226 replies to this topic

[Matt Diamond]

I finally stopped dicking around with the settings and now I'm starting to have fun with it.
Set it to Low preset, Ultra streaming; I tried to like 1280 but found a tiny jump to 1344 looked much better. Now its running smoothly.

[Homy]

Matt Diamond, on 02 November 2019 - 09:31 PM, said:

I finally stopped dicking around with the settings and now I'm starting to have fun with it.
Set it to Low preset, Ultra streaming; I tried to like 1280 but found a tiny jump to 1344 looked much better. Now its running smoothly.

That's a bit depressing to hear considering you have a Vega 56.

[Matt Diamond]

Homy, on 02 November 2019 - 09:42 PM, said:

That's a bit depressing to hear considering you have a Vega 56.

I agree. But it's worth mentioning that the Low preset still has 2x anisotropic filtering, AA, and other settings turned on. (I also have vsync on.) That's why the video reviewer said it still looks okay on Low.

The benchmark says I can get 41 fps on Medium, even at 1600x960. But it seemed to stutter. And nothing I changed got it to 50 fps.

I'm going to try a few more experiments, this time in-game instead of the benchmark, and I'll spend much more time with each setting to avoid confusing this poor beleaguered engine.


Eventually we'll get past this and can talk more about the game itself. :-) The 3D map is a real improvement.

[Matt Diamond]

Sorry to post this often but the performance of this game is incredibly inconsistent (for me) and I'm probably going to just put it away for a while and hope they patch it.

Some details:

I played fairly happily at Medium w/Ultra streaming textures/1344x756 at a fairly consistent 35 fps. I left it paused for an hour, came back and the fps was in the 20's, then became a slideshow during a boss battle. Eventually gave up, tried to quit to the main menu it hung on the loading screen, had to reboot the machine.

After reboot I ran the game, set it to Low, finished the boss, left. The areas outside were now horribly blocky and the fps was in the 20's. I returned to base and it never improved- an area I'd played earlier on Low without problems were stuck in the 20s and blocky. (You can see an example of the blocky effect in the video review.) Same area & settings as before, but this time unusable appearance and performance.

Restarted the game. This fixed the blockiness and performance seemed more normal, but I soon managed to screw up a triggered event by parking a truck in its parking space backwards. The game wouldn't let me move it, but the next event failed to trigger. Thankfully restarting fixed that one.

Almost immediately after that I got to a long an in-game cutscene, and it played the entire scene with the audio on a 5 second delay.
Then the game was okay for a big fight that followed.
--
So I can't really recommend the game to anyone at the moment.
Like the earlier titles they they are probably going to milk this title for a while, so there could very well be patches even for the Mac port.

[Camper-Hunter]

You should have waited for it to come to Steam, since after a few months of delay, it would have been patched up, and also you wouldn't support the bad guys, haha.
Joke aside (or is it one), I never ever buy a game until at least a year after release, both for bug fixes, all DLCs released, and better pricing.

[Homy]

Matt Diamond, on 04 November 2019 - 06:02 AM, said:

So I can't really recommend the game to anyone at the moment.
Like the earlier titles they they are probably going to milk this title for a while, so there could very well be patches even for the Mac port.

Thanks for sharing your experiences! I read here that Borderlands 3 prefers rather high CPU clock speeds than number of cores and here they say that the game can only use 4 cores and 4 threads. Having a i7-8700B with 6 cores and 12 threads like in your Mac Mini doesn't help. I wonder if you could get a little better result with the base i3 3.6 GHz since it has higher base clock speed. The minimum and recommended CPU speeds for pc is quad core 3.4 GHz and for Mac apparently 4.2 GHz. Your CPU has turbo boost up to 4.6 GHz but only if not all the cores are used and not the whole time. It's no doubt that the game isn't well optimized for Mac though.

Camper-Hunter, on 04 November 2019 - 04:48 PM, said:

You should have waited for it to come to Steam, since after a few months of delay, it would have been patched up, and also you wouldn't support the bad guys, haha.
Joke aside (or is it one), I never ever buy a game until at least a year after release, both for bug fixes, all DLCs released, and better pricing.

I always play games years after their release too. It's only this year I started to play BL1 and 2. Another advantage is that you can play old games with high settings since Mac GPUs are always behind the requirements at the release time.

[Matt Diamond]

Homy, on 04 November 2019 - 07:27 PM, said:

I wonder if you could get a little better result with the base i3 3.6 GHz since it has higher base clock speed.

If by "better result" you mean "same performance when I play through the same area twice with the same settings" then the answer is apparently no.

It is EXTREMELY out of character for me to buy a game so soon after release, let alone one that my machine is below spec for. Not sure I deserve to read lots of posts from people patting themselves on the back for not buying it. :-)

I hope my experiences are helpful to others. Oddly enough I'm not sorry I bought it yet. I got a few good hours in before that last bad session so I think there's hope in the long run.

I miss the days when IMG would pay me to test and review games instead of me doing it on my own dime.

[macdude22]

For the few minutes at a time I can tolerate using a K/M I have had solid performance at 1680x944, Low settings, Texture streaming cranked to Ultra. Like 45FPS, no dips below 30. The difference between Low and Medium does not seem to make much difference to my tired eyes at the resolution I am playing at (though the Very Low -> Low difference is staggering). Playing on any higher resolution results in wild performance swings, which may be a VRAM thing (4GB 560 Pro).

I don't think any modern CPU is limiting BL3 and most performance issues are disk/texture/GPU related. I get a solid 30FPS at 1280x720 on a 2018 Mini (UHD Graphics 630, 3ghz i5) on Very Low, albeit doesn't look very good.

