Good/decent Mac, 7-8 FPS

Avaruu · February 2017

Hey all. I bought ESO for my friend a couple of days ago and we just got it installed on her iMac, the specifications are as follows:

General: iMac 27-inch, Mid-2010
Processor: 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 8GB 1333MHz DDR3
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5750, ~1GB VRAM (which does use the required 4.1 OpenGL version)

Yet for some reason, at character select and ingame, her FPS won't go above 8 at most, even with every single setting brought as low as possible. Bringing up the settings to medium-ish still sits at 7-8 FPS. I did a very basic tweak in the usersettings.txt (the GPUsmoothing from "10" to "0") and it didn't have any effect.

I feel like something is arbitrarily capping her FPS this way as changing settings has little to no effect when it normally would, but I really just can't figure it out. She regularly plays WoW at almost-maxed settings with extremely good FPS and I believe it was a similar case with GW2.

Any ideas on where I should at least start looking? Nothing in the Activity Monitor stood out as being high when I watched it while the game was loaded (and ingame).

Thanks.

KhajitFurTrader · February 2017

This iMac's graphics card does not fulfill the minimum system requirements.

For general performance hints, you could take a look at my Mac 64-bit client FAQ (link in sig below).

I too keep a 2010 27" iMac around as a testbed/secondary display (i5 2.8 GHz, 12 GB RAM, same GC), and frankly, I don't even bother starting ESO on this machine anymore, except for rare testing purposes. WoW runs well on sightly pimped recommended settings, but compared to what the GTX 780M in my main iMac can pull off, the difference in quality is apparent. BTW, Metal isn't even supported on the HD 5750.

smacx250 · February 2017

The current sub-sampling problem (always runs high) is likely to be negatively affecting the performance - particularly with below spec machines. This is supposed to be fixed on Monday, and after that you can try reducing the subsampling, which generally helps a lot. Until then you can try reducing the screen resolution (if it doesn't take affect from the game menu, do it from system settings), and run in fullscreen windowed mode.

Avaruu · February 2017

Thanks, guys. I did kinda forget how high a native resolution the 27-inch has so I will lower it to something more comfortable in the settings file (I could only change it during full screen).

I did not know there was a bug with subsampling. That might explain why I didn't notice any difference when I changed it around in the settings.

I will play around with the resolution some more and comb over the 64-bit FAQ when I get home. Even tho the Radeon 5750 is kind of potato, I don't think it warrants 8 fps on minimum. Hopefully it will help!

Jurand80 · February 2017

that card is ancient. eso will never be playable on that. i can barely play on my hackintosh with nvidia gtx660!