selected new image from device, selected the WCIII disk which was in my external Firewire burner and proceeded to make a DVD/CD master image without any compression or encryption. WCIII still didn't see it.

Let me know if you have any sucess with making a disk image of WCIII.

I was able to burn the image though and after I burned it, WCIII ran off of the burned disk. (It was so my brother and I could play LAN together.)

[hvfsl]

Originally posted by G3-Pwnz-G4
@falleron
your problem is quite obviously your grahpics card. the 7500 is, by today's standards, crap. get yourself a 9000, 9700, or gf-4mx/ti. your peformance will sky-rocket.

it slows down for me pretty bad in big battles, but i play RPG's mostly, so it really doesn't bother me that much :D

Don't get Geforce 4mx, they are the same speed as the Radeon 7500. The best value cards on the Mac are the Radeon 8500 and 9000 at the moment. Also the Geforce 5200FX is slower than the Radeon 9000, just in case people care about gaming and want to get a G5.

[job]

Originally posted by hvfsl
Don't get Geforce 4mx, they are the same speed as the Radeon 7500. The best value cards on the Mac are the Radeon 8500 and 9000 at the moment. Also the Geforce 5200FX is slower than the Radeon 9000, just in case people care about gaming and want to get a G5.

The 7500 also has better DVD playback perfomance than the GeForce 4MX.

[hacurio1]

Originally posted by jimthorn
OK, I guess I'll pick up the first one. Thanks.



I know it can be done, but I just don't know if it's easy or not. Someone earlier in this thread said they just used OS X's Disk Copy, but they didn't mention what settings to use. I'm wondering if you need to apply some sort of hack to make it work...

Yes, it can be done. I use toast, just open the program and form the file menu select "Save as disk image". Then, put it somewere in the harddrive and mount it whenever you want to play it. I have a 12"PB and a PowerMac, and sometimes it's just hard to carry the disk with you or have it next to the PM when you want to play it. I understand what you mean!

[thanatos]

First of all the Geforce 2mx and 4mx suck royal ass! Sorry just had to say that.

Disk Copy will work just fine. Use Read only not DVD/CD master. It works for me on almost all of my games.

[job]

Originally posted by thanatos
First of all the Geforce 2mx and 4mx suck royal ass! Sorry just had to say that.

Better than my 8MB Rage card I've got soldered to my motherboard.... ;) :p :rolleyes: :D

[QCassidy352]

I use an ibook 900 with the Radeon 7500 to play Warcraft 3 all the time, and it works fine. It only slows down in really big battles, like if I'm playing 3v3 and all 6 people are fighting at once. War 3 isn't really that graphics intensive as games go... the processor does a lot of the work.

btw, I tried it in OS 9, and the game played exactly the same as in 10.2.6.

[thanatos]

I seems to remember it playing better in OS 9; however, I don't have OS 9 installed on my tibook so I can't test it out. Anybody else agree cassidy?

[AppleMatt]

Let me just check...you guys having problems with Warcraft III not seeing your disk image...you are actually mounting the image right?

AppleMatt

[Anticipat3]

one very simple way to get around this rubbish is very simple. copy all the files on the CD into a folder, say /war3cd.

then type:

umount /dev/cdroms/cdrom0
mount /war3cd /dev/cdrom

to eject the disc, just type the umount cmd again.

This is manually mounting or unmounting things with unix.

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by thanatos
Disk Copy will work just fine. Use Read only not DVD/CD master. It works for me on almost all of my games.

I bought the game yesterday. Played a little. Then I decided to try the Disk Copy thing. Launched Disk Copy. Dragged the mounted CD onto the Disk Copy window. Selected CD/DVD Master. It created a file. Ejected the original CD. I double-clicked the file and it mounted. It has the same name and content as the original CD (though it doesn't have the same mounted icon of a CD with the WCIII logo). Tried to start the game and it told me to insert the CD. D'oh!

Originally posted by AppleMatt
Let me just check...you guys having problems with Warcraft III not seeing your disk image...you are actually mounting the image right?

Yup. But it's not working. Can Disk Copy do it, or do I have to buy Toast to get the job done right?

[AppleMatt]

Originally posted by jimthorn
Yup. But it's not working. Can Disk Copy do it, or do I have to buy Toast to get the job done right?

The exact process I followed, which works (Warcraft III v1.06):

Insert CD
Launch DiskCopy
Drag Image to DiskCopy (v55.6)
Create image to root drive
Eject CD
Mount image (by double-clicking) when want to play.

