[xyber233]

Originally posted by AlanApple:
I have a G4 800 with 640 ram and a GeForce 4 Ti. Game runs great but...sadly there is a but...is that it crashes every so often. Complete freeze. Majorly pissed.

Heh, a hard freeze like mine does?

[AlanApple]

Yeah, a hard freeze. Glad it's not just me and this game ain't half buggy judging by all the posts.

[xyber233]

Heh, Blizzard may be aware of these problems.

http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=awr0669p

[drHo]

hmm...i guess i dont have much to compare it to. but i have a B&W G3 450 (overclocked to 500) with the Original Radeon ME PCI 32mb DDR and 1gig of memory. running 10.2.3. uhm...i think the game runs fine! not as smooth as silk as i guess it should run but heck this a 4 year old mac! i have it running at 1024x768x32 most everything turned on high or medium. i guess i've never 'played' it on the pc...i 've seen it running on a p4 1.8ghz w/GeforceTI 4400 128mb..and although i would like my mac to run that way its definately playable on my B&W. i guess some people are just being over dramatic or my expectations are not as high as some of you.

[elmer]

I'm using a 12-inch powerbook, with 640MB RAM, running 10.2.4.
For single player, Medium settings are fine.
For multiplayer, things get choppy unless I turn everything down low - then it is fine.

[xyber233]

What resolution are you running at?

[DBvader]

are you kidding? this game runs just as well on my Dual 867/9000 as it does on my 2000+/Ti4200.

[elmer]

Originally posted by xyber233:
What resolution are you running at?

I usually run at 1024x768x32. The game looks nicer at high resolutions, but some people actually prefer playing it on lower ones; it's not necessarily an advantage.

Caveat: when I talk about multiplayer, I'm talking 1-on-1. I rarely play FFA or team.
I now find I can turn textures up to medium and even in big battles this is fine. The game looks very nice with these settings.
I have ambient sounds turned off.
I have often seen some choppiness when scrolling the view using the mouse, but it's not bad enough to affect play -- I saw much worse when I had a 800MHz QS 2002 on medium detail (of course, that was with 10.2.3)
I am a level 7 on Battle.net (that puts me in the top 10%) with about 60 wins, 33% win percentage, and I often engage in 1-on-1 battles with a lot of units and am able to micromanage effectively.

I can run 1024x768x32 with everything turned on for small to medium sized games against the computer. It looks awesome. I recommend doing this for replays.

The powerbook keyboard has some significant disadvantages for playing this game. The F1,F2,F3 buttons can't be used without the Fn modifier key (they are brightness/volume controls). Also the arrow keys are similarly Fn'ed for Home,End,Page Down,Page Up. There is no Insert key. The forward Delete key is Fn-Delete. There is no separate number pad. So there are a lot of the lesser-used keyboard shortcuts missing.

Tell me the exact settings you want me to use, and I'll tell you what the results are like. I don't mind doing it; it's a fun game!

Oh, also I have no problem playing campaign missions on battery/reduced speed.

Also, if you want to know what kind of battles I run into, I'll post a link to a replay or two, or maybe even a screenshot.

[nobitacu]

Hmmm... that's weird... mine works perfectly and runs very nicely. I'm using OS X with all the settings maxed out. I think there might be something wrong with your settings.

Ming

[elmer]

Originally posted by nobitacu:
Hmmm... that's weird... mine works perfectly and runs very nicely. I'm using OS X with all the settings maxed out. I think there might be something wrong with your settings.

Ming

If you're using the 17-inch, it has double the VRAM that mine has, to start with, and a faster G4, not to mention L3 cache. Mine's the 12-inch, whose main advantage over the iBook is Altivec ...

Performance seems related not just to the amount of action on-screen, but also off -- the few times I played FFA and teams this was evident.

[nobitacu]

Ah... yea, that would explain everything...

Ming

Originally posted by elmer:
If you're using the 17-inch, it has double the VRAM that mine has, to start with, and a faster G4, not to mention L3 cache. Mine's the 12-inch, whose main advantage over the iBook is Altivec ...

Performance seems related not just to the amount of action on-screen, but also off -- the few times I played FFA and teams this was evident.

