Improving FPS on high-end iMac

[Domino8282]

Strange as I had two displays running 1920x1200 and when both were on it would lag more in the game, but when I disabled the 2nd one, it wouldn't lag anymore and got better fps. Surprised you didn't get that.

Yeah to be honest I was surprised too... I tried both turning off the monitor and going into Catalyst control panel and disabling it,... really didn't change framerate at all.

It looks like the things that are impacting framerate the most are those little checkboxes at the bottom of the graphics settings. Also, changing shadows to "Environment Only" instead of "Full" helps tremendously. The checkbox that affects fps the most seems to be "Multipass terrain." By unchecking that, trilinear filtering, fullscreen fx, and projected textures, I'm able to keep everything else at Ultra settings and get 40-43fps.

To be honest, I'm probably being picky here. I just logged in on my wife's 2010 iMac and she only gets 17 fps with these same settings.

 

[Domino8282]

Also, for anyone who is interested about how the SSD impacts gaming - if you're into MMO's, there seems to be a MASSIVE performance increase when zoning.

Obviously, I'm comparing apples and oranges with my wife's 2010 iMac and my fully-loaded 2011, but her load times are around 13 seconds when zoning, and mine is around 5 seconds. I would think that this could largely be attributed to the SSD (correct me if I'm wrong).

 

[Elven]

This has me worried as I was hoping to use my iMac for EvE Online.

 

[inihility]

To be honest, I'm probably being picky here. I just logged in on my wife's 2010 iMac and she only gets 17 fps with these same settings.

I'm running Rift on a 2010 iMac as well (similar to your wife), and I only get about 17 as well :-(

If there's anything you find about improving FPS on either iMac's please do share!

 

[andrei.barbuta]

It must be a game problem. Not optimized. You should check their forums.

 

[Johnf1285]

On my p67 i5 2500k @ 4ghz box with a 2gb HD 6950 card also OC'd, I couldn't crank the settings up to the max and keep it at 60fps. At mid settings it seemed to lag a bit too. It's probably the game. I was running it at 1920x1080 w/ vysnc.

I uninstalled the demo and went back to World of Warcraft. Rift was just too clunky for me. I'm not a huge gamer anyway, infact all I play is wow... which leads me to ask myself why the hell I sold my mac and built a gaming PC!>?

 

[h00ligan]

You're very likely setting a specific directx setting to on, that has virtually no impact on the graphics but kills the graphics card.. happens all the time.

My guess would be the big thread at the top of their tech forum:

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?176320-General-Steps-For-Low-FPS-Issues

specifically about low fps, would probably answer this question better than macrumors.

It would be worth looking to see if it is active on all cores... my guess is no, or incorrectly..

Hyperthreading can actually cause problems with games..

here is another thread about the game performance..http://forums.riftgame.com/archive/index.php/t-134104.html?

there's a lot of info out there for improving performance.