AppleMatt

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by AppleMatt
The exact process I followed, which works (Warcraft III v1.06):

Insert CD
Launch DiskCopy
Drag Image to DiskCopy (v55.6)
Create image to root drive
Eject CD
Mount image (by double-clicking) when want to play.

AppleMatt

Does it look like the original CD when mounted (an icon of a CD with the WCIII logo on it), or does it look like a generic OS X mounted dmg icon (a little white external drive)?

[AppleMatt]

Generic drive.

AppleMatt

[jimthorn]

Hmm. OK, I'll try again. Thanks.

[CrackedButter]

I got W3RoC and i don't like its performance on my iBook with the 7500 Radeon and 640 megs of RAM...it annoys me that it is this slow and i have to lower the settings for everything.

Sometimes i can barely play W3 and use mimac in the background, it just jitters all the time.

Its a pity laptops cannot be upgraded other than memory, HD, and certain cards.

Here's hoping to a Radeon 9600m in the new powerbooks, THEN its upgrade time for when the needs arises.

I would get a windows machine but thats the problem in itself, its a windows machine...

[job]

Originally posted by CrackedButter
I got W3RoC and i don't like its performance on my iBook with the 7500 Radeon and 640 megs of RAM...it annoys me that it is this slow and i have to lower the settings for everything.

What are your settings?

I'm on a 400Mhz iMac DV and it plays fine at 800*600, albeit with everything turned down to low, no ambient sounds, no unit shadows, etc.

I would have thought a iBook with more RAM and a better graphics card would have performed better than my iMac.

[Mav451]

ditto, my old 800tbird with an old Diamond TNT2 could run WC3 at 800 x 600 just fine.

LOL the 9600 is overkill just to play wc3. My 8500 (in my PC) is just fine: this was before AND after my CPU upgrades.
(7500 i would say is between my TNT2 and 8500, obviously a lot closer to the 8500 side)

Obviously going from 800 to 2.14 allows me to turn everything to high, but with my 800 i had most of it on low or medium and it was pretty close to 60fps.

I'm wondering what other PB users are using...display settings/game settings.

Now i see alot of people talking about mounting--while Daemon Tools can do this--i don't see why this would increase performance unless your CD drives are limiting you in any way (or doing a rip)

[ddtlm]

A GF2MX is all WC3 needs to play smooth. I know that because for a long time my buddy played with such a card in his PC, which also had a 1.4ghz Athlon and DDR RAM. Lots of people blame the video cards, but really the problem is that the G3/G4 aren't real good at WC3, and memory bandwidth is limited. I bet a G5 with a GF2MX would play great (and the actual video cards that are available will just make it that much better).

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

lol, well wc3 RUNS on my bondi-blue rev.B imac. key word is runs.

[ddtlm]

When I first played it, I was using a 16mb nVidia TNT card with a 1.2ghz Athlon on a friend's machine. If I peeked at the battles it got so slow that it took 5 or 6 seconds to "free" myself. :D

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by ddtlm
When I first played it, I was using a 16mb nVidia TNT card with a 1.2ghz Athlon on a friend's machine. If I peeked at the battles it got so slow that it took 5 or 6 seconds to "free" myself. :D

*cough*its called lag *cough*

[ddtlm]

:confused: I was talking about freeing my screen to look at something else. I never tried to free any armies.... they all died.

[Golem]

Originally posted by ddtlm
i_am_a_cow:

There is an entire thread dedicated to WC3 performance, or maybe more than one. Since I don't accept that your G4 is better at WC3 than my dual 800, for example, I conclude that you either have not taken it into a large battle, or that you don't know what smooth is like, or that you just can't percieve the chopiness for some strange reason.

Here's a link for you:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?threadid=26742&perpage=25&pagenumber=1

ddtim maybe you should be looking at a problem with your dual 800. This topic has somehow crept across to the wow on g5 thread but I would prefer to keep it here.

I reiterate as I posted near the top of this thread. Warcraft III works just fine on on my single 800 quicksilver with Geoforce 2mx. The exception to this being 6+ ffa with computer opponents or 4v4 where their is a massive battle with everybody haveing 90 food armys. Even in that situation I can control my hero, just 2-3 heros + micromanaging spellcasters is beyond me. I can certainly manage battle move back to town if I need to and move back to the battle with no lag at all. Hint use keys to control not the mouse.

Last time I played i had something like 600+ random wins in all sorts of games from ffa to 1v1 to 4v4 so I do have some clue about what I am talking about. I was aiming for the highest dragon icon:)

[Jimong5]

I know MY Dual 867 Runs WC flawless untill a battle, then its hardly bad. I do feel slowdonw in 80 food 4v4 battles, but Its still very playable. I have a gig of RAM and Radeon 9000 BTW.