[elmer]

Hmm ... just tried a couple 1-on-1 games with everything on except 3D-audio. Seemed fine, other than slight jumpiness of the mouse scroll. These were not big games though. More testing needed, obviously.

[xyber233]

Is that with the 10.2.5 update?

[CheesePuff]

I have a TiBook 1 GHz with 768 MB RAM and the ATI Radeon 9000 64 MB DDR video card. In OS X 10.2.4 and 10.2.5, Warcraft III runs smooth as silk at the native resolution of my widescreen LCD (1280x854).

[nobitacu]

Download the newest update for OS X, it improved game play. See if that does any better for you.

Ming

[elmer]

Originally posted by xyber233:
Is that with the 10.2.5 update?

Nope - I think it is 10.2.4 that made the difference. Haven't tried Warcraft with 10.2.5 yet. I'll try it over the next week, and try to be more scientific about it this time.

[poulh]

I think we all know that warcraft is going to run fine on a g4 w/ a 64meg video card. its the consumer computers that get the widest range of reports. So someone telling me that Warcraft runs fine on a dual 1ghz w/ 128 meg video card no matter what the OS is not news to me.

To find out if the os is making a difference we need reports on the lowerend computers which are straining to run it, like the iMac (w/ GeForce 2mx). This computer does fine in os9 by most counts, but is slow in X.

How does this computer do w/ the new 10.2.5?

Sorry for the rant.

[dividend]

does anyone know if blizzard are making an other X-optimised update before the sequal is released - and is the sequal going to be just as bad as the first game? if so, there is no chance that i will buy it.

altivec doesn't matter for this game, does it? But it could, couldn't it?

I have heard that W3 runs fine in OS 9. Can somebody confirm that it runs ok on a 550 mhz with 16 vram, but poorly in X on the same machine. I don't have OS 9 anymore...

thanx

[11011001]

QS 867, 640 mb, 32 mb GeForce2MX.

WCIII blows on this thing.

The video card sucks, I will get a radeaon 9700 or whatever, as soon as I can (is it out for mac yet?).

For me, it's fine for the first little while, but it gradually gets slower and slower.

In this one map setting game, or custom game as it would be called in WCIII, a whole whack of units are spawned every minute, and then we kill them off.

As the game progresses, it get's noticeably slower... looks like a memory leak to me. (At the end of one of these games I got disconnected, and warcraft locked up.. definetely looks like a memory leak.. I had ssh from the computer in the other room and kill the thing).

I need more RAM though. 640 may have been large a while ago, but not it's rather insuffecient. And the GeForce2MX does not cut it.. even when it came out, it wasn't the best card...

oh well

I really should buy a PC for gaming.

[Scifience]

Runs great on a Dual 1Ghz with 512MB RAM and a Radeon 900 with 64MB VRAM. No slowdowns even in the largest of battles.

[dividend]

I noticed that if I put the game speed to the slowest, then it works a lot better actually. I can even play with 1024 * xxx, and medium without too many hick-ups.

[kainjow]

I have a PowerMac G4 733MHz, 640 MB of ram and I think the GeForce2 something card (don't know much about graphics cards).

But all my friends I play Warcraft with have PC's and I've played it on their computers. The performance is sooooo much better then my Mac. It's disgusting. I'm thinking about buying a cheap Dell or something just for Warcraft.

You guys have to test it out on a PC to get REAL performance - no lags in major battles or anything at all. And their computers are mostly all older then mine.

Oh well.

[Weezer]

Originally posted by dividend:
I noticed that if I put the game speed to the slowest, then it works a lot better actually. I can even play with 1024 * xxx, and medium without too many hick-ups.

yea but who wants to play on slowest? eww

[poulh]

Originally posted by kainjow:
I have a PowerMac G4 733MHz, 640 MB of ram and I think the GeForce2 something card (don't know much about graphics cards).

But all my friends I play Warcraft with have PC's and I've played it on their computers. The performance is sooooo much better then my Mac. It's disgusting. I'm thinking about buying a cheap Dell or something just for Warcraft.

You guys have to test it out on a PC to get REAL performance - no lags in major battles or anything at all. And their computers are mostly all older then mine.

