I’ve been comparing the EVE Online clients for Mac OS X and Windows Vista on my Mac Pro Quad Core Xeon 2.8GHZ, 6GB RAM, Nvidia 8800GT. I’m using EVE’s built in console-type-thing, which you can access via CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-M.
These are only very rough observations at the moment, but it appears as if the Mac client is very, very slow compared to the Windows client.
Docked in a station:
Vista – 300FPS
Mac – 40FPS
In space:
Vista – 170FPS
Mac – 30FPS
That’s around 80% slower than Windows. My Nvidia graphics card may be a bottleneck as ATI graphics cards notoriously run faster under Mac OS X, but Mac users on CCP’s forum have been complaining about the poor performance for some time.
There’s no real worry for me, but for people using more realistic configurations for gaming, it will be. Factor in that when the Trinity Premium Graphics is released for Mac, the performance hit will be even greater.
Here’s what Arend Stührmann had to say about Premium Graphics for Mac and Linux earlier this year:
“We have declared [Trinity] to be the Boost Patch, where our game designers will take a long, hard look at areas of EVE Online’s gameplay that might benefit from a bit of a boost. All areas of gameplay are coming under scrutiny, so this patch will hopefully have something that everyone can be happy about. We have also started collecting ideas for our next big expansion, which will continue our tradition of offering large, free expansions to our players on a regular basis. A release date for that expansion has not been set yet, but it will be in 2008. This year will also see the publication of the EVE Online novel by Tony Gonzalez, something we’re really excited about. Tony is an excellent writer and his work is bound to appeal, even to readers who have never set foot into the game. In the background we will of course continue to work on bringing the premium graphics to the Mac and Linux platforms and keep the universe moving along.”
Let’s hope some serious works goes into optimising the client and Apple and Transgaming can work together to improve drivers for the range of cards in Mac hardware, not just cards from ATI.
“Let’s hope some serious works goes into optimising the client……..”
I hope they pull all resource off the Mac version and re-deploy it to get Ambulation finished and released for the PC version. Only kidding.
Thanks for taking the time to gather the data. I’m surprised there is such a performance gap, but then I haven’t played EVE on bootcamp.
There are a lot of complaints from Mac users in the EVE Online forums to be sure, and yet this seems like the ideal game for a Mac person. This is a game that challenges intelligence and creativity more than reflexes.
Well, what can I say … I’m an addict.