Some Performance observations re: Fortnite Battle Royale in macOS and Win10

[PJivan]

Total War Britannia runs really really well on Metal, some settings btter on mac, some combinations beter on bootcamp with my 580

 

[Huntn]

So, during this past Christmas break, my sons and I played quite a bit of Fortnite Battle Royale (them mostly in Xbox One, and me on my iMac, dual booting High Sierra and Bootcamp Windows 10). For a few days, we were playing it so frequently in Win10, that I just left Windows running without rebooting back into macOS. My iMac's specs are as follows: late 2012, 21.5" 1080p screen, 2.9 GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 1 TB HD, nVidia GT 650M 512MB GPU. I'm running nVidia's Web Drivers (up-to-date as of this morning).

We have Google Fiber gigabit internet, which is hard-wired straight into my Gigabit-equipped iMac.

The reason that I tried out the Windows version is because my initial experience running the game in macOS was so negative that it had me concerned that maybe my Mac was too long in the tooth to play it well. What I found out, instead was a little bit different.

Here are my observations after playing Fortnite on both OS's:

1. The loading screens and transitions are much smoother and reliable in Windows. In High Sierra, I experience random errors, (mostly failure to join a game pop-ups). Sometimes, I would have to quit out of Fortnite, then quit out of the Epic Launcher, both of which are laborious and slow to wait for. My son, at one point, while waiting to join a game in High Sierra, asked me if my Mac was frozen up.

2. After having played around with the settings to achieve the best results, I learned that it will only play on lowest settings at 640x480 in High Sierra, with a frame rate that varies wildly between 5 FPS to 60 FPS, even on loading screens. On Windows, I can run on 720p, with all settings lowest, except for draw distance, which I max out), for obvious reasons. These settings give me a frame rate from between 40-60 FPS. Even with the in-game frame cap turned up to 120 FPS, we noticed no difference in measured frame rate.

3. Once in-game, the differences between the two OS's mostly melted away, giving an enjoyable playing experience. The only hitch I encountered was a slight stutter when scoping in with the game's sniper rifle, an action which was smooth in Windows.

4. Regarding menu performance under High Sierra: one thing I quickly learned not to do is to bring up the menu to chance graphic settings once in-game. Doing so introduced the same transition slowness I noticed in #1 above. Sometimes, the game would freeze up and I would was forced to command-tab out of it, and restart my Mac.

5. Please notice that I am not shocked that a Mac of mine's vintage experiences problems playing the game. Also, please note that I am fully aware that the game is in Early Access, which means it's not fully optimized. What I hope to do is present mine and my sons's experiences playing the game. The differences between the performance in Windows 10 and macOS High Sierra are disappointing, and I can only hope that further Metal development brings performance gains more on-par with Windows 10.

I’m not a programmer, but it seems to me games are designed for Windows or Consoles, and at best, the Mac is an after thought, with programming cobbled together with the extra baggage to get it to work. This is not new. Back in 2000, I had a $2000+ Mac tower, and a $800 PC, both had the same graphic card in them, and playing Unreal Tournament, the PC produced twice the frame rate (80ish fps) as the Mac.

 

[mpConroe]

Hello, I'm on my holidays in Poland and I thought I will do a video about Fortnite on my 2012 Mac mini, enjoy!

 

[ursulahx]

Game's running much better on my iMac since I updated to Season 5. More consistent frame rate, next to no hitching and smoother performance overall. Graphics actually look sharper, even though I haven't changed my settings. Guess there must have been some work done under the hood. Here's hoping!

 

[Irishman]

Game's running much better on my iMac since I updated to Season 5. More consistent frame rate, next to no hitching and smoother performance overall. Graphics actually look sharper, even though I haven't changed my settings. Guess there must have been some work done under the hood. Here's hoping!

Me too! I'm not sure if it's season 5 or Apple's latest macos update, but I am enjoying it much more.

 

[marksatt]

Much work has been done on all fronts across the game team, engine team, with macOS specific changes as well as general platform agnostic optimisations. Perfection is probably still a way off, but I am happy that you are seeing an improvement.

 

[marksatt]

Hello, I'm on my holidays in Poland and I thought I will do a video about Fortnite on my 2012 Mac mini, enjoy!