Oh well.

Restart into os9. Your specs are similar to mine.

I read somewhere (think imgmagazine) whenn they were interiviewing the omnigroup about bringing over some web games to macosx. The games would not run on the web, but would be cocoa games. the interviewer asked how come such a simple game took up so much of the cpu. The answer was that on a pc, sending the data to the screen was not cpu-intensive on a pc, but was on a mac. he said an update would be coming out where only the area of the screen that changes would be sent to the screen and that would speed up the game.

i think this has to do w/ bus speed and i know that on a mac this is REAL slow. Yet another thing apple needs to fix.

[vsurfer]

Res 1024
M odel Detail Med
A nimation Hi
T exture Med
P articles Hi
L ight Hi
Unit Shads On
Occlusion On

Mouse scroll on
Tool tips on

demo - no patches

OSX 10.2.4
TiBook 1 Ghz SD
1 gig RAM
9000 Radeon

I'm playing the demo for a week -- definitely having some troubles with the mouse ( trackpad) response in battles involving multiple units. A bit rough but OK ish.

Scrolls off by itself to edge of screen frequently at the most inopportune moments. A bit jerky, but OK. Not so bad that i wouldn't buy it. This is definitely a good game - hint of Total Annihilation in there, but wish I had better control over multiple groups of units a la TA. eg cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-3 etc... to define a group of selected units and opt-1, opt-2, opt-3, etc etc to activate your units.

[xyber233]

Yup. The horrible mouse responseis what costs me games. It is really annoying because I cannot control anything in battles. How can I micro like this?

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by vsurfer:
This is definitely a good game - hint of Total Annihilation in there, but wish I had better control over multiple groups of units a la TA. eg cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-3 etc... to define a group of selected units and opt-1, opt-2, opt-3, etc etc to activate your units.

Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, etc defines groups and then just pressing 1, 2, etc activates the group.

[elmer]

12-inch PB, 640MB, 10.2.5
Yup, played a few with High detail, then Medium detail and I am back to having most of the settings on Low. It's in the big battles where you start to see slight choppiness in the animation and mouse response. Still like to play small missions with all the details max'd out though - it looks so great.

[Deicide]

xyber233:

Is the mouse curser still jumpy in the expansion beta?

[Rabid Duck]

Originally posted by Deicide:
xyber233:

Is the mouse curser still jumpy in the expansion beta?

I'm going to repost what I said in a different thread:

Wc3x hasn't solved the slowdowns in battle or the jumpy scrolling, etc. Wc3 original runs much better in OS 9 as I'm sure you're all aware (albeit still with major slowdowns, especially during battles). However, Blizzard has disabled OS 9 compatibility for the Wc3x beta, so I'm not able to test OS 9 performance.

As I said in another thread, I'm not a framerate junkie-- I don't particularly care if the 3D models render quickly during battles or not. It's the mouse speed I'm most concerned about. If I could make selections and give orders in real-time, that would be great. Perhaps there's a way for blizzard to handle cursor refresh rate differently than the 3D graphics' refresh rate? Rob?

-RD

[xyber233]

Yup, mouse is still jumpy in the beta. Sometimes it is hard to find the mouse in a large battle. Does anyone have this problem: The screen will move in one direction randomly all the way to the end of the map until you move the mouse back to that side?

[poulh]

This game seems like the perfect example that people always turn to when they say "MacOSX is slow".

Given that I will bet when Steve rolls out Panther and talks about "Quartz Extremer" , or whatever they call it, and how much faster Panther is then Jaguar he will use WC3 as an example.

This had to be the top selling game on the Mac last year and I'm sure it embarrasses Apple that everyone has to reboot into os9 to play it.

[dividend]

I agree, the performance difference for W3 on OS 9 and OS X is quite striking. I am not asking for OS X to be as good as OS 9 speed-wise for W3, but I am asking for W3 at least being playable with OS X.

The only way that I can play W3 is by putting everyting to slow, but even then I get the jumping mouse-cursor.

[Deicide]

I am not asking for OS X to be as good as OS 9 speed-wise for W3, but I am asking for W3 at least being playable with OS X.

