118 replies to this topic

[Bernie]

TG_Castolo, on 09 March 2011 - 04:32 PM, said:

o/  Gamers !!

Introduction  first.  I am Sunny Thakkar, one of the Senior QA personnel at  TransGaming Inc.  Been a long time lurker on the IMG forums and its nice  to finally meet you all.

Regarding the High Res Texture Pack, apart from the potential patching issues noted on the BioWare forum ( http://social.biowar...-6394633-1.html ), another factor for the pack's absence is the need for  DirectX 11 features which are currently not available on Mac.  

If you are curious about performance when using the texture pack on Windows, you can take a peek at some numbers here - http://social.biowar...index/6395368/1

cheers

Hi, Sunny. Welcome to our little home-away-from-home. Since you've been a long time lurker, let me offer you some bacon & root beer.

[UmarOMC1]

Looks like a lot of people's set ups are choking on the hi-res textures on the PC side of things, I doubt mine would but I don't do the Bootcamp thing. Well the game looks good as-is on my setup with everything maxed, vsync on, 8xAA. I haven't played for too long but I'm enjoying the game. It feels like a "Dragon Age" game without feeling like it necessarily ties into Origins at all. Other options I enabled are those little pop-ups during battle they allay to me whether there was a hit, miss and the amount of damage, if any. I want to feel like I'm still playing an RPG.

On into Kirkwall...

[jgwdoc]

Any more impressions about how this is playing on the Mac side? Amazon says I'm getting my copy tomorrow and I was hoping to actually play it under OS X instead of BootCamp.

[strangemax]

Hi Sunny,

Any tips for getting around my installer crashing? or where I can send the crash report? As I mentioned above it only crashes on my 2011 macbook pro 17". I was able to install it fine on my mac pro.

Thanks.

TG_Castolo, on 09 March 2011 - 04:32 PM, said:

o/  Gamers !!

Introduction first.  I am Sunny Thakkar, one of the Senior QA personnel at TransGaming Inc.  Been a long time lurker on the IMG forums and its nice to finally meet you all.

Regarding the High Res Texture Pack, apart from the potential patching issues noted on the BioWare forum ( http://social.biowar...-6394633-1.html ), another factor for the pack's absence is the need for  DirectX 11 features which are currently not available on Mac.  

If you are curious about performance when using the texture pack on Windows, you can take a peek at some numbers here - http://social.biowar...index/6395368/1

cheers

I haven't tried the hi-res windows pack. I didn't even realize it was out there. The game is awesome by the way. It is different from Origins, so I wouldn't compare the two. I haven't tried playing on the mac side again, since the mac pro I have is at work. I installed it there just as a test. I play on my macbook at home. I have another mac pro at home that my son uses, I'll try getting it loaded on there as a test and report.

[Bernie]

jgwdoc, on 10 March 2011 - 01:07 PM, said:

... I was hoping to actually play it under OS X instead of BootCamp.

Have you seen your own forum sig? I'm going to be playing DA2 on my 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac and you're worried about your Mac Pros handling it? If I was in Monty Python, I'd be drooling in your general direction.

[Tesseract]

TG_Castolo, on 09 March 2011 - 04:32 PM, said:

Regarding the High Res Texture Pack, apart from the potential patching issues noted on the BioWare forum ( http://social.biowar...-6394633-1.html ), another factor for the pack's absence is the need for  DirectX 11 features which are currently not available on Mac.

Out of curiosity, which ones?

[Jan]

The game plays absolutely flawless on my iMac. Cider has come a long way since the Battlefield 2142 disaster.
Performance is much better than Aspyr's 7-year old 'native' KotOR port. My settings are: Res: 1.920 x 1.080,
Detail: High, AA: 2x. Nothing to complain about here.

[clocknova]

Maybe Dragon Age 3 will go back to the true RPG formula of DA:O, and those of us who don't particularly like action-RPGs can just ignore this one.  Let's hope.

[Jan]

clocknova, on 11 March 2011 - 07:33 AM, said:

Maybe Dragon Age 3 will go back to the true RPG formula of DA:O, and those of us who don't particularly like action-RPGs can just ignore this one.  Let's hope.

