Disappointed in gaming on new 15" rMBP

[leman]

Not trying to be smart, but the razer blade is actually thinner, and much better for gaming than the rMBP. Only downside is the not-so-great screen, similar to the MBA.

True, I stand corrected: you and John are right. I didn't know the 14" model existed, was only aware of the bigger Blade. This small one really looks like a very nice machine, and has clearly more attractive specs for gaming than the rMBP

Most games by default do not have a frame rate cap. What that means is that no matter how powerful your computer is, it will try to push out as much frames per second as it can.

You could have an entry-level laptop pushing a certain game at 20 FPS, and a top-of-the-line gaming laptop pushing it at 200 FPS, and both would potentially produce the same amount of heat/noise.

Yep, its really weird how game engine programmers still make blatant mistakes as these. The screen refreshes at 60fps - rendering faster does not make any sense at all - its wasted work. Another one is presentation/animation synchronisation - it is possible to make a game appear really smooth at relatively low frame rates (around 30fps) by properly decoupling animation and drawing + synchronising the drawing to the refresh rate, but very few people actually seem to do it. Interesting thing - OS X offers an API (CVDisplayLink) to synchronise your drawing to the monitor refresh interval - you can use that to make sure that your animation frames and the actual visible frame are as close apart in time as possible. To my knowledge, there is still no way to properly do this in Windows.

 

[Scott7975]

rMBP with dedicated GPU is the best portal gaming laptop on the market today. Make sure you're running the latest software updates to maximise performance on your machine. But yeah, you won't find a better laptop on the market than the high-end 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

Uh no its not.

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I think this qualifies.

http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade

Not trying to be smart, but the razer blade is actually thinner, and much better for gaming than the rMBP. Only downside is the not-so-great screen, similar to the MBA.

Yes, and if you get the 17 its full HD... just not retina.

 

[byuister]

Interesting thing - OS X offers an API (CVDisplayLink) to synchronise your drawing to the monitor refresh interval - you can use that to make sure that your animation frames and the actual visible frame are as close apart in time as possible. To my knowledge, there is still no way to properly do this in Windows.

In Windows OS you have control over the core loop - no need for APIs such as CVDisplayLink at all.

 

[whitedragon101]

I like to think (i know its unlikely) dumastudetto was making a joke. He didn't write portable laptop, he wrote portal laptop.

So yes a rMBP will produce stellar performance running portal and even portal 2 . It is such as good game you probably don't need to play others

rMBP with dedicated GPU is the best portal gaming laptop on the market today.

 

[luffytubby]

It's been the same for all the years I've been here. Every week, the thing people are most disappointed with is games, games, games.


Which makes sense, as gaming continues to grow. It's revenue now is now superior to even Hollywood and the film industry.

Gaming is the only area on Mac(not iOS) that Apple is behind it. It's not like it's surprising. The Directx standard makes sure that Apple can never get ahead.



Mac ports are terrible. It's truly a shame. Apples quality and good image distorts as we move onto gaming. Some fanboys won't recognize this, but it's the same. Several times a week new customers flood in, saying they want better support for gaming. Apple won't listen!

 

[Hawkler]

Fixed with bootcamp

Hi all, just a quick update - I installed windows 8.1 with boot camp and updated the NVIDIA drivers.

Civ5 runs silky smooth and the fan doesn't kick in from the moment I load a large map like it did under OSX. Witches 2 is also hugely improved.

I think macs are great for gaming, but sadly OSX is not.

 

[byuister]

It's been the same for all the years I've been here. Every week, the thing people are most disappointed with is games, games, games.


Which makes sense, as gaming continues to grow. It's revenue now is now superior to even Hollywood and the film industry.

Gaming is the only area on Mac(not iOS) that Apple is behind it. It's not like it's surprising. The Directx standard makes sure that Apple can never get ahead.

Mac ports are terrible. It's truly a shame. Apples quality and good image distorts as we move onto gaming. Some fanboys won't recognize this, but it's the same. Several times a week new customers flood in, saying they want better support for gaming. Apple won't listen!

It's not Apple's problem. Even if Apple put the 760m/765m into the rMBP (which I really hoped they would do), it would still run badly. Blame the game developers.

That being said, honestly I see little incentive for devs to pander to the Mac gaming community. We've got a 10% market-share of the OS market, and the amount of people that play games on OS X is probably a tenth of that. From personal experience, none of my friends or colleagues that own Macs play games on them, and those that do use a PC.

If there were enough gamer Mac users, sure, developers would optimize for OpenGL. But that's not reality.

Hi all, just a quick update - I installed windows 8.1 with boot camp and updated the NVIDIA drivers.

Civ5 runs silky smooth and the fan doesn't kick in from the moment I load a large map like it did under OSX. Witches 2 is also hugely improved.

Glad to hear. But I would force fans to turn on under Windows...temps get uncomfortably hot when I play games under BootCamp.

