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Tadros

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 29, 2007
378
23
New Jersey
I love Starcraft 2! Has anyone noticed its performance on OSX? I am running OSX and Starcraft 2 on my Macbook Pro, I also have Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro. When using Starcraft 2 under OS X, I MUST place all my graphical settings down to low, and even then the game asks me to lower my graphics settings, but on Windows 7 everything runs TOTALLY smooth on Medium-High settings. Being that I am using the same hardware for both operating systems, it makes me wonder, what is it about OS X that makes gaming so difficult?

Anyway, I am mostly wondering how people are doing in the campaign and in multiplayer? Are there any build orders you feel work best? Have you come to any sections of the game that you found too difficult? So far I'm cruising in the campaign on Normal, and I am eagerly looking forward to playing the game again on a harder difficulty level. Has anyone here reached GOLD in multiplayer? Also has anyone else noticed that higher level players are playing the NOVICE training online? It gets kind of annoying when trying to sharping my skills and people who are insane are playing on the NOVICE maps.
 

aki

macrumors 6502a
Mar 2, 2004
688
0
Japan
As regards the whole Novice Practice Games thing - I think there is probably a fair population of people who have just bought and installed the game and don't really know how novice Novice is actually meant to be, and want to play Novice games to get up to speed before doing their "real" placement matches - even if actually they were quite experienced at SC/BW or have already played plenty of RTSes.

I agree it would probably be better for people to just play their placement matches and then ladder up or down from there.

Ah well at least with the novice maps even if you loose, because the rocks prevent rushes, you get to practice your build orders.
 

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,314
34
1. It's not OS X. Computers games have been optimized for Windows over the past decade or two, but the developers don't really put that much effort into it on osx as they need.
 

TMRaven

macrumors 68020
Nov 5, 2009
2,099
1
It's not the "optimization for windows" either. Blizzard focuses just as much effort under osx than windows for their games. The real culprit is apple's outdated gpu drivers. If you read the front-page rumors of this site, you will see that they're hopefully releasing an update soon. Barefeats did an hd swap to see performance difference between old and new drivers ('10 iMac has new drivers) and the difference in most games is 20-30fps.
 

UKBeast

macrumors 6502a
Jan 21, 2010
623
53
Turkey
It's not the "optimization for windows" either. Blizzard focuses just as much effort under osx than windows for their games. The real culprit is apple's outdated gpu drivers. If you read the front-page rumors of this site, you will see that they're hopefully releasing an update soon. Barefeats did an hd swap to see performance difference between old and new drivers ('10 iMac has new drivers) and the difference in most games is 20-30fps.

so when the new drivers come, overall mac os performance will be almost same with windows ha ?
 

CptnJustc

macrumors 6502
Jan 19, 2007
311
153
It's partly poor drivers, but 10.6.4 appears to have some deeper issues:

https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/2...ith-nvidia-graphics-cards-on-mac-os-x-10-6-4/

I'd bet that the latter is more important than the former. Most games I've played have never seen as much of a disparity in performance between operating systems as I've seen in SC2 on my 2010 MBP and 2008 Mac Pro. Hopefully, 10.6.5 or something along these lines will help quite a bit:

https://www.macrumors.com/2010/08/04/apple-seeds-snow-leopard-graphics-update-to-developers/
 
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