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William Darkk
Garoun Investment Bank
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Posted - 2008.03.15 23:14:00 -
[1]
This was written after some pretty bad problems I had with framerate forced me to research every last thing. If I missed something please let me know and I'll edit it in.
Alert Warning - ATI Displays Utility
I was wrong about this in previous threads. It does not work. Do not use it. It's a bad idea on par with flying a deadspace fitted CNR on autopilot while afk.
Other Programs
If you're having trouble, close other programs. A particular culprit in the past has been Snapz Pro. I use it regardless because the performance hit isn't so bad. But if you have 500-odd safari or firefox windows open, give closing that a try. Oh, and apparently MS Office 2003 is a particularly bad program for VRAM consumption (I don't use it, just passing it along). Another MS program was implicated but I forgot what it was.
Transparency
Trinity 1.1 turned on transparency for many UI elements for me. Turn it OFF by going to the menu, selecting the "General Settings" tab and setting transparency to 255.
Windows in EVE
For me, every window I have open represents a 5-10 drop in FPS. If you don't need it right now close it.
Clean Up
There are two things you should probably do to clean up your disk every now and then. First is to repair permissions from the disk utility (I think most of you know how that works). The second is to run "periodic" from the console. It's a BSD cleaning service that's in OSX because OSX is secretly BSD. Open console, enter "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" to run all the cleans. Note you will need to have an administrator account for this.
How do I check things out myself?
There are two ways, the basic way and the advanced way.
The Basic Way
Open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor and look around. Select "all processes" from the show menu then look down at the various graphs. If you've filled your ram or cpu capacity you can sort by those (rsize for ram) to determine what's using up so much ram. Then you need to figure out if it's safe to quit it or not. USUALLY processes owned by your login name are safe to close. If you can see their icon at the bottom of the screen, just quit it that way.
The Advanced Way
You need Developer Tools. This is what makes this the "advanced" way. Once you install them, go to the Developer Tools/Applications folder and open Inspector. Also, it lets you check directly on what's messing with your graphics card.
Now, you select the "blank" template, then click the "library" button in the upper right corner. This opens the library of monitoring stuff. Scroll down and add the OpenGL Driver tool. You can add others but this is a guide about graphics. Now go up to the little menu where it says "Default Target". You should probably set this to cider (which is EVE) at first to see how it works. Now hit the record button and play EVE for a couple minutes, then come back.
This will leave you with a log of all the opengl calls made. Anything other than EVE that makes a lot of opengl calls is bad and wrong and must be expunged (this is how I found out about ATI Displays). I'm not sure how to get the names of the programs making the calls to show up when I do "All Processes" so you'd have to go through each program individually.
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<3 my Drones |
William Darkk
Garoun Investment Bank
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Posted - 2008.03.15 23:31:00 -
[2]
Reserved
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Mac Graphics Performance Guide
<3 my Drones |
Suffen
Exponential Zagadka Inc.
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Posted - 2008.03.15 23:35:00 -
[3]
Edited by: Suffen on 15/03/2008 23:35:20
the periodic i think have some issues with non-PPC macs, so best do it with ONYX which will do a similar job.
what version of xcode are you talking about? I can't find inspector but a folder that has images...
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William Darkk
Garoun Investment Bank
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Posted - 2008.03.16 01:14:00 -
[4]
 Originally by: Suffen
Edited by: Suffen on 15/03/2008 23:35:20
the periodic i think have some issues with non-PPC macs, so best do it with ONYX which will do a similar job.
what version of xcode are you talking about? I can't find inspector but a folder that has images...
XCode 3.
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Mac Graphics Performance Guide
<3 my Drones |
Mamothicus
Scorpio Industries Inc
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Posted - 2008.03.16 11:28:00 -
[5]
Nice summary Will... 
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"War is the greatest affair of state..." Sun-tzu |
Dexant
Republic University
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Posted - 2008.03.16 11:29:00 -
[6]
Originally by: William Darkk
Originally by: Suffen
Edited by: Suffen on 15/03/2008 23:35:20
the periodic i think have some issues with non-PPC macs, so best do it with ONYX which will do a similar job.
what version of xcode are you talking about? I can't find inspector but a folder that has images...
XCode 3.
weird. i have xcode3
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Capn Hack
State War Academy
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Posted - 2008.03.16 12:53:00 -
[7]
Edited by: Capn Hack on 16/03/2008 12:55:22
I have some stuff that may also help.
Firstly, turn off all audio in the game. the mac client still seems to pour forth errors to the console when audio is enabled, and this will suck up a little cpu power that can be put to better use.
The following are modifications to the config.ini file that can be found in ~/library/preferences/eve online preferences (thats the library folder in your accounts home folder).
- In the [x11drv] section, change the "VideoRam" value to however much vram your computer has. This should enable the cider engine to make better use of your hardware.
- In the same section, change "AGPVertexRam" to 128 if it isnt already at that value.