That Mac Mini has an Intel HD 4000 GPU, this is under the required minimum specification on macOS as it isn’t fast enough. We need an Intel HD 5000. The Mini might play Fortnite better under Windows but it is still pretty far from the minimum GPU I personally would play on.

 

[ursulahx]

Much work has been done on all fronts across the game team, engine team, with macOS specific changes as well as general platform agnostic optimisations. Perfection is probably still a way off, but I am happy that you are seeing an improvement.

Thanks, Mark, and thanks to the Epic team (yourself included, if relevant) for all the work.

Can you give us any insight on the one remaining major issue, which is that the loading screen freezes for a long time when launching the first game of a session? (This is the loading screen which precedes the starting island - quite often the screen won't clear until the game itself has started and the unlucky player finds him or herself floating in mid-air, having been thrown out of the bus at the end of the timer.)

 

[MrUNIMOG]

That Mac Mini has an Intel HD 4000 GPU, this is under the required minimum specification on macOS as it isn’t fast enough. We need an Intel HD 5000. The Mini might play Fortnite better under Windows but it is still pretty far from the minimum GPU I personally would play on.

Isn't the 4000 actually the minimum requirement? It says so in the FAQ at least: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/de/faq

 

[marksatt]

Isn't the 4000 actually the minimum requirement? It says so in the FAQ at least: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/de/faq

Fortnite team have updated the FAQ to list what they believe should be the minimum for Mac, which they’ve set as the Intel Iris Pro 5200.

 

[marksatt]

Thanks, Mark, and thanks to the Epic team (yourself included, if relevant) for all the work.

Can you give us any insight on the one remaining major issue, which is that the loading screen freezes for a long time when launching the first game of a session? (This is the loading screen which precedes the starting island - quite often the screen won't clear until the game itself has started and the unlucky player finds him or herself floating in mid-air, having been thrown out of the bus at the end of the timer.)

The long initial loading screen is the shader pipeline cache I was taking about. We record all the shader pipelines that are used when QA play the game internally and then that list is used by the game to create all the necessary runtime Metal shader pipeline objects. That way we don’t create so many during gameplay, only those we didn’t see during our testing passes. The trade off is increased loading times.

 

[MrUNIMOG]

Fortnite team have updated the FAQ to list what they believe should be the minimum for Mac, which they’ve set as the Intel Iris Pro 5200.

Oh, that's quite a steep increase.
They haven't updated the german version of the FAQ yet, that's why I didn't know.

 

[jeanlain]

The long initial loading screen is the shader pipeline cache I was taking about. We record all the shader pipelines that are used when QA play the game internally and then that list is used by the game to create all the necessary runtime Metal shader pipeline objects. That way we don’t create so many during gameplay, only those we didn’t see during our testing passes. The trade off is increased loading times.

I don't play fortnite, but I noticed that other Metal games (from Feral) take a long time to load only after install or after an update (to the game or OS). Other than that, the loading is quick.

 

[Irishman]

Okay, so I wanted to give it a few days of consistency before I offered any numbers to you all. I am now able to get a steady 60fps on low settings (the one exception is that I bump up antialiasing to the lowest setting cuz it's ugly without it).

This is incredibly nice. The only thing I need to do is run these settings on Windows 10 and share my results.

 

[marksatt]

I don't play fortnite, but I noticed that other Metal games (from Feral) take a long time to load only after install or after an update (to the game or OS). Other than that, the loading is quick.

I have a fix for that - I did say that the caching code wasn’t perfect! In a future release only the first run after a game or OS update should be quite so slow, after that it should be noticeably quicker.

Apparently the game team found some issues with the caching on Nvidia that really impact the usefulness of the cache on the NV GPUs. Anyone running on Nvidia under macOS is not getting the benefit expected. That is going to take longer to sort out.
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Okay, so I wanted to give it a few days of consistency before I offered any numbers to you all. I am now able to get a steady 60fps on low settings (the one exception is that I bump up antialiasing to the lowest setting cuz it's ugly without it).

This is incredibly nice. The only thing I need to do is run these settings on Windows 10 and share my results.

I expect there is still an underlying performance difference. Lots more work to do there and no way I can tell anyone how long it will take to close the gap. It is a “How long is a ball of string?” kind of thing.

 

[ursulahx]

I expect there is still an underlying performance difference. Lots more work to do there and no way I can tell anyone how long it will take to close the gap. It is a “How long is a ball of string?” kind of thing.