Hell, I'm just asking that my 800Mhz iMac play it as well as my 500Mhz Celeron/Geforce1 SDR PC!!!!!! That same PC wich only has a 66Mhz FSB handles large battles better then my dual 1.25Ghz G4! There is no getting around it. WC3 on the Mac just all out sucks. Even though I have a kickass Athlon +1800/Geforce4 4200 PC to play WC3, I was so looking forward to playing it on my iMac. It would have been one extra box for LAN play, but nope.

[sniffer]

What a turn down. n I considered buying W3, but I now image it wouldn't be worth it with my current mac.
I've played it some on my p2 333mhz gforce 1 32mb, until the game crawled to death getting to the higher levels. I really thought earlier that my mac would have been sufficient. How wrong I was. This must be a terrible mac port, no doubt IMHO.

[xyber233]

I'm thinking about getting a 12" PB but elmer's post doesn't look encouraging. Anyone else have 12" performance tests?

[gizzard]

Originally posted by sniffer:
This must be a terrible mac port, no doubt IMHO.

It wasn't a port. WC3 was developed simultaneously for Mac and PC. Blizzard is still learning about 3D programming and they'll get it right soon enough. With every patch and OS update, WC3 seems to have gotten a bit faster. Or maybe it's the 1.25 GHz CPU upgrade. =P

[villalobos]

Originally posted by poulh:
and i wouldn't blame blizzard. i would blame apple. hopefully they can keep squeeezing performance out of osX.

I dont agree with that,/ I think the port is terrible. It should be playable on a 533 G4 with a radeon. it is not. The PC version is waaayyy faster.
Nice of them to bring both versions simultaneously but they maybe should have optimized the mac one a little bit.

villa

[cinder]

I had WC3 on my old G4-450 AGP (ATi Rage 128, 16MB) PowerMac

It was barely playable at 800x600 with most of the settings turned off.

I could play up to a few levels in in the single player before it was too slow.

The bottom line is video card

You need a half decent card with at least 32MB of RAM to play at a resolution higher than 800x600

Period.

sadly, having a Powerbook - there's nothing you can do short of getting a new machine.

that's one of the major caveats of most laptops.

you shouldn't be surprised to experience huge performance hits running a too-high resolution on a sub-par gaming machine.

=/

[sunrunnerfire]

I havent had any problems with Warcraft III at all. In fact, Ive maxed out all of the settings and set the resolution to its highest setting and have no jitters at all, ever.

....oh wait, I have a DP 1.25 G4 with a GeForce 4 Ti and 2 Gigs of RAM ..... shutting up ....

[mproud]

War3 does not crash. I don't know what to say. You probably have video driver issues.

I have a good old Rage 128 Pro and hey, I can run Warcraft III rather decently. It was a little choppy, but I attribute that to:

a) subpar internet connection
b) using only a 16 MB RAM card
c) only a 400 MHz G4

Turn your reses down all the way. Turn off ambient/3D sounds - turn it all off.

[::maroma::]

FWIW:

I have a G4/500 AGP Sawtooth, flashed GeForce3 64MB, 1GB RAM, OS 10.2.5. I used to have to boot into OS 9 to be able to play with my friends on an 8 player map. I had to run it at 640x480x32, Low, Extras off, in order to get smooth gameplay throughout. In OS X, I couldn't even get smooth gameplay during one of our games, even with everything on lowest and extras off.

I just purchased a GigaDesigns G4/1.2GHz Upgrade card, and the difference is dramatic. I can now play in OS X in 1042x768x32, Medium, Ambient Sound off on the same maps as before with zero lag. It is like night and day. I would recommend this upgrade for anyone who is considering getting one.

[satin]

hey guys,

new here. sorry but i ain't gonna read ALL THOSE THREADS.

i've had all powerbooks up to now. i had warcraft III installed on my Ti800 and had problems - it would hang or freeze on me whenever it wanted and lagged like crazy.

but on my new 17"... no problems whatsoever and i'm playing the new BETA

the only upgrade i've done is upgrade to 1Gig RAM. i'm using 10.2.5 and have all the video and sound settings on MAX:

- 1440 x 900 X 32
- EVERYTHING on high or max

it hasn't frozen on me and its look SWEET on the 17" widescreen.

any questions, let me know.

