OS X Feral Games Default Settings?

My computer is a mid-2011 27" iMac with 3.1 i5 CPU, 12 gigs RAM, Radeon 6970m GPU

These are all Feral games and their default settings on my system. As I understand it Feral presets defaults per your system for best overall performance throughout a game from start to finish which is something I appreciate but wonder about in the cases below. For one thing, I am wondering how the routine that queries the system info and then sets up defaults handles systems newer than when the game shipped. I wouldn't expect them to keep updating these settings every year for new Macs.

Some of the games below were released after my iMac though so their suggested defaults should be correct. I am surprised that not one of these defaults to 1440p, especially the older games. The two newest Total War games listed below I can see reducing screen resolution and forgoing FSAA on given how demanding that series can be so I'm trusting Feral for the best experience there. The resolution for Tropico 4 seems rather low to me.

I am not overly picky about this stuff I would say but it did strike me that some of these resolutions seem mighty low. The 6970m while aging now is still a pretty decent GPU.

And yes, I am kind of hoping Edwin or someone from Feral will come along and lend some insight here.


Rome Total War

• Battle Map Resolution: 1280 x 720
• Strategy Map Resolution: 1600 x 900
• FSAA x2

Tropico 4

• Resolution: 1600 x 900
• FSAA x2

Sid Meier's Pirates!

Resolution: 800 x 600 (seriously???)


Empire Total War & Napoleon Total War

• Resolution: 1920 x 1080
• FSAA OFF

Sid Meier's Railroads

• Resolution: 1600 x 900
• FSAA x4
• Texture, Shader, Shadow Quality all High (highest setting available)
• Tree Density High (highest setting available)

When I eventually play Tomb Raider I sure hope it doesn't default to 1024 x 768 with FSAA OFF. lol

EllieFeral said:

We don’t create defaults for every machine spec out there, but we set them at a level where in most cases the game will be playable at a decent frame rate throughout.

Some games, depending on how you play them, may push the game to limits even we haven’t - so you may have to turn them down - especially for titles such as the Total War series, which have a history of issues when you get further into the games campaign. You're more likely to get away with higher settings at the start of a campaign than you will be towards the end.

The defaults are recommendations and we tend to be fairly conservative when settings these.

This can be because we set the default on VRAM rather than specific GPUs. Doing this means some cards will have lower settings (especially newer cards such as the NV 600 and 700 series) than we would suggest as there are many older cards out there with the same amount of VRAM but don’t have the same performance.

Some games (such as Sid Meier's Pirates!) never had this applied, or we didn’t account for 2GB cards at the time of release, which means they default to low.

The settings we provide are just a building block for you to work from, as we find people like to experiment or have different preferences (like FXAA over resolution, for example).

Click to expand...

Okay. I misunderstood something Edwin had said previously and was under the impression that Feral took time to create optimal settings per Mac which were intended to provide the most optimal experience overall. I won't trust the defaults then as something I should probably stick to since I don't really have any way of knowing if they are on my particular Mac.