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mslilyelise

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 10, 2021
129
158
British Columbia, Canada
Just curious to know how many folks out there have seen a marked improvement in graphics performance under Sonoma? I haven't seen a post about this yet.

I'm not sure if it's graphics stack improvements, or Game Mode, but I've seen a marked improvement in most games running on Sonoma. I figured Game Mode was a nice gesture towards the focus they're placing on game development with the Game Porting Toolkit, etc, but I figured I'd be seeing a marginal improvement, at best. Instead, it's quite profound. My M2 Air is mostly a writing machine, but I do like playing games on occasion. Due to some glitch somewhere, the FPS counter isn't showing up for games running from Steam like it was in Ventura, so these are just seat-of-the-pants observations.

Euro Truck Simulator is one of my time-sink, play-to-relax games, and previously set to "Medium" settings in 1080P resolution I was able to hit 35-40fps. Now I can set the same game to "Ultra" settings, and I'm seeing roughly the same frame rate. Another example is Alien Isolation. Under Ventura, I was lucky to hit 45fps at Medium settings. I'm hitting 60fps+ with everything cranked up to maximum. Looks gorgeous and is liquid-smooth.

It's worth noting that neither of these games, to my knowledge, is optimized for Apple Silicon. To see such a huge jump in graphics performance while the games are running under Rosetta is fantastic. If this is a result of Game Mode, then it certainly is no gimmick. The one game I currently have that is AS optimized, The Long Dark, was already hitting 60fps with all settings turned up in Ventura so I can't tell if it's actually faster in Sonoma.

Anyway feel free to discuss, chat, share your own observations. It'll be great when the Steam FPS counter is working again so I could get some hard numbers for what I'm seeing.
 
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That sounds fantastic. Alien Isolation uses OpenGL and SSAO kills the performance on Macs. Did you use SSAO? 60 fps at max settings on M2 Air is quite unbelievable.
 
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That sounds fantastic. Alien Isolation uses OpenGL and SSAO kills the performance on Macs. Did you use SSAO? 60 fps at max settings on M2 Air is quite unbelievable.

Yeah I don't quite believe it myself. I can't run Metal HUD because it's an OpenGL app, and Steam refuses to show me an FPS count. Suppose I could try installing Steam Beta. I just fired it up again to test just now after setting the command to launch Metal HUD but no dice. Double checked all my settings, and aside from motion blur which I can't stand, everything is turned up as high as it will go, and the game resolution is 1920x1200. SSAO is enabled.

Once I get an FPS counter of some kind going I can confirm what my eyeballs are telling me.
 
Yeah I don't quite believe it myself. I can't run Metal HUD because it's an OpenGL app, and Steam refuses to show me an FPS count. Suppose I could try installing Steam Beta. I just fired it up again to test just now after setting the command to launch Metal HUD but no dice. Double checked all my settings, and aside from motion blur which I can't stand, everything is turned up as high as it will go, and the game resolution is 1920x1200. SSAO is enabled.

Once I get an FPS counter of some kind going I can confirm what my eyeballs are telling me.

Have you tried turning off full screen and running it in windowed mode? I remember I couldn't see the fps counter in Metro Exodus but it had simply landed outside the screen. You could also change the place for the counter to another corner and see if it helps. I ran the game on my Mac Studio 24c on Monterey and saw that setting Shadow mapping to ultra has the same impact as SSAO. So those two have the biggest impact on the frame rate. With these settings I get 53 fps at 1080p in the first scene and 36 fps at 4K. If I change Shadow mapping to ultra and turn on SSAO I get 20 at 1080p and 7 fps at 4K.

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I haven't tried windowed mode, I could give that a shot. I'm curious now that you mention it, Sonoma's "Game Mode" only activates when an assumed game program launches to full screen, it's not supposed to work on windowed programs. So I should check and see how hard the performance is hit if you window the app.

You definitely feel the hit from SSAO being turned on, but the games I'ved up to this point (Bendy & The Ink Machine, Alien Isolation, The Long Dark, Firewatch, War For The Overworld) still seem to run incredibly smoothly, when compared to the performance in Ventura. I just updated to public beta 2 last night so I'll check it out later today.
 
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