Mark, I don't expect you to account for every new bug that crops up, but you may or may not be aware that since the release of v5.20, there's been a new problem for Mac users. The first game of a session loads slowly as usual, with the 'frozen' loading screen. The second game, however, crashes as soon as READY is clicked. This is now a consistent problem, and Mac users are currently raging about it on the relevant forums (some Windows 8.1 users are complaining too, but I'm unable to determine if it's exactly the same problem).

I'm mentioning it to you, because I thought I detected that the 'frozen' loading screen on the first game was 'frozen' for slightly less time than before (when it cleared I was still on the bus, not floating in mid-air). I wondered if an attempt had been made to fix the long loading time caused by the shader pipeline cache, and in doing so other problems had been caused down the line. I appreciate you may not know the answer, or may not have time to share it, but thanks in advance.

 

[marksatt]

Mark, I don't expect you to account for every new bug that crops up, but you may or may not be aware that since the release of v5.20, there's been a new problem for Mac users. The first game of a session loads slowly as usual, with the 'frozen' loading screen. The second game, however, crashes as soon as READY is clicked. This is now a consistent problem, and Mac users are currently raging about it on the relevant forums (some Windows 8.1 users are complaining too, but I'm unable to determine if it's exactly the same problem).

I'm mentioning it to you, because I thought I detected that the 'frozen' loading screen on the first game was 'frozen' for slightly less time than before (when it cleared I was still on the bus, not floating in mid-air). I wondered if an attempt had been made to fix the long loading time caused by the shader pipeline cache, and in doing so other problems had been caused down the line. I appreciate you may not know the answer, or may not have time to share it, but thanks in advance.

As stated earlier I don’t work on Fortnite team so I am not an oracle of Fortnite bugs and thus I hadn’t seen or heard about this. Send me a link via DM to the active discussion and I’ll make sure this info gets to the right place.

What I do know for sure is that none of my changes to shader precompilation are in 5.20 so they definitely aren’t the cause.

 

[ursulahx]

As stated earlier I don’t work on Fortnite team so I am not an oracle of Fortnite bugs and thus I hadn’t seen or heard about this. Send me a link via DM to the active discussion and I’ll make sure this info gets to the right place.

Done, and thank you.

 

[marksatt]

Done, and thank you.

It is being looked at - the feeling is that this is a known bug which will be hot-fixed shortly.

 

[ursulahx]

It is being looked at - the feeling is that this is a known bug which will be hot-fixed shortly.

There was a patch just came out an hour or so ago. I've downloaded it, but I haven't had a chance to play to see if it works.

 

[marksatt]

There was a patch just came out an hour or so ago. I've downloaded it, but I haven't had a chance to play to see if it works.

Let me know what happens either way.

 

[ursulahx]

Two patches this week, and the second has fixed the problem for me. Success!

 

[albertohurst]

Never played any games on mac since I just use them for work only while I am pretty they wont respond the same as my windows machine for gaming purpose.
But after reading the above replies I guess the new patches can fix the random lag and other issues.

 

[ursulahx]

v5.30 is working better for me than ever, even the frozen loading screen problem has been largely resolved. But a lot of people have reported problems with textures which make the game unplayable - black bars across the screen, transparent walls, skins with missing sections, weird colours. Everyone I've seen complaining has either an NVIDIA or an Intel graphics card (as far as I can tell), whereas I have AMD. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

I don't want to be one of those people who sits back and says, "it's working fine for me, I don't care." Mac users are a community, so if I can help my fellow users I'd like to find a way.

 

[marksatt]

v5.30 is working better for me than ever, even the frozen loading screen problem has been largely resolved. But a lot of people have reported problems with textures which make the game unplayable - black bars across the screen, transparent walls, skins with missing sections, weird colours. Everyone I've seen complaining has either an NVIDIA or an Intel graphics card (as far as I can tell), whereas I have AMD. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

I don't want to be one of those people who sits back and says, "it's working fine for me, I don't care." Mac users are a community, so if I can help my fellow users I'd like to find a way.

There is a known bug on Nvidia, not so sure about Intel though. We believe we know what the fix is for Nvidia, but I don’t know when it will go out.

If there is information about Intel then I’d like to see that. I wouldn’t expect the same issues on Intel provided the OS is up to date. Holdouts still running 10.12 might be hitting driver bugs though.