LATER

[Thain Esh Kelch]

G4 400 AGP Radeon 32 Mb, 512 Mb ram.
iMac 500 DV, 392 Mb ram, 8 Mb Rage Pro.

Performance is almost identically on Battlenet, and unplayable both in OSX and OS9 on both machines. Lowest/off settings.

Game is very playable on G4 in singleplayer at 1024x768, except at large battles. This is in OS9 though.. OSX = Unplayable.

Conclusion: Very bad coding from Blizzard.. Havent seen a game that sucks so much on both systems at those low settings...

[Edit:] Oh, and on the iMac the machine crashes whenever we try to quit the game? Solutions?

[Cantaloup]

Here's my system for comparison:

QuickSilver G4 733MHz
384 Mb RAM
NVidia GeForce 2MX

Under OS X, even with everything turned to minimum (640x480x16, etc.) it becomes unplayable during large battles (no mouse control, large frame rate drops). If I boot under OS 9, it slows down a little in large battles but is always playable...and this is at 1024x768x32 with everything turned on. I've contacted Blizzard's technical support, but they didn't really give me any useful advice. I was thinking about getting a Radeon 9000 since many people seemed to have the same performance problems I do with the GeForce 2MX under OS X, but now I'm not so sure it would help.

[Rabid Duck]

Originally posted by Cantaloup:
Here's my system for comparison:
I was thinking about getting a Radeon 9000 since many people seemed to have the same performance problems I do with the GeForce 2MX under OS X, but now I'm not so sure it would help.

My advice would be to save your money. I have a Digital Audio G4 733 with a gig of RAM, and upgraded from a GF2mx 32 mb card to a Radeon 8500 64 mb card, thinking I'd see at least some improvement in WC3. It didn't happen. The bottleneck here seems to be the CPU.

-RD

[K++]

Originally posted by villalobos:
I dont agree with that,/ I think the port is terrible. It should be playable on a 533 G4 with a radeon. it is not. The PC version is waaayyy faster.
Nice of them to bring both versions simultaneously but they maybe should have optimized the mac one a little bit.

villa

Its neither Apple not Blizzard's fault, it's OpenGL's. OpenGL is nowhere near as optimized as DirectX is and that is why even the crappiest of PCs have no trouble handling Warcraft III, if the mac had DirectX or OpenGL became ungodly optimized then we wouldn't have to exchange raw GPU and CPU performance for the game to run well. That is why it sucks so bad for most of you. SO shut up and stop blaming Apple for it since Apple can only progress OpenGL so far, Apple is not a game developer so they can only optimize OpenGL so much, the rest is up to that Open SOurce cummunity who thinks so highly of themselves and that they don't need MS yet thier 3D graphics framework is nowhere as capable in either performance or featureset as DirectX is.

[sfhipster]

Originally posted by xyber233:
I have a 700mHz LCD imac w/ 32mb geforce2mx. I cannot play it in X even at low settings. I have to boot into 9 and even then its still bad in big battles.

and 10.2.5 - most of my settings are on high, and the game is very playable for me. it's really wierd the conflicting reports of performance on various machines.

has everyone loaded the patch from blizzard ?

[Brian D Marsh]

Originally posted by K++:
Its neither Apple not Blizzard's fault, it's OpenGL's.

why do many other games using OpenGL get more then decent frame rates without the apparent problems that Warcraft III has?

some games are very comparible between pc and mac versions


something doesn't seem to jive here, Warcraft III can be playable but does jump for many people (some people with PC's even have this problem in large battles, not as bad as the Mac OS X version, since as many people have posted the Mac OS 9 version runs faster then the Mac OS X version, and in general OpenGL in MacOS X is a fair bit faster than Mac OS 9's open GL)

also different users have different levels of what's "Playable" which can make it hard to guage if others are having the same issues as you.

[xyber233]

Originally posted by sfhipster:
and 10.2.5 - most of my settings are on high, and the game is very playable for me. it's really wierd the conflicting reports of performance on various machines.

has everyone loaded the patch from blizzard ?

It seems to be running a little better now in single player but still is sluggish on battle.net.