[MrUNIMOG]

macdude22, on 05 November 2019 - 08:13 AM, said:

I get a solid 30FPS at 1280x720 on a 2018 Mini (UHD Graphics 630, 3ghz i5) on Very Low, albeit doesn't look very good.

I'll say it again, that kind of performance out of a Mac mini is very astonishing to me. Really makes me want to give it a try on my 13" MBP.

Haven't made up my mind yet on whether to get in on Epic or wait for the Steam release though. Not that I have anything against the Epic Store in particular, It's just that I prefer having my games in one place. Not especially keen on buying it twice, already had to do that with BL1 (Mac version only on MAS, Windows version on Steam)..

[macdude22]

I want you to understand how not very pretty this looks at 1280x720 and Ultra Low settings. I have attached some screenshots from the mini.

It's playable in a technical sense that it's a fluid 25-30FPS. But it's like graphical quality between PS1 and PS2.

I have been unable to get the game to load on a 2018 Air (UHD 617) so the 630 may be the bottom bar.

Attached Files

•  bl32.jpg   105.43K   38 downloads
•  BL31.jpg   119.05K   33 downloads

[Frigidman™]

macdude22, on 06 November 2019 - 07:42 AM, said:

I want you to understand how not very pretty this looks at 1280x720 and Ultra Low settings. I have attached some screenshots from the mini.

It's playable in a technical sense that it's a fluid 25-30FPS. But it's like graphical quality between PS1 and PS2.

I have been unable to get the game to load on a 2018 Air (UHD 617) so the 630 may be the bottom bar.

Looks like Marathon grade graphics right there... whats the issue?

[macdude22]

It doesn't bother me but my understanding is most folks on this forum think anything sub 4K 144hz photorealistic is unplayable.

[Sneaky Snake]

Matt Diamond, on 04 November 2019 - 06:02 AM, said:

After reboot I ran the game, set it to Low, finished the boss, left. The areas outside were now horribly blocky and the fps was in the 20's. I returned to base and it never improved- an area I'd played earlier on Low without problems were stuck in the 20s and blocky. (You can see an example of the blocky effect in the video review.) Same area & settings as before, but this time unusable appearance and performance.

Thanks for all of your detailed input Matt.

Have you checked your CPU's temps/frequency while gaming (you can do so with Intel Power Gadget) ? It looks to me like it may be a case of thermal throttling.

On my work laptop (Dell XPS 9570 with a 1050 Ti MaxQ GPU) I can play Destiny 2 on low settings at around 60 fps for around 20-30 minutes but eventually the laptop will start to thermally throttle and my framerates goes way down (drops from 60fps down to 25). The XPS has an i7 8750H but it will throttle itself down to 1.1 GHz for extended periods of time. Very frustrating.

[macdude22]

My iMac sits against a very cold wall. Maybe performance will drop wildly come summer

[mattw]

What kind of hardware is needed for 1440p on new titles like Borderlands 3 (and for that matter the most recent TR game too if anyone knows)?

I'm not as fussy so don't need 60fps all the time just not dropping below 30 really.

Until these latest games my RX580 has been capable without dropping the quality setting much but it sounds like more GPU is required?

[UmarOMC1]

'Borderlands 3 Optimization, Fix Low Framerates With Virtually No Visual Downgrade'
Skip to 3:14 as the first few minutes are spent mostly talking about the differences between DX11 and DX12 performance. I started with Medium and turned some things to Ultra as going straight to Ultra locks in Motion Blur and I personally hate the effect.

[Matt Diamond]

Sneaky Snake, on 06 November 2019 - 08:46 AM, said:

Have you checked your CPU's temps/frequency while gaming (you can do so with Intel Power Gadget) ? It looks to me like it may be a case of thermal throttling.

Very interesting! I will try to play it some more with that in mind. I will try the Power Gadget too.

[Homy]

UmarOMC1, on 06 November 2019 - 04:18 PM, said:

'Borderlands 3 Optimization, Fix Low Framerates With Virtually No Visual Downgrade'
Skip to 3:14 as the first few minutes are spent mostly talking about the differences between DX11 and DX12 performance. I started with Medium and turned some things to Ultra as going straight to Ultra locks in Motion Blur and I personally hate the effect.

In this video they say that the stuttering can be due to the DRM and more common with quad-cores.

[ozzy]

So I bought it to do a few tests. Will update this as I do more. Seems like this game is not optimized great (as has previously been discussed), and also much more CPU bottlenecked and thunderbolt bandwidth bottlenecked than any others I've tried before:

2018 13" MBP 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, Vega 56 in eGPU:

• 1440p at settings between Medium/Ultra(in the video linked above by Umar I used the quality settings compromise they have about 4/5 of the way through the video): 40.33 FPS Avg, 4.5 FPS Min, 264.21 FPS Max
  
• 1440p at settings close to Medium (in the video linked above by Umar I used the performance settings compromise they have about 4/5 of the way through the video): 39.31 FPS Avg. Not sure why this one was slightly lower than the first, but they are basically the same
  
• 1080p at settings close to Medium (in the video linked above

  by Umar I used the performance settings compromise they have about 4/5 of the way through the video): 41.68 FPS Avg

​

2012 15" MBP 2.6Ghz Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM, Vega 56 in eGPU running over Thunderbolt 1:

• I will post the exact stats when I boot back into Mac OS, but I think everything I tried was around 20 FPS tops

I'm trying to install it in Windows 10 on my 2012 15" MBP now to see how it compares to Mac OS on the same rather outdated hardware. Unfortunately I can't do bootcamp on my 2018 13" MBP.

[UmarOMC1]

BTW, where's the output file saved?