Yeah, it's not the 'old-school RPG' Dragon Age experience with an epic storyline like in Origins (I spent 100+ hours in the game, without DLC), but still a pretty fun game.

[jgwdoc]

Bernie, on 10 March 2011 - 06:48 PM, said:

Have you seen your own forum sig? I'm going to be playing DA2 on my 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac and you're worried about your Mac Pros handling it? If I was in Monty Python, I'd be drooling in your general direction.

I wasn't so much worried about the machine as about the Cider version. But it sounds like folks think it's pretty good, so that's where my weekend's going.

[Hobeaux]

the performance is good so far, but i really only played for about 30 minutes—and by "played" i mean staring at my character from a worm's eye view as the camera spins around rapidly. Seems that no one tested the controls with a Wacom tablet. I'll have to locate a mouse and hope that I don't re-aggrivate the carpal tunnel again. may start with checking that i have the latest wacom drivers first...

[ltcommander.data]

Jan, on 11 March 2011 - 05:12 AM, said:

The game plays absolutely flawless on my iMac. Cider has come a long way since the Battlefield 2142 disaster.
Performance is much better than Aspyr's 7-year old 'native' KotOR port. My settings are: Res: 1.920 x 1.080,
Detail: High, AA: 2x. Nothing to complain about here.

I'm guessing the requirement for the very latest OS 10.6.6 helps here, because they can really focus and take advantage of all the new OpenGL extensions that have been added since Leopard.

I was impressed that the minimum system requirements for the Mac version are actually the same as the Windows version, 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo and 256MB HD2600. That implies that Cider no has virtually no CPU overhead and Mac OpenGL drivers may actually be comparable to PC DirectX drivers.

[devSin]

Yeah, but it probably doesn't scale up as well as the PC version. I believe the PC version has two renderer paths (DirectX 9 and DirectX 10/11), and I bet the Mac wrapper supports only the DX9 renderer (so even if the minimums are close enough to the PC, which I doubt they truly provide equivalent performance, there's no advantage past a certain point in terms of improving the graphics quality on more capable hardware, whereas the game on Windows can push up against even current hardware).

[UmarOMC1]

I just received (March 11, 2011 5:38:29 PM EST) an email from EA Customer Service with a pre-order promo code for Fadeshear and the Lion of Orlais shield. I never wrote to them so I'm assuming it was a widespread problem.

After submitting the code the top of the following page states; Code successfully redeemed! NOTE: You may need to refresh your wallet balance in-game before content will appear in-game.

devSin, on 11 March 2011 - 11:35 AM, said:

Yeah, but it probably doesn't scale up as well as the PC version. I believe the PC version has two renderer paths (DirectX 9 and DirectX 10/11), and I bet the Mac wrapper supports only the DX9 renderer (so even if the minimums are close enough to the PC, which I doubt they truly provide equivalent performance, there's no advantage past a certain point in terms of improving the graphics quality on more capable hardware, whereas the game on Windows can push up against even current hardware).

Neither my Radeon HD 4870 nor my current 5870 cards have OpenGL 3.x-compliant drivers if OpenGL Extensions Viewer tests are to be believed (well, to be more correct, I believe it should be stated that Apple doesn't have OpenGL 3.3-compliant drivers...), much less anything near the more Direct X 11-equivalent OpenGL 4.1 draft so I wouldn't expect more than Direct X 9-ish bells and whistles. Sad considering Apple sits on The Khronos Group Board of Directors/Promoters "...with final specification ratification voting rights."

[ikir]

Performance are very very good indeed!! I've played for a couple of hours now. Much more faster than DA: O on the same machine, i can even play good on new GMA HD 3000 on my MBP 13".

I can't wait for full OpenGL 3.0 support in Lion

[UmarOMC1]

ikir, on 14 March 2011 - 03:36 AM, said:

I can't wait for full OpenGL 3.0 support in Lion

Full OpenGL 3.x (3.3 is the last 3.x draft I believe) compliance in Lion? Is that the claim? Where have I been?




EDIT: ...after a Google search I came across this macrumors post along with this statement; "Support for OpenGL 3.2 on capable hardware". Being that AMD released [Windows] Catalyst drivers with OpenGL 4.1 support LAST DECEMBER... OpenGL 4.x support on OS X would still be about a year behind when Lion's released... and that's IF 4.x support was going to be available out of the box! *sigh!*

Well... it's better than only full 2.x compliance!