[ddtlm]

Golem:

There is nothing wrong with my dual 800 that isn't wrong with the other people who have the same problems. People who insist their framerate is fine on a system like that must have low standards, or else be wearing the rose colored glasses. I've damn near lost 2v2 games (to the Mac) because I can't aim my spells fast or accurately enough, and I've never dared take it above 3v3. Perhaps after playing at such low performance for a long time a person learns to see through the chop, who knows. Coming from my PC I find it unbearable.

[AppleMatt]

Originally posted by ddtlm
Golem:

There is nothing wrong with my dual 800 that isn't wrong with the other people who have the same problems. People who insist their framerate is fine on a system like that must have low standards, or else be wearing the rose colored glasses. I've damn near lost 2v2 games (to the Mac) because I can't aim my spells fast or accurately enough, and I've never dared take it above 3v3. Perhaps after playing at such low performance for a long time a person learns to see through the chop, who knows. Coming from my PC I find it unbearable.

I have to agree there, I've often played games and thought they were OK, then played them on a faster machine (usually my PC), and found them to be so much better that I cannot go back to the original machine. Especially with shoot-em-ups.

AppleMatt

[Anticipat3]

Two things absent from this discussion that should be mentioned:

1. Warcraft III runs like POO if you don't patch it -- you have to update to the latest version on battle.net (1.10) in order to see decent performance -- if you just install off the CD and run, it'll run like crap on any machine.

2. The big difference in chop vs. no chop in War3 seems to be L3 cache. Any Quicksilver machines that had it, as well other G4s that have it (pmacs and pbooks) seem to run very well, and the ones that don't tend to struggle.

Here are machines i've seen run War3:
3 ghz P4 w/ Radeon 9700 Pro PC: Smooth. This is the benchmark. Runs 1280x1024x32, full details, no chop EVER.
12" iBook, 800 mhz, 384MB RAM, 32MB R7500: Playable, but choppy, even at 800x600x16, low detail settings.
12" Powerbook, 640 MB RAM: Playable, and smooth except when in battles when things get choppy, even at lowest graphics settings.
667 15" Powerbook, 256 MB RAM, R7500 32MB: Smooth, except for occasional HD loads due to lack of RAM, and otherwise noticibliy better than the 12" powerbook, smooth except during medium-large battles, provided you keep the detail and resolution down to about 800x600 or 1024x768, medium details.
eMac 700, 512MB RAM, GF2MX 32MB: Performed about like iBook, perhaps worse -- very choppy in battles, even at lowest detail settings, and smooth otherwise only if resolution/details were low.
1 ghz 15" Powerbook w/ Mob R9000 64MB: Smooth, at either high resolution/medium detail, or medium resolution/high detail. 1024x768, high details provided a smooth game, on par with the PC except during very large battles, and evne then still playable.
Dual 1.25 MDD G4 w/ 512 MB RAM, R9000: Silky smooth, I played this with a 23" cinema at 1920x1200, and the framerates were good even at this resolution, even in battles.

The moral of the story is: If you want smooth games, get a Powermac, if you want the best mobile games you can get, get a Powerbook. I haven't run War3 on a modern iMac, so they're the only model I can't judge.

[zaphoyd]

I have used disk copy to make images of the RoC and Frozen Throne cds. Both are basic read only compressed images. the RoC image, when mounted, appears as a cd with the warcraft 3 logo the frozen throne appears as the white disk. Both are read correctly by WC3 as the disks it needs to play.

[daveg5]

Originally posted by 8thDegreeSavage
867 QS here and the game runs great in 10.2.6
can you test it in os9 and report back

[woodsey]

from the posts in this thread, it looks like WCIII performance is better in os 9, especially on machines with no or little cache, such as quicksilver G4's and iMac's.

Its pretty poor IMHO, apple pushes OS X as being a gaming platform, but on many of their models, OS 9 far outperforms OS X.

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

well you have a trade-off. os9 can do one thing very fast, but is unstable (relatively) and has a heart attack when you try to do 2 or more things at the same time. osx can do multiple things relatively quickly, and is very stable (for me, anyways...), but doesn't work as fast when running a single program.

[SLJ]

very strange... I am running 12" pb with Frozen Throne, I hardly will called it playable, you can't even control your units during a battle... how are you going to suppose to win? well, I can't boot into OS 9 so, I wonder if runnning under classic mode is the same as booting into OS 9? any confirmation... the truth is, I gave up playing warcraft III on my 12"pb...

[lewdvig]

I tried the Mac demo last night. All details set to high - shadows off (shadows always kill performance).