 

[pgiguere1]

Yep, its really weird how game engine programmers still make blatant mistakes as these. The screen refreshes at 60fps - rendering faster does not make any sense at all - its wasted work.

Depends. It's not necessarily wasted since your game's frame rate is variable and never perfectly in sync with your monitor's refresh rate. You could for example have 60FPS on a 60Hz screen, but including frames that last 0.5 Hz that aren't even displayed, and others that last 2Hz. You have V-sync to solve that problem but it isn't a perfect solution either.

Interesting thing - OS X offers an API (CVDisplayLink) to synchronise your drawing to the monitor refresh interval - you can use that to make sure that your animation frames and the actual visible frame are as close apart in time as possible. To my knowledge, there is still no way to properly do this in Windows.

Interesting. I didn't know about CVDisplayLink. Perhaps the tech behind it is what OS X itself uses.

I remember reading a post from John Carmack than mentionned the differences between OS X and Windows and how OS X does "tear-free, retrace-synced desktop compositing" while Windows doesn't. What it does is try to compensate for the fact a refresh scan has a duration (the top of your screen refreshes 14 ms before the bottom) and draw new frames accordingly so you never get visible tearing. Windows on the other hand just draws frames as they come without compensation so that's why you get tearing when moving windows quickly.

 

[leman]

In Windows OS you have control over the core loop - no need for APIs such as CVDisplayLink at all.

Could you point me to a corresponding MSDN page? I looked all around it, but I didn't find a way to get a hardware screen refresh notification from the OS in Windows. I think you are talking about the render loop (which in OS X and Windows work in the same fashion).

 

[luffytubby]

It's not Apple's problem. Even if Apple put the 760m/765m into the rMBP (which I really hoped they would do), it would still run badly. Blame the game developers.

You're right. OSX only has 10-15% marketshare. So in itself it's an oxymoron to say that "if there were enough mac gamers". There aren't even enough Macs to warrant the software focus.


Never the less, Apple can't lay claim to that they can do entertainment in it's whole right. they can do music and film. But not gaming. And as I said, it's an important part of our culture now. I know lots of people who don't buy Macs for this reason, even if they want to make use of Apples other advantages like build quality, the stability of OSX and so on.

 

[Count Blah]

Lots of fanboys incapable of hearing thre truth. Lots of same attitudes when it comes to the iPad.

 

[byuister]

Could you point me to a corresponding MSDN page? I looked all around it, but I didn't find a way to get a hardware screen refresh notification from the OS in Windows. I think you are talking about the render loop (which in OS X and Windows work in the same fashion).

Programs can code it within. For instance:

while(toldtocontinue)
{
Render();
Update();

WaitForVsync();
}

 

[leman]

In Windows OS you have control over the core loop - no need for APIs such as CVDisplayLink at all.

Programs can code it within. For instance:

while(toldtocontinue)
{
Render();
Update();

WaitForVsync();
}

Sure. So what about user input? Your program will block in WaitForVsync(), resulting in potentially stuttery event processing. The best thing you can do is to perform your rendering on another thread (which would wait for v-sync eventually), while doing event processing on main thread and animation on the third one. This is actually very close to what the OS X display link offers you - but its benefit is also the precise frame timing info, which allows you to sync the animation more precisely.

 

[byuister]

Sure. So what about user input? Your program will block in WaitForVsync(), resulting in potentially stuttery event processing. The best thing you can do is to perform your rendering on another thread (which would wait for v-sync eventually), while doing event processing on main thread and animation on the third one. This is actually very close to what the OS X display link offers you - but its benefit is also the precise frame timing info, which allows you to sync the animation more precisely.

I see we've hijacked the thread for programming purposes

The example I gave was simply...an example.

Anyways, I'm not sure if DisplayLink is worth it. Sure, it's smooth, but if you're developing a game with mutiple objects in motion, you probably won't be able to discern a difference between DisplayLink and NSTimer - so why not just use NSTimer?

This isn't to mention DisplayLink is in another thread, which makes it fairly annoying to deal with multi-threading bugs. Everytime I use it I wonder if it's actually worth it...

Which brings me back to my original point. There are "good enough" alternatives that can do the job of DisplayLink with less time and less energy.

 

[Steve121178]

rMBP with dedicated GPU is the best portal gaming laptop on the market today.

It's not in the top 50.

 

[snaky69]

So I wonder why my fan kicks in so much :-( I'm tempted to fire up windows 8.1 in a dedicated bootcamp partition just to check out the differences. I've heard that some games use an emulator to port to osx which can degrade performance.

Because you're taxing the CPU and GPU. When you do that, they consume more power and thus produce more heat. That heat has to be extracted somehow or they'll melt themselves into oblivion. So your fans ramp up.

That's how it's supposed to work, and how it's always worked on computers so long as they've had fans, I'm not sure what the problem is here?

