View Single Post
Wrao
Yarp
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
 
2014-11-09, 16:38

Since I installed Yosemite I've seen *major* performance drops in a few games that I play. One of them the FPS went from a stable 300+ at 1440p(older game) down to barely capable of staying above 100fps with regular drops to 60 or worse. I lowered the resolution in that game to 1080p and now it is going stable at 500fps *but* even then I still get occasional drops down to 60 or worse. Which is insane, and something that *never* happened prior to Yosemite.

The other two games I have played recently don't have FPS monitoring in-game(at least not that I know how to turn on) but just observationally each feels like it is struggling more.

Oh and also about that first game, it is Mac and Windows compatible and when I boot into Windows 7 to play it it handles 1440p perfectly smooth with no drops in FPS at all.

It would appear very likely that Yosemite has either created some major glitches with graphics performance or something along those lines.

So yes, in a roundabout way, Macs are getting worse at being 'gaming rigs', but it might well just be due to Apple's incompetence more than anything else.


My completely uninformed speculation is that Apple develops OS X for laptops primarily and doesn't really think about their desktops at all. I think that they work in as many power saving and power throttling measures as possible for the sake of battery life and heat but then some of these things carry over onto their iMacs to where unreasonable drops in performance become more frequent. Don't really have much support for that idea though, that's just sort of what 'feels like' is happening. Like the system is constantly trying to get in the way and 'handle' things to a degree where it interferes with the things actually being done.

I read a blog post a few weeks ago talking about serious performance drops in some graphics design related applications as well, like serious not just 'oh this is working a little worse' just outright 'wow, this is borderline unusable now'. So it could well just be a glitch, but it could also be a consequence of how Yosemite does things too, or both. My iMac may be 3 years old but for a high-end desktop 3 years should still be able to keep up with modern demands really, the pace of development isn't *that* fast and my iMac, by the numbers still holds its own against current iMacs for the most part. So it's really not a question of not having the power. It has to be something in Yosemite.

And honestly, as I talked about in the Yosemite thread, I've also been seeing some mouse performance issues which are equally baffling and seemingly impossible but yet here they are.
  quote