How does your Mac perform?

[themateika]

Hey there Mac users,

I am doing a survey/study on what people use to play LOTRO and how well it plays. I do not want to leave out Mac users! All contributors will be referenced as such in the study. So if you could oblige, could you provide me with info on:

Either the model number/or these specs:

• CPU
• RAM
• Graphics card
• operating system (32/64 bit?)
• Is it a laptop or desktop?

The preset you use/or these graphics settings:

• DirectX version
• Screen resolution
• Anti-aliasing
• Object draw
• Texture detail
• Texture filtering
• Shadows
• Bloom

Lastly, I need your frames per second (accessed in game with ctrl+f, or Mac equivalent) in a few areas

• minimum/average/maximum in pre-Rohan areas
• minimum/average/maximum in post-Rohan areas or high-pop areas and Bree if you cannot get to Rohan

---

I plan to make the information into a sortable reference list. People should be able to compare systems to their own and see what people actually get in terms of performance. I will also include some facts about how components tend to interact in LOTRO and what makes LOTRO tick overall!

I hope you can help me out!



P.S. I am sorry if it is not ctrl+f for the framerate meter. I fix Macs, but I do not remember the keyboard layout that well.

[Valamar]

To answer these questions the easy way: (Under OSX 10.9 Mavericks)
1- In the upper Left Corner of your screen (the Apple Menu) select - About this Mac
2- In the pop-up which appears, click "More Info"
3- In the next pop-up, click on "System Report" at the bottom of the screen.
4- The next screen is "Hardware Overview."
5- Simply Cut and paste the first few lines:

For example, for my system --

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac11,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.93 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB

Next: The "About this Mac" panel continues to display. On that panel, the second line of that panel will display a "marketing description" of your system.
In my case, "27-inch, Mid 2010" -- this can simply be appended to the "Model Name line" to provide a more "descriptive" model name line:

Model Name: iMac , 27-inch, Mid 2010

* The Graphics in your system is also on that panel:

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB

* As is the Software information:

Software OS X 10.9.1 (13B42

* The Display information has to be constructed a bit. From the Hardware report, select "Graphics/Displays" in the left column. The "Resolution" information can be combined with other information
to "construct" the description of your display.

Note also, acquiring this information if you are running Mountain Lion is very similar but differs slightly.

[Valamar]

You can simply "reply with quote" to this message and use this as a template to fill in all of the graphics settings.

These are listed in the sequence found on the two Graphics Options panels.

LOTRO Graphics Settings

• All versions of OSX are 64 bit.
• Directx - not applicable; Mac Client uses OpenGL.

Graphics

• Overall Graphics Quality -

Display

• Full Screen -
• Windowed Resolution -
• Aspect Ratio -
• Antialiasing -

Colour

• Ambient Light =
• Brightness =
• Contrast =
• Gamma Level =

Adv Graphics
Objects

• Object Draw Distance -
• Model Detail -
• Material Detail -

Scenery

• Landscape Draw Distance -
• Frill Distance -
• Distant Imposters -
• Atmospherics Detail -

Texturing

• Texture Detail -
• Texture Filtering -
• Anisotropic Filter Quality -

Lighting

• Hight Quality Lighting -
• Specular Lighting -
• Surface Reflections -
• Landscape lighting quality -

Shadows

• Landscape Shadows -
• Blob Shadows -
• Stencil Shadows -
• Environment Stencil Shadows -

Post Processing

• Post Procssing Effects -
• Glow Mapping -
• Overbright Bloom Filter -
• Blur Filter Quality -
• Bloom Intensity =

Performance

• Player Mesh Combining -
• 3D Object Portraits -
• Texture Cache size =
• Player Crowd Quality =

Display

• Refresh Rate -
• Sync to Refresh Rate -
• Tripple Buffering -

[Valamar]

I've already replied in the original thread, but I'll re-post here just to keep the Mac info in one place.

My system:

27 inch iMac Intel (mid 2010)
Model: iMac11,3
Processor: 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB
Display: 27-inch (2560 x 1440)
Software OS X 10.9.1 (13B42))

Nominally, I use the default settings from the Mac Client. Note that the Mac Client uses OpenGL, not DirectX.

Settings Used (In sequence from the two Options panels)

• All versions of OSX are 64 bit.
• Directx - not applicable; Mac Client uses OpenGL.

