[devNevyn]

I have a G4 733 with a GeForce 2 TwinView (essentially just a GF2MX with an extra ADC).

Tried playing Warcraft 3 on OS X 10.1.
At 1024x768x32bit, I get about four (4) FPS. In 640x480x16bit, it's playable, as long as I stay out of battles.

Tried it in 10.2. No change.

Tried in 9.2. No change.

This is with no other apps running.

Anyone knows what the *hell* is wrong?

Thanks a *lot* for any help.

[IamBob]

This is expected of Blizzard. See Diablo 2.

It's nice that they make the effort to port them but the performance is less than stellar. I wish they would just contract-out the porting to a more capable outfit.

Also, I find it odd that they even bothered with an OS9 version. I wouldn't have wasted the effort. There are still a lot of mac gamers on that side of the fence (I suppose) but Apple has been pretty clear, the future is in OS X.

I get 50-60 FPS with Quake3 (alliance mod, high quality+) when it's not the only app running and about 6 FPS with D2 LOD when it is the only thing running....something is seriously wrong.

[Adam Betts]

You can expect a 20% or better improvement in Warcraft III 1.1 with MacOS X 10.2.1

[Norm1985]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
You can expect a 20% or better improvement in Warcraft III 1.1 with MacOS X 10.2.1

And I can see how you have 10.2.1, but how did you get 1.1 of WarCraft III?

[nforcer]

Like yourself, I also get a horrible framerate during battles in WC3. The OS 9 version isn't too bad, but the OS X version is not doing something right. (If I can get higher framerates in Quake 3 under OS X than I can in the OS 9 version, there is little reason the OS X version of WC3 should not be able to get higher framerates as well.)

I've emailed Blizzard about the performance problems with some test results, but they seemed to completely ignore my comments and told me to turn down graphics detail options I had already turned down.

Regarding the 20% statistic, I recall reading an article on one of the mac games sites that this came about within 30 minutes after Apple demonstrated OpenGL Profiler to Blizzard or something. Whether or not Blizzard will include these performance improvements in a 1.1 update or require Mac OS X 10.2.1 remains to be seen (unless Adam has other sources he doesn't mind revealing )

[Gul Banana]

I must say, that is strangely bad performance - for me the game is playable in 10.2 on a G4/400 with a Rage Pro 128, and was also in 10.1. It's not NICE - I have to turn all detail options to minimum - but if I do that, I can even play on Battle.net. In 9.2 it's much faster, I can turn some back up again. On a dual gig, it flies, as you would expect. I would expect it to be quite decent on your machine, though... how much RAM do you have? I noticed an _immense_ War 3 performance improvement when adding more RAM, up to 448 MB from 196.

[bOOzo]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
You can expect a 20% or better improvement in Warcraft III 1.1 with MacOS X 10.2.1

Is this because of new Nvidia drivers or better optimization in war3?
Because I have the same problem, I have to boot into OS 9 to play it..

[devNevyn]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
I must say, that is strangely bad performance - for me the game is playable in 10.2 on a G4/400 with a Rage Pro 128, and was also in 10.1. It's not NICE - I have to turn all detail options to minimum - but if I do that, I can even play on Battle.net. In 9.2 it's much faster, I can turn some back up again. On a dual gig, it flies, as you would expect. I would expect it to be quite decent on your machine, though... how much RAM do you have? I noticed an _immense_ War 3 performance improvement when adding more RAM, up to 448 MB from 196.

I have 384 MB of RAM on this machine.


And the stuff about 20% increaste - I wouldn't say 120% of 4 fps is an 'acceptable' fps. There's something SERIOUSLY wrong here.

[IamBob]

My lil bro just got War3. He tossed it on the old B&W/350/256/10.1.5 w/ aftermarket radeon. From where I'm sitting it's not looking too bad!?

How do you get the fps?

If I knew that I could get a sample from the G3w/radeon and a sample from my iLamp/800/256/10.2 w/GF2MX to compare with.

If I remember right, Bliz was complaining about the nVidia cards and basically blaming them for the poor performance. If the G3 behind me woops my iLamp...

[drHo]

hmm...this is interesting....in my g3 B&W 450 with 512ram and Radeon Mac Edition the game runs pretty damn good, i even ran the game at 1792x1600x32bit and it ran ok until i into heavy battles! now i run it at 1280x1024x32 with everything on high and it runs coo..not sure the exact fps but it cant be that bad if i'm not complaining...oh yeah i'm using 10.2.

[devNevyn]

Originally posted by IamBob:

How do you get the fps?

I count the frames. :P

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by nforcer:
Regarding the 20% statistic, I recall reading an article on one of the mac games sites that this came about within 30 minutes after Apple demonstrated OpenGL Profiler to Blizzard or something. Whether or not Blizzard will include these performance improvements in a 1.1 update or require Mac OS X 10.2.1 remains to be seen (unless Adam has other sources he doesn't mind revealing )

I don't have any special sources but I talked to several mac programmers at Blizzard in battle.net and they told me about it. They said it's partly Apple/nVidia/ATI's fault and partly Blizzard's fault. Blizzard's "excuse" of why WC3 act poorly is that they don't have proper tools to optimize WC3 but now they does with Jaguar.

