For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?
This makes no sense since OSX is certainly capable of the same level of graphic performance as any other OS (some would say it has even more powerful low-level tools now that Metal is available), so there must be something else going on in his setup that is causing a problem. As others have noted, possibly the drivers, but more likely he's not using the Mac's API to guarantee GPU rendering vs software rendering, or other fairly small settings that can lead to a big difference.
For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?
Drivers. On MacOS they tend to be a bit behind the Windows versions, also MacOS itself is reasonably GPU-heavy. Add to that Apple's tendency to lag behind the latest (as in from the last five years) OpenGL standards and you've got a recipe for slow OpenGL. Though interesting that it's an Iris Pro, MacOS used to have the best Intel drivers as Apple pulled them in-house. ATI and NVidia have always treated MacOS as a se…
Here's a table of specific OpenGL support for various versions of OSX:
For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?
I don't have the links with me, but I've read somewhere that this happens because Windows uses DirectX, whereas OS X uses OpenGL.
I assumed this is because Game Engines are built usually targeting Windows/DirectX. Some say that DirectX is more mature and powerful, although this might be subjective. And so the games perform better on Windows.
FYI,
With the advent of Vulkan, maybe subjective opinion that DirectX is better than OpenGL dies down, as Vulkan is supposed to very good - kind of like a rewrite of OpenGL.
And with DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Microsoft has done a lot of good stuff.
>unix-like Not just unix-like, OS X is certified UNIX.
Yeah, I guess the author meant more like "very similar to Unixes (unices?) I've used before", which quite possibly means 'various Linux distros'. Aside from official certification, OSX is still sufficiently different to make this mistake forgivable, and not just in terms of the UI. The filesystem organisation is unusual, to say the least.
For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?
I don't have the links with me, but I've read somewhere that this happens because Windows uses DirectX, whereas OS X uses OpenGL. I assumed this is because Game Engines are built usually targeting Windows/DirectX. Some say that DirectX is more mature and powerful, although this might be subjective. And so the games perform better on Windows. FYI, With the advent of Vulkan, maybe subjective opinion that DirectX is bet…
DX12 is drawn from the same source as Vulkan (i.e. Mantle), so they aren't very different. It's just a NIH tool from MS for lock-in purposes.
For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?
Drivers. On MacOS they tend to be a bit behind the Windows versions, also MacOS itself is reasonably GPU-heavy. Add to that Apple's tendency to lag behind the latest (as in from the last five years) OpenGL standards and you've got a recipe for slow OpenGL. Though interesting that it's an Iris Pro, MacOS used to have the best Intel drivers as Apple pulled them in-house. ATI and NVidia have always treated MacOS as a se…
That doesn't sound completely right.
If it was a 10% performance hit, I could blame the driver but comparing 60 FPS (I presume) with 1 FPS when people are playing the game in Mac OS X using WINE; that sounds like something is probably not quite right in his code.
Xcode isn’t too bad. I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I've always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn't deal with it even though I tried. I don't remember all details b…
I don't use VS but I use Xcode every day. Downsides: incredibly laggy, buggy, can crash a lot depending on the version. Upsides: actually pretty thoughtful in terms of UI and UX, at least insofar as a fully-fledged IDE can be. I could never wrap my head around VS's stupid toolbars. Debugging, when it works, is really nice; there's more interactivity and inline code interaction than I remember VS having. (VS probably has more power features in this arena, though.) The profiling tools are top-notch; you can even capture frames when debugging an iOS OpenGL app. Fuzzy search is a huge help — is VS still missing this feature? You can very easily access the docs for any property or method with an Alt-click, as well as the headers with a Cmd-click. Adding external code and projects, as well as hooking up all the dependencies, is pretty easy once you've done it a few times. So yeah, not great by any stretch, but pretty good when it works.
Tangentially related: Banished is higly recommended. Quiet room, couple glasses of whiskey and you're guaranteed to have a nice evening.
Indeed, for me it's only recent city builder that captures the feeling of the original Settlers game(s). The feeling where I just want to see what my little city is up to, see the people scurrying about their little lives.
The game is relatively deep, and has tons of room for clever tactics. Also, it was developed by a single person, which is pretty impressive for a game like this.