MaVster70 Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 I have got wow running on my box. I have managed to have OpenGL working but I do not understand why the CPU is not fully used by the game. It ranges from 40% to 60%. Any help? My Specs are: 2,8 ghz P4 sse2 Radeon 9600 pro 1 gig of ram. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyclonefr Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 i bet the game is slow like on mine because of the SSE2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. Bear Helms Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 You have a better graphics card than my PC, and a better one than built in to my Mac Mini. Your FPS shown there in a trafficky area looks to be about the same as a Mac Mini 1.5 Ghz with 1gb RAM... maybe 20% faster, I tend to have 3 FPS when trying to move in Ironforge, and if I just stand still the FPS slowly rises to 11 more or less. Check versiontracker for a free app called "Speed freak." This will boost your app priority of the frontmost app out of proportion with the share-and-share-alike default OS X uses. It's also possible that the CPU actually is doing its job as best it can, and it's waiting on the graphics processor to get off its butt and move pixels faster. A 9600 is a far cry from the kind of card you'd want for 100 FPS gaming. See if you can turn off vertical sync (VSYNC) which may boost the frame rate a bit, and of course, bottom out all the graphics sliders in the display options to see just how fast a FPS rate you can get. My Mini is set on bottomline graphics settings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaVster70 Posted February 11, 2006 Author Share Posted February 11, 2006 Thanks for the info. I tried speedfreak with no success; as you said it seems that the bottleneck is the GPU. What would you suggest as an hasslefree upgrade? Something that I just put in the PC like I did with the radeon 9600. (I had an nvidia before) Please consider that I have an AGP slot. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. Bear Helms Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Check with a retailer that has a decent return policy, like CompUSA or Best Buy. Then look at a Radeon X200 or whatever "X" they have for your AGP slot. Check also the ATI web site, drivers, OS X, see if they have Universal Binary editions of anything. The card will be spendy... in fact, last time I shopped for a high end graphics card, I said in disbelief, "Damn! I could buy a Mac Mini for less!" ...and so that's what I did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
New001 Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Check with a retailer that has a decent return policy, like CompUSA or Best Buy. Then look at a Radeon X200 or whatever "X" they have for your AGP slot. Check also the ATI web site, drivers, OS X, see if they have Universal Binary editions of anything. The card will be spendy... in fact, last time I shopped for a high end graphics card, I said in disbelief, "Damn! I could buy a Mac Mini for less!" ...and so that's what I did. The only X series cards for AGP are the X700 (does not work accelerated in OS X x86), and the X800. And my 3GHz Hackintosh runs circles around my iBook G4 when I'm playing UT2004, and I'm sure that would also be true if I played WoW. Believe me, I have an iBook, it's a great PPC mac, but it sucks for gaming (just as the Mini does, since my iBook is close on par with a Mini), no offense, and guess how much I got my Radeon X600Pro for - $80 at NewEgg. Doesn't seem like a bad deal, considering I put all graphics on low with my iBook, get 15FPS in UT2004, put all graphics on max on my 3GHz, get aroun 50-60FPS in UT2004, I'm happy! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bagwaa Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 I had this working on my machine, its basically a hacked copy of OSX on a PC (JaS) -- using the default intel on board gfx card ... anyways, it works for about 2 minutes and then freezes ... did you manage to get this working without freezing? Im thinking this could be down to the gfx card but im not sure... Any help would be cool Thx Bag Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyclonefr Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Check the other WoW post, it seems every GMA9xx user we know has the same bug as yours : ie it freezes. The only advantage you have though, is you can run WoW under Rosetta so you can patch it automatically without doing some tricks... Yep, I know, you'd like best to be able to play it ; it seems for now you gotta buy an ATI card, and don't get me wrong, but it's worth it : there is no way you can play WoW fully maxed with your GMA card, even on Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. Bear Helms Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Yeah the XP version of WoW also seldom gets much above 22 FPS on my GMA900. My hardware came from Newegg, so I guess I'll shop them for a PCIe Radeon I can afford. At the time I last shopped, the Newegg price for an X850 was over $500, so I gave up and got a Mini, and really wish I could make XP look more like the Aqua interface, but all solutions I found either beg me every reboot, slow down the system considerably, and/or eat memory like candied popcorn. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moomoo Posted February 13, 2006 Share Posted February 13, 2006 I have an ATI radeon 9800 and I was having problems with freezing, or rather very very bad delay/lag that would occur in the game. It turns out it was due to incorrectly copied files. Delete all your WoW and bnet preferences and make sure you have a patch.mpq file in your base wow directory. Also if you've got a radeon try removing the string from your ATI9700GA.plugin that fixes tearing, that may help you as well. though you lose CI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dog_Paddle Posted February 26, 2006 Share Posted February 26, 2006 R. Bear Helms, have you tried Flyakite? Will WoW play on GMA900 at all, if I set all the graphics as low as I can? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark7714 Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 R. Bear Helms, have you tried Flyakite? Will WoW play on GMA900 at all, if I set all the graphics as low as I can? Works fine for me (i915/GMA900). All the graphics are turned to the lowest. I get between, 10 - 20 FPS usually. I play it windowed; for some reason it seems to run better windowed? It's never crashed either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dog_Paddle Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 Yeah, I've found out I need 10.4.4 or higher to get it to run. It looks like that is running on your laptop, since my pc is about 1.6Ghz faster than your laptop, do you think I could run it with higher graphics settings and not slow down to snail speed? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark7714 Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 I really don't know what this graphics card is capable of; whether it is my CPU that prevents me from running it smoother or the card. So I couldn't tell you for sure (although, it did run better under XP, so there is room for improvement), but I would assume yes, it should run better on a faster system. Although, RAM plays an important role too... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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