10.2.1 will include all of the updated drivers from ATI and nVidia and improved AltiVec support so hopefully we can see more than 20% improvement in speed from WC3 1.1

[oVeRmInD911]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:


I don't have any special sources but I talked to several mac programmers at Blizzard in battle.net and they told me about it. They said it's partly Apple/nVidia/ATI's fault and partly Blizzard's fault. Blizzard's "excuse" of why WC3 act poorly is that they don't have proper tools to optimize WC3 but now they does with Jaguar.

10.2.1 will include all of the updated drivers from ATI and nVidia and improved AltiVec support so hopefully we can see more than 20% improvement in speed from WC3 1.1

Rock on!

I'm sick of going into 9 just to play Warcraft III. This is definitely good news. Meso happy!

[ksuther]

Originally posted by oVeRmInD911:



Rock on!

I'm sick of going into 9 just to play Warcraft III. This is definitely good news. Meso happy!

Ditto! Having to restart just to play Warcraft and UT is such a pain. If I can get Warcraft running well, I'll stop caring about UT

[IamBob]

It runs "a little" better on my iLamp than on the B&W. Since I don't know how to turn on the fps display that's all the better I can do comparison wise.

If you're seriously counting the frames as they update....ouch!!!

[supernature]

WC3 on my machine (867G4 w/ nVidia2MX) is not stellar either. It's playable except in large battle sequences. I think it drops to about 4fps all the way down to possibly 2fps in large battle sequences. I have to litterlly hold down the mouse button for a good second before it makes the selection during large battle sequences. Of course, by the time I'm finishing clicking on stuff, my Hero is dead by then. Keyboard shortcuts help a lot in those cases.

With my recently rebuilt PC (2ghz w/ Radeon 9000), playing WC3 is so smooth compared to OS X. So I've been playing on the PC now (don't slam me for it now).

I didn't see any improvements or slow downs when moving from 10.1.5 to 10.2. I'm not so sure if the video card is the problem or not. Same thing happens with Diablo 2. Anytime I play with other people, there is a huge lag.

I have a feeling it has to do with the online gaming than just playing single player mode on the computer. I haven't really noticed anything like that in single player mode (but I haven't played single player mode all that much).

[devNevyn]

Originally posted by supernature:
WC3 on my machine (867G4 w/ nVidia2MX) is not stellar either. It's playable except in large battle sequences. I think it drops to about 4fps all the way down to possibly 2fps in large battle sequences. I have to litterlly hold down the mouse button for a good second before it makes the selection during large battle sequences. Of course, by the time I'm finishing clicking on stuff, my Hero is dead by then. Keyboard shortcuts help a lot in those cases.

With my recently rebuilt PC (2ghz w/ Radeon 9000), playing WC3 is so smooth compared to OS X. So I've been playing on the PC now (don't slam me for it now).

I didn't see any improvements or slow downs when moving from 10.1.5 to 10.2. I'm not so sure if the video card is the problem or not. Same thing happens with Diablo 2. Anytime I play with other people, there is a huge lag.

I have a feeling it has to do with the online gaming than just playing single player mode on the computer. I haven't really noticed anything like that in single player mode (but I haven't played single player mode all that much).

That sounds like the performance I get. Kinda.

It seems that it is the GeForce 2 MX that has Warcraft3-incompatible drivers. Can anyone confirm this? Anyone with a GF2MX that *doesn't* get 4 fps in battles?

[bOOzo]

Originally posted by devNevyn:


That sounds like the performance I get. Kinda.

It seems that it is the GeForce 2 MX that has Warcraft3-incompatible drivers. Can anyone confirm this? Anyone with a GF2MX that *doesn't* get 4 fps in battles?

I can confirm that the performance with my 733 with 768 mb ram and Gf2mx sucks in war 3 in OS X and that it plays smooth in os 9. I've been longing to find a solution, but have not found any.. I had a long discussion over mail with blizzard mac support, but nothing helped..!

[LeeG]

Is there really gonna be an update for WC3 (or the ATi drivers) that will speed it up more? I just got an 8500 radeon installed, and the speed is definitely better, but I still get choppy on busy battle scenes - maybe my 2x agp is holding me back...but i bet its faster in OS9 - - I just don't want to switch back to try!

Lee

[bOOzo]

Re: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos - Video and Sound Issues

Yes, we are working on tweaks which will leverage Quartz Extreme features to enhance game performance. These should be available in a future update to the game.

On Wednesday, Sep 4, 2002, at 08:27 America/Los_Angeles, Max Rubderg wrote:

Hi

I'm sorry to say that Warcraft 3 does not work any better in 10.2.. Are you working on any performance tweaks?

I think it's probably because the Nvidia drivers are badly written...

[asmodeus]

Just to add to the thread... on my 700 G4 iMac with Geforce 2 MX running 10.2, I get pretty bad performance from WC3 at times, but overall it's playable. OS 9 runs it much faster. I really hope OS 10.2.1 and WC1.1 updates fix the speed problems.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by asmodeus:
Just to add to the thread... on my 700 G4 iMac with Geforce 2 MX running 10.2, I get pretty bad performance from WC3 at times, but overall it's playable. OS 9 runs it much faster. I really hope OS 10.2.1 and WC1.1 updates fix the speed problems.

Likewise. I don't even try to play on b.net anymore. Not being able to control a major battle = instant loss

[hyperizer]

Originally posted by devNevyn:
I have a G4 733 with a GeForce 2 TwinView (essentially just a GF2MX with an extra ADC).

It seems to play all right for me in 10.2 on a G4 733 with a GeForce 3 and 1024 MB RAM. I haven't gotten very far in the game, though.