This is one of the few games that runs equally well on the Mac and PC. The PC I ran this on was a P4 1.6a, my mac is a dual G4 800. Cool.

[ChronoIMG]

I happen to be very addicted to Wc3 and play everyday. My normal machine for playing is a G4/533 with 1GIG Ram and a GeForce 2MX. I'd play at 800x600 with low settings except medium textures or else it would look too blurry. This was fairly playable except during heavy battles with more than 4 different players on screen. As you can imagine, winning in the heat of battle under screen lag is almost impossible.

So, I invested in a 1.4GHz G4 upgrade card. I now play with 1024x768 32Bit with everything turned on high and the game plays like a dream come true. Big battles are no longer a problem, I'm able to micro the enemy to death :)

Having to spend $600 in order to get acceptable performance from a game is not acceptable, however, when this is the only game I care to play at the moment it was completely worth it.

Maybe this game is seriously CPU bound? I'm still using the GeForce2MX which will all know is junk but the game is really flying now with the upgraded processor.

[ddtlm]

ChronoIMG:

Yeah, you bet WC3 is CPU hungry. Your comments are the first time I've heard anyone on a Mac describe what I've seen many times on PC's. I've seen great Athlon/GF2MX PC's and great Athlon/PC133 PC's.

[mattmack]

Originally posted by ChronoIMG


So, I invested in a 1.4GHz G4 upgrade card. I now play with 1024x768 32Bit with everything turned on high and the game plays like a dream come true. Big battles are no longer a problem, I'm able to micro the enemy to death :)



Maybe this game is seriously CPU bound? I'm still using the GeForce2MX which will all know is junk but the game is really flying now with the upgraded processor.
I'm debating upgrading my Dual 450 with a 1.2 or 1.4 card. It seems to be worth it to you? Which card did you go with?

[ChronoIMG]

Originally posted by mattmack
I'm debating upgrading my Dual 450 with a 1.2 or 1.4 card. It seems to be worth it to you? Which card did you go with?
I went with the Sonnet Encore/ST 1.4Ghz. I felt more comfortable buying more someone who's been in the upgrade business for a long time.

ddtlm:

All I can really say is that it's freaking amazing. Being able to actually see the rain or snow fall; watching my units leave footprints; or the vastly improved visuals all around is just incredible. Now, once I replace that GF2MX I'll really be ready for WoW ;)

[Vlade]

Originally posted by mattmack
I'm debating upgrading my Dual 450 with a 1.2 or 1.4 card. It seems to be worth it to you? Which card did you go with?

It depends, you may expect it to be ALOT faster, but due to the bus bottleneck it will only maybe double your CPU performance, and thats about 600 bucks when you could sell your system and get a G5 :)

[mattmack]

Originally posted by Vlade
It depends, you may expect it to be ALOT faster, but due to the bus bottleneck it will only maybe double your CPU performance, and thats about 600 bucks when you could sell your system and get a G5 :) I was thinking abut that, but the MDD's have a 167 bus right? I have a 100 bus so I'm not losing much and the 1.2 is down to $395 at owc (powerlogic), but I'm still debating the G5:)

[ChronoIMG]

Originally posted by Vlade
It depends, you may expect it to be ALOT faster, but due to the bus bottleneck it will only maybe double your CPU performance, and thats about 600 bucks when you could sell your system and get a G5 :)
Selling a Dual 450 isn't going to net more than $600 as is. A single G5 1.6 is $1799 w/o superdrive so the out of pocket cost is still $1200, the cost of a new single 1.25Ghhz G4. I've thought about this long and hard before I made the upgrade choice and it all came down to raw dollars. For $600 I improved my Mac to be faster than the current shipping single G4 for half the cost and I get to keep all my existing RAM without having to buy more, another cost of $250.

G5s are great if you have a lot of cash. I'm gonna wait it out until at least Jan. 2005 when the newer models ship with faster processors and whatever other goodies Apple throws in. My $600 upgrade will easily last me until then.

[Vlade]

Originally posted by mattmack
I was thinking abut that, but the MDD's have a 167 bus right? I have a 100 bus so I'm not losing much and the 1.2 is down to $395 at owc (powerlogic), but I'm still debating the G5:)

Some have 133, some have 167, but remember that pentiums have 800MHZ busses and the G5s have 1GHZ! I think to fully send data to a dual 1.42 G4 it would take at least a 400MHZ bus with DDR400.

Basically I would never recommend upgrading a G4 card, I looked at benchmarks from a 400MHZ mac to a 1.4GHZ mac, and in most cases it was only double the speed, despite the CPU being almost 4 times as fast/