- You can also turn off "NV_VAR" and "ARB_VBO" by changing both values to N and that may speed things up.
- In the [d3dgl] section you can turn off "AnisotropicTextureFiltering" and "OcclusionQueries" and change "PixelShadersLevel" to 1.2. Turning off "VertexShaders" may also give you some FPS increase but can cause some rendering errors, especially inside stations.
Doing those things should grant you a few extra FPS that you cant get by messing with the in-game settings. Note that these changes may break the game as newer versions come out, but deleting that config.ini file will fix that problem and cause the game to reload the config file from within the game bundle.
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William Darkk
Garoun Investment Bank
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Posted - 2008.03.16 15:26:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Capn Hack
Edited by: Capn Hack on 16/03/2008 12:55:22
I have some stuff that may also help.
Firstly, turn off all audio in the game. the mac client still seems to pour forth errors to the console when audio is enabled, and this will suck up a little cpu power that can be put to better use.
The following are modifications to the config.ini file that can be found in ~/library/preferences/eve online preferences (thats the library folder in your accounts home folder).
- In the [x11drv] section, change the "VideoRam" value to however much vram your computer has. This should enable the cider engine to make better use of your hardware.
- In the same section, change "AGPVertexRam" to 128 if it isnt already at that value.
- You can also turn off "NV_VAR" and "ARB_VBO" by changing both values to N and that may speed things up.
- In the [d3dgl] section you can turn off "AnisotropicTextureFiltering" and "OcclusionQueries" and change "PixelShadersLevel" to 1.2. Turning off "VertexShaders" may also give you some FPS increase but can cause some rendering errors, especially inside stations.
Doing those things should grant you a few extra FPS that you cant get by messing with the in-game settings. Note that these changes may break the game as newer versions come out, but deleting that config.ini file will fix that problem and cause the game to reload the config file from within the game bundle.
I'll check that out in a bit. If it works, I'll add it to the first page.
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Mac Graphics Performance Guide
<3 my Drones |
Sigma Xi'Pi
Numismancy Incorporated
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Posted - 2008.03.17 06:52:00 -
[9]
Originally by: Capn Hack
Firstly, turn off all audio in the game. the mac client still seems to pour forth errors to the console when audio is enabled, and this will suck up a little cpu power that can be put to better use.
Anyone know the cause of those log messages or how to temporarily disable syslogd? I think there is a significant performance hit due to those messages being written to disk while Eve is running. It seems Eve is CPU limited for me since the resolution that I use makes no apparent difference. The number of Eve GUI windows does make a difference and seems to be the only thing that I can use to deterministically change the FPS.
The client seems to get the max FPS when one of the cores on my MBP is running at 100% and the other is relatively idle. However, I notice that sometimes neither of the cores seem to reach 100%. I'm guessing this is due to some other app using my CPU and causing Eve to get swapped out of the CPU cache. Does anyone know how to set processor affinity on OSX similar to Windows? I'm guessing if I can get Eve to stick to one CPU and put everything else on the other, I should be able to get one core to run at 100% and stop all these cache misses.
The other thing I've notices is that mds seems to start up a lot while running Eve. If I disable Spotlight indexing with mdutil, this stops happening.
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Capn Hack
State War Academy
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Posted - 2008.03.17 11:42:00 -
[10]
Originally by: Sigma Xi'Pi
Anyone know the cause of those log messages or how to temporarily disable syslogd? I think there is a significant performance hit due to those messages being written to disk while Eve is running. It seems Eve is CPU limited for me since the resolution that I use makes no apparent difference. The number of Eve GUI windows does make a difference and seems to be the only thing that I can use to deterministically change the FPS.
The client seems to get the max FPS when one of the cores on my MBP is running at 100% and the other is relatively idle. However, I notice that sometimes neither of the cores seem to reach 100%. I'm guessing this is due to some other app using my CPU and causing Eve to get swapped out of the CPU cache. Does anyone know how to set processor affinity on OSX similar to Windows? I'm guessing if I can get Eve to stick to one CPU and put everything else on the other, I should be able to get one core to run at 100% and stop all these cache misses.
The other thing I've notices is that mds seems to start up a lot while running Eve. If I disable Spotlight indexing with mdutil, this stops happening.
The cause seems to be just a bug, although we will need word from ccp or transgaming to work out whether its the game or wrapper doing it. It was introduced several version ago and wasnt happening in the mac beta client or the first couple (?) of public builds, so it may well have something to do with trinity. To stop the logserver you can try this in the terminal: sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
Use load rather than unload to get it going again.
As far as i know there is no way to meddle with processor affinity on osx because it automatically handles load balancing to reduce load on any particular core/processor.
You should be able to more easily solve the spotlight problem by just adding the eve apps parent folder (make a new folder for it if you dont wanna exclude other things) and your eve preferences folder to the privacy list via its prefpane. I think those are the only two places eve writes to so that should stop it trying to index the constantly changing data.
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