 

[leman]

Which brings me back to my original point. There are "good enough" alternatives that can do the job of DisplayLink with less time and less energy.

I see your point. Still, I am a perfectionist I guess you will hate the way I do it - I render everything to a FBO on separate thread, using a different OpenGL context, which is shared with the NSView context, and blit the FBO over to the view on the displaylink callback. The UI is then rendered on the top of it. This allows me to easily work with HiDPI stuff, e.g. display UI in retina resolution while doing the scene rendering in lower resolution to have better performance.
Furthermore, the user can potentially tweak the performance/quality tradeoff by changing the dimensions of the render target.

But you are right of course, we are derailing the thread

 

[dusk007]

For all those that want to play some older games with less noise you can limit it in Windows. You can clock the GPU slightly lower but more can be gained from more aggressive power saving on the CPU side. Play at balanced at the least but better power saving power plan. You can also change the cpu time that can be used max to some 70%.
Generally most older ego shooters need very very little of the Quad Core power. That is because Consoles are really poor in that department and if at all they only add a view GPU features to the engine but the cpu part like AI, physics is ported more directly. The more efficient power saving plans also are less aggressive at clocking higher which can cause some lag but usually it is just like running it with a older slower cpu.

Overall though I notice the same with my rMBP. Gaming is more noisy than on my older 2010 15" MBP even though that also hit max fan speeds while gaming. The rMBP just makes more noise.

For all those that didn't notice yet. The 750M is locked to 925Mhz while the Nvidia Specs speak of 967Mhz + ~15% higher turbo boost. Maximum boost clock is on standard nvidia spec 1160Mhz usually yet Apple locked it to 925Mhz as well. So that is really just a 650M with more VRAM. I only found one tool that allows for more clocks and the 750M seems to run without a hitch on 1060Mhz but +135Mhz was the maximum overclock possible via that tool. I found no way to change that Turbo boost clock which would be a much nicer, safer and more on demand over clock.
I wish Anandtech would release a review and loudly complain about that. There really seems no reason to disable turbo boost. If the chip is too hot it won't activate and the fans run on full speed in gaming anyway. All Nvidia boost would do is take some cpu performance and put it toward the gpu.
925Mhz vs 1060Mhz changes neither CPU nor GPU temps by even a single degree Celsius in my testing.

 

[undesign]

True, fanboys can drop the false notion of "rmpb is the best portable gaming laptop in the market".

I don't know how they say this with a straight face.

LOL, I completely agree.

 

[Xgm541]

So I wonder why my fan kicks in so much :-( I'm tempted to fire up windows 8.1 in a dedicated bootcamp partition just to check out the differences. I've heard that some games use an emulator to port to osx which can degrade performance.

I believe that witcher is native but I cant say for sure. Many games are however ports or used in an emulator type wrapper.

Also the game you are trying to play, Witcher, is very demanding as has been said before.

 

[goMac]

I've heard that there are issues in the Nvidia drivers on Mavericks. Hopefully fixes will be coming.

Another thing to remember for people moving from older machines is if you're trying to use the Retina resolution for games, that could be a huge strain.

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This isn't to mention DisplayLink is in another thread, which makes it fairly annoying to deal with multi-threading bugs. Everytime I use it I wonder if it's actually worth it...

This is a pro, not a con. Don't block the main thread, especially if you get called but for some reason are not ready to render.

 

[reery]

Play in Windows/Bootcamp, it will speed up your games a lot.

Also activate vsync or set a fps-limiter to 30-45 fps so the fan won't spin up at max revs everytime you play a game.

The Mac drivers also have some issues: Throttling the GPU when there is not that much on screen, and as soon as a scene starts getting demanding the clocks take a few seconds to increase. Result is a decent but unnecessary lag as the GPU is quite strong, but the drivers aren't.

 

[Hawkler]

Play in Windows/Bootcamp, it will speed up your games a lot.

Also activate vsync or set a fps-limiter to 30-45 fps so the fan won't spin up at max revs everytime you play a game.
.

That's my experience, my framerate was much better on windows/bootcamp and the fans don't kick in as often. How does the vsync setting work on the games that support it? I didn't know it can limit fan noise...

 

[leman]

That's my experience, my framerate was much better on windows/bootcamp and the fans don't kick in as often. How does the vsync setting work on the games that support it? I didn't know it can limit fan noise...

The vsync setting blocks the drawing until the display has been refreshed. This ensures that the program does not wastefully draw frames which never get displayed - and in turn can save energy.

 

[warplane95]

rMBP with dedicated GPU is the best portal gaming laptop on the market today. Make sure you're running the latest software updates to maximise performance on your machine. But yeah, you won't find a better laptop on the market than the high-end 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

Hahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Youre cute, rMBP will never ve a high gaming laptop, he only have a gt750m