[devSin]

As has been stated, it's largely irrelevant. Correct me if I'm wrong, but OpenGL 3 is an entirely separate framework and everything that can be done with the existing framework is already implemented as an extension (so Snow Leopard is OpenGL 2.x + a lot of stuff where possible and when it actually matters). And don't compare Apple with a vendor that only has to support OpenGL (that nobody even uses, so who knows how robust it is) on their own latest hardware.

The new framework might bring some nicer effects in the future, but it's not going to be an overnight change (every game developed before this summer that doesn't receive a patch will still be running the same OpenGL as Snow Leopard, plus whatever fixes and improvements to it are in Lion).

[UmarOMC1]

Why does a "Thank you Captain Obvious!" come to mind...? Well, after reading the second paragraph anyway...

Now correct me if I'm wrong but OpenGL seems to evolve as a set of modular libraries and extensions that are the foundation for higher level 2D/3D rendering APIs periodically updated to access the latest hardware advances. One may peruse this list easily via OpenGL Extensions Viewer.app

[ltcommander.data]

TG_Castolo, on 09 March 2011 - 04:32 PM, said:

Regarding the High Res Texture Pack, apart from the potential patching issues noted on the BioWare forum ( http://social.biowar...-6394633-1.html ), another factor for the pack's absence is the need for  DirectX 11 features which are currently not available on Mac.

Firstly, great job on getting Dragon Age 2 as a hybrid release. This is definitely one area where Cider can show its potential. Secondly, Lion is reported to be OpenGL 3.2 compliant. Hopefully you'll be able to look into ways to get the High Res Texture Pack working in Lion once Lion is released. Otherwise, I hope you'll encourage Apple to add whatever missing extensions are necessary while Lion is still in development.

devSin, on 14 March 2011 - 05:12 PM, said:

As has been stated, it's largely irrelevant. Correct me if I'm wrong, but OpenGL 3 is an entirely separate framework and everything that can be done with the existing framework is already implemented as an extension (so Snow Leopard is OpenGL 2.x + a lot of stuff where possible and when it actually matters). And don't compare Apple with a vendor that only has to support OpenGL (that nobody even uses, so who knows how robust it is) on their own latest hardware.

UmarOMC1, on 14 March 2011 - 11:05 PM, said:

Now correct me if I'm wrong but OpenGL seems to evolve as a set of modular libraries and extensions that are the foundation for higher level 2D/3D rendering APIs periodically updated to access the latest hardware advances. One may peruse this list easily via OpenGL Extensions Viewer.app

In OpenGL 3.x, they've started deprecating older features, but supposedly due to internal politics, OpenGL couldn't make a clean break like DX10 and DX11 have been able to do. As such, OpenGL 3.x implements a Core profile that adds new features and tries to clean things up by not including older features, plus a Compatibility profile that's a superset of the new features plus all the older features for backwards compatibility. Apple, in traditional Apple style, is trying to be forward looking in Lion since the only way to access OpenGL 3.2 in Lion is reportedly through the Core profile. They are separately keeping a legacy profile which is basically OpenGL 2.1 + extensions as in Snow Leopard. But there is no Compatibility profile superset to combine the two. So it'll probably be a little bit more work for developers to target OpenGL 3.2 in Lion and still support OpenGL 2.1 for Snow Leopard compatibility.

As pointed out, Apple is a Khronos Group Promoter so I'm sure they would say they are leading by example since they are probably the only ISV implementing Core profile only support for OpenGL 3.x. Supposedly the Compatibility profile was really needed to support professional apps and conveniently AutoCAD, one of the likely holdups, is now on Mac, so they'll have to clean up their code to be Core profile compliant if they want to take advantage of newer OpenGL features. The same with software from Adobe, Maxon, etc. So perhaps Apple can play a role in moving things forward in OpenGL.

[UmarOMC1]

...well it's better than Apple's GameSprockets and QuickDraw 3D RAVE misfire... Direct X sucked when it debuted, but they kept hammering at it... Apple shot an arrow in the 1996 dark and ran...