Strange performance with overlays on mac

[unmerged(156413)]

Hi,

when playing on my mac, I get a very bad performance when I activate the overlay info. This is especially true when trying to build subway-stations. When I switch to above ground mode, and then try to place the station, it takes nearly a full second to update the overlay for every step that I move the station, which makes the game really annoying to play.

By the way, I own the Macbook pro 2010 15" and use the gfxCardStatus to control the switching of the graphics cards.

Just out of curiosity, I tried what happens when I do not use the dedicated graphics card. So I forced the use of the integrated chip instead of the nvidia, and as expected the overall performance was really bad. Interestingly though, the updating of the overlays is then much smoother than when I use the dedicated chip.

Also, the basic performance of the game is really good, it is just the overlays slowing down the machine.

 

[unmerged(429455)]

I'm on a White Macbook with only the integrated NVIDIA GeForce 320M and 256mb (Way under specs) but it runs small & medium maps with multiple lines just fine (Not tried large maps beyond a few years and lines yet) Overlays seem fine for me, like you however the only thing that chugs along are the metro stations during placement, but they are not things I like to place quickly anyway.

The only thing to do is turn stuff off (graphics options) until you get a level of performance you are happy with. Also switch the mini monitor (bottom right) to data view. Hiding lines might also help.

It's a shame you can't hide people, traffic and buildings as you could in Traffic Giant

 

[co_damsku]

when playing on my mac, I get a very bad performance when I activate the overlay info. This is especially true when trying to build subway-stations. When I switch to above ground mode, and then try to place the station, it takes nearly a full second to update the overlay for every step that I move the station, which makes the game really annoying to play.

Hi daBorg666,

Have you tried to lower the graphics setting? Especially, I would suggest you experiment with the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering options.
The fact the integrated chips performs better than the dedicated one in this particular case may relate to a non-optimal implementation of some graphic features in the graphic drivers and the first thing with the overlay which comes to mind is AA
Hope that helps !
BR,

 

[unmerged(431726)]

I'm seeing the same issue, subway stations are the biggest culprit. Here are my machine specs:
Mac Pro: Early 2009
Processor: 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 10 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 6800 Series 1024 MB
OS: Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

Thanks,

-Eric

 

[unmerged(156413)]

Hi,

I already tried lowering the settings to absolut minimum (that is, no HDR, no filtering, no anti aliasing, no shadows and minimum resolution), but this does not help. Also, I do not have this problem if I play on Windows with the same machine.

Moreover, all overlays have a serious performance impact, not just the subway stations, although they are worst.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that if I click on the minimap to jump to a different location, this also takes quiet long to load, roughly a second. And it only happens on the discrete chip again, but not on the integrated chip, on which this jumps are much smoother.

So my personal guess is that there is some kind of bottleneck in the cpu/gpu communication, maybe I'm on the right track here?

Anyway, thanks for the help already.