Mac Client Feedback

I ran on OSX Maverick with no problems on max resolution on a 27-inch IMac.

I thought that was very promising!

How did other Mac users fare?

 

I had dreadful framerate problems at first (super choppy, character "teleporting" and lurching constantly, etc.), but then I discovered the problem: patching. I downloaded the Mac client on Thursday, and wound up with a buggier, earlier release. Manually downloading a fresh copy of the most recent client (v. 1.24.14 vs. 1.22.14) made an IMMENSE difference. Now things run just as well on my Mac as they do on one of the household Windows systems.

The fix for these kinds of problems seems to be a patching system on par with the Windows client. I'm sure that will be forthcoming in the days ahead, but until it's a reality, I just err on the side of caution and download/install a new client each morning.

(For the record, my system is a 15" Retina MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) with 16GBs of DDR3 and a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor. I'm running OS X 10.9.1.)

 

Maverick OS X 10.9.1 (13B42) running on a 6 year old MacBook Pro (early 2008 model)
2.5 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
6GB RAM, 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (over the original 4GB limit)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512 MB
Main boot drive is a 96 GB SSD popped in the Express Card 34 slot with R2 installed there
Not using the other internal drive (though it does have a newly re-installed Boot Camp partition for Windows XP)

As to be expected things could get a little choppy at times. No idea what frame rates I was getting.
(Is there a FRAPS equiv for OS X?)
The client isn't fully optimized, and I don't expect the best experience on my hardware.
1440x900 full screen, 1024x768 windowed, no AA, no ambient obscurance
I found LOW shadow distance to be about the best option

Biggest problem was excessive turning when trying look around. I could end up at any arbitrary angle, pretty much not the one I wanted. Some sluggishness trying to get a more accurate direction of travel. I got somewhat used to strafing, walking side ways or not directly forward to get around some of those issues. Performance drops off when entering populated areas. 60-70% CPU per core in windowed mode with some spikes up to mid 80's. Most performance drops were probably from resource loading. I think the more recent patches helped with some of the issues.

Memory footprint was never an issue (though I think it was up from R1).