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Topic: Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852 (Read 16976 times) previous topic - next topic

Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852

I've really been enjoying Simutrans. A nice zen game for me (no competitors) to relax with.

Anyways, the performance seems to be pretty poor for me. If I run at the default resolution (windowed), 704x560 I get ~25 FPS quite consistently. But if I maximize (zoom) the window to the full screen (not fullscreen mode), which is effectively 1440x852, then my performance goes down to ~17 FPS. It's playable, but only barely. I'm worried that if I start getting deeper into the game with a lot of convoys the poor performance will be prohibitive.

Also, fullscreen mode doesn't work. It seems like the game runs fine but the graphics are all messed up. Is this normal for Mac?

Is this normal performance for Mac or is there something wrong here? What can I do to improve performance? Thank you!

15" Macbook Pro 2,2
2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
3 GB RAM
128 GB ATI Radeon X1600

I'm running Simutrans 102.2.2-3122 usually with pak96.comic, though changing the pak doesn't seem to affect performance.

Re: Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852

Reply #1 –
It really depends on the SDL; maybe copying 16 bit to the screen is very slow on a MAC. No clue, and none of the current developer has a MAC at the moment. Actually fps is really not important to simutrans, the game runs well with 10fps. I would just set in your simuconf.tab
Code: [Select]
frame_per_second = 10

About fullscreen: if SDL fullscreen mode does not work, then simutrans will not have full screen. It really relies on SDL about this. GRphics messed up is most likely an SDL error too.

Re: Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852

Reply #2 –
Thanks for replying. I wondered if it is simply SDL to blame. I changed the frames_per_second setting and that seems to have helped a bit.

I mostly want this to improve the responsiveness of the interface (i.e., clicking buttons, windows closing, panning around the map, rotating, etc). But it does seem that it's the graphics that are causing the problem not the processing required to run the game.

What's the typical performance like on Windows or Linux?

Re: Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852

Reply #3 –
It really depends. I have only a 1280x1024 screen, which is not so demanding (the problem is, that many modern graphic drivers are not caring much about 16Bit images; in the worst case the CPU has to do the rendering, which is demanding on larger screens).

The more people travel the more demanding a games is. Generally after 2 million people per month/2000 convois/2000 stations less than 10 fps are needed even on faster CPUs. I have one game that only runs in optimized version and is unusable with the normal version. (Since I do not own a MAC, I have to use the nightly builts and distribute them; even though they have debugging code with less optimisation).
 

Re: Poor performance on Mac, ~17 FPS at 1440x852

Reply #4 –
Alright, thanks for the info. Actually, 1280x1024 is slightly more demanding than 1440 * 900, at least as far as the number of pixels go.

Well, so far it hasn't seemed to go below the ~17 FPS no matter the size of the map nor as I've built my transportation network up. We'll see. I'm really liking this game. Maybe I'll have to dual boot later on the down the road.  Thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it!