Graphics

• Overall Graphics Quality - Custom

Display

• Full Screen - not checked
• Windowed Resolution - Custom - nominally 1024x768 - "Display Windowed Resolution" = 162006259 - most of the 27 inch display.
• Aspect Ratio - Auto
• Antialiasing - Disabled

Colour

• Ambient Light = .64
• Brightness = 1.0
• Contrast = 1.0
• Gamma Level = 1.0

Adv Graphics
Objects:

• Object Draw Distance -- Ultra High
• Model Detail - High
• Material Detail - High

Scenery

• Landscape Draw Distance - High
• Frill Distance - Medium
• Distant Imposters - checked
• Atmospherics Detail - Medium

Texturing

• Texture Detail - Medium
• Texture Filtering - Trilinear
• Anisotropic Filter Quality - off

Lighting

• Hight Quality Lighting - checked
• Specular Lighting - checked
• Surface Reflections - Low
• Landscape lighting quality - Low

Shadows

• Landscape Shadows - Medium
• Blob Shadows checked
• Stencil Shadows - Medium
• Environment Stencil Shadows - not checked

Post Processing

• Post Procssing Effects - checked
• Glow Mapping - checked
• Overbright Bloom Filter - not checked
• Blur Filter Quality - Medium
• Bloom Intensity = 1.0

Performance

• Player Mesh Combining - not checked
• 3D Object Portraits - checked
• Texture Cache size = 1.0
• Player Crowd Quality = 1.0

Display

• Refresh Rate - Auto
• Sync to Refresh Rate - not checked
• Tripple Buffering - not checked

[Arathem]

Here are my results:

• CPU: 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
• RAM: 16 GB 1600 Mhz DDR3
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2 GB VRAM
• operating system (32/64 bit?): 10.9.1
• Is it a laptop or desktop: Desktop

• DirectX version: The Mac OS X client uses OpenGL 3.2
• Screen resolution: 2560 x 1440
• Anti-aliasing: not supported by the Mac OS X client
• Object draw: both object and landscape draw distance are set to Very High
• Texture detail: Very High
• Texture filtering: Anisotropic, level 4
• Shadows: Lanscape Shadows: High; Stencil Shadows: Medium; Landscape Lightning Quality: Very High; Surface Reflections: High
• Bloom: Bloom Intensity: 1; Blur Filter Quality: High

• minimum/average/maximum in pre-Rohan areas: 40, 70, 119
• minimum/average/maximum in post-Rohan areas or high-pop areas and Bree if you cannot get to Rohan: 35, 56, 75

Some additional notes:

1) Turning 3D portraits off gives me an extra 2 FPS.

2) Note that all recent Mac OS X versions are 64bit. A pure 32bit Mac OS X does not exist anymore and hasn't ship in a number of years.

3) The game launcher is in fact a 64bit executable. However the game client itself is still 32bit.

4) The Mac OS X version exhibits significantly less hitching compared to the Windows version running on the same hardware (this is 10.9.1 versus Windows 7).

5) The Mac OS X version still crashes at least once every 30 minutes while playing in Rohan because it:

5a) either runs out of memory (the C++ new() operator throws an OOM exception but the game doesn't install a default exception handler -> the OS kills the app because of an unhandeled exception).

5b) or it crashes while trying to do an occlusion query because of a invalid pointer dereference.

So in the end, while Lotro could be a very decent Mac OS X game, it falls short of this goal because of its extreme crash habit. Also every time the game crashes the system crash dialog comes up and offers you to restart the game. But when you push the Reopen button then the game immediately crashes again because the game client expects that it gets started by the launcher and that the launcher passes the log-in details via CLI arguments. Naturally that won't work with the system crash dialog. The way that the client should work is that the launcher writes the log-in info into the user defaults and the the game client should pick it up from there when it starts. This would work as long as the launcher and the game client would use the same suite name to access the user defaults. Then the game client could restart as expected when the user hits the Reopen button in the crash dialog.

[Aelin_uial]

2) Note that all recent Mac OS X versions are 64bit. A pure 32bit Mac OS X does not exist anymore and hasn't ship in a number of years.

3) The game launcher is in fact a 64bit executable. However the game client itself is still 32bit.

4) The Mac OS X version exhibits significantly less hitching compared to the Windows version running on the same hardware (this is 10.9.1 versus Windows 7).

5) The Mac OS X version still crashes at least once every 30 minutes while playing in Rohan because it:

5a) either runs out of memory (the C++ new() operator throws an OOM exception but the game doesn't install a default exception handler -> the OS kills the app because of an unhandeled exception).

5b) or it crashes while trying to do an occlusion query because of a invalid pointer dereference.

So in the end, while Lotro could be a very decent Mac OS X game, it falls short of this goal because of its extreme crash habit. Also every time the game crashes the system crash dialog comes up and offers you to restart the game. But when you push the Reopen button then the game immediately crashes again because the game client expects that it gets started by the launcher and that the launcher passes the log-in details via CLI arguments. Naturally that won't work with the system crash dialog. The way that the client should work is that the launcher writes the log-in info into the user defaults and the the game client should pick it up from there when it starts. This would work as long as the launcher and the game client would use the same suite name to access the user defaults. Then the game client could restart as expected when the user hits the Reopen button in the crash dialog.[/QUOTE]

Yet another update and these things are still a problem. I'm glad some typos were fixed in dialogue boxes or whatever....but this stuff literally ruins the game!

[themateika]

Hey thanks for adding the templates and further instructions Valamar. I'm not a regular Mac user so I don't know my way around it's ecosystem very well.