Overall Spore Mac Performance

[kk1ro]

Hi,

I bought the Galactic Edition of Spore yesterday and I'm loving this game!
But there's something I don't quite get...
I play the game at Max Settings on my MBP (2.4GHz Santa-Rosa, nVidia 8600M GT 256MB, 2GB RAM - upgrading to 4GB soon) and it seems to struggle a lot to get a good enough framerate...
But a friend of mine has an Asus with roughly the same specs and the game runs smoothly on his PC...
Is this a driver-related problem or does it have something to do with Cider requiring more processing power to run?

Also, do you think we'll be seeing performance patches (like a Cider framework update) in the future or some new drivers?

 

[kaltsasa]

I play on Minimum graphics on my 20" imac with x1600 (I think 1680x1050 is a lot of pixels to push with this 128 meg card).

I've heard the overhead of cider ranges in the 10-20% range, and if that's the case I'm impressed at that given the exotic nature of what it does (translating DirectX calls to OpenGL mainly). I'm just happy to be playing games on my Mac I suppose, though I'm hoping that increased Mac game purchases will encourage developers to start developing their Mac games in house, not outsourced ports, not cider wrapped windows games, honest Blizzard style in house Mac versions.

 

[spyker3292]

That's cider for you . Makes games run crappier on Macs (like the GMA 950 issue).

 

[vagarach]

Yup, cider in action. Direct 3D is only going to run at full speed in windows, so your best option is to use bootcamp.

I tried the creature creator and it works perfectly on my mbp (in osx), but then it isn't doing much, and spore has much more to it than just that.

 

[eagleis]

Yup, cider in action. Direct 3D is only going to run at full speed in windows, so your best option is to use bootcamp.

I tried the creature creator and it works perfectly on my mbp (in osx), but then it isn't doing much, and spore has much more to it than just that.

I have a MBP with a 8600 and spore runs like a pile of simmering crap on both osx and vista. We are talking a constant 20fps or lower on high during the second stage. There is no way a game with the graphics (even on high settings) of spore should run this bad on a newer MBP. There's something not right.

 

[kk1ro]

Oh well, I'll run it on Medium for now and hope for a Cider or driver update that brings a significant framerate boost!
Thanks to all

 

[polar-blair]

I have noticed a lot of jerky movement, especially when I raise the settings past med on my 20"inch Al iMac, because it has been ported over with cider = crappy cheap copy, would spore run better on my mac if I installed it onto my windows partition and run it in VM ware, or will there not be much difference?

 

[Keleko]

I have a MBP with a 8600 and spore runs like a pile of simmering crap on both osx and vista. We are talking a constant 20fps or lower on high during the second stage. There is no way a game with the graphics (even on high settings) of spore should run this bad on a newer MBP. There's something not right.

Have you updated your graphics drivers? nVidia drivers on Vista were known to be bad until only the past few months. If you're just using the drivers Apple provided with bootcamp, then you're using crappy drivers for gaming. http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ has updated installable drivers for a MBP with 8600 chips.

 

[beige matchbox]

On my Mac Pro with 8800GT most of the time I'm getting tearing issues which makes me think the fps is well above the screen refresh, at other times, when theres 2 or 3 groups of animals on screen in creature era I get a frame rate that looks to be well under 20...

This is of course with no AA/AF because as far as i know theres no way to force it on under macos, but all other in game settings are on high.


Bit of a pain, but it's plenty good enough, and for the sake of some AA/AF it's not worth rebooting into XP

 

[eagleis]

Have you updated your graphics drivers? nVidia drivers on Vista were known to be bad until only the past few months. If you're just using the drivers Apple provided with bootcamp, then you're using crappy drivers for gaming. http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ has updated installable drivers for a MBP with 8600 chips.

You can't play spore without the latest drivers installed. It comes up with a error message telling you to upgrade. I found this out because I tried installing spore on my desktop which had the 175.16 drivers installed. Upgraded to 175.19 and it allowed me to play.

I'm going to try installing spore on my wife's laptop Asus m50 which has the nvidia 9500m gs video card and see how it runs. The performance should be the same as the 8600.