jerky performance on mac

[part12studios]

Hi there, i've tried a few different versions of the steam version of seven days to die on my i7 2013 iMac and it's got this kind of "jerking" thing going on that i can't figure out how to get rid of.  You walk and it just kinda moves in short bursts of movement rather than simply having the camera move smoothly.  it's worked fine in the past.  Just seems to be something going on more recently.  I'm sure it's something simple.  I just can't find that simple thing

 

I recall there used to be an "experimental" version that worked.  Now in steam it's not there anymore.  

 

Thanks,
Caleb

Edited November 2, 2020 by part12studios (see edit history)

[Jugginator]

Really not sure on your specs but looking it up what you put and the issues it sounds like you're pegging out on ram and vram. I don't know if you can upgrade anything or not (I know Macs typically aren't... but maybe they are lol I'm really not familiar with Macs), but extra ram and, certainly if you can, upgrade the GPU in it (if it has a dedicated card in there, I think that's a chip onboard). From a google on 2013 iMac, it's got a GTXM that has 2gb vram, and your 8gb of system ram is running 1600 mhz, so those are two bottlenecks.

 

If not... lower your texture size to half or quarter, utilize dynamic resolution (set it to scale, not auto), and perhaps lower the terrain quality a bit.

[Lime]

I side with @part12studios on this one. Game performance on Macs heavily degraded since, I dunno, A17, I guess.

 

I have a macbook pro with 16Gb ram, 2,6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 CPU and Radeon Pro 555X 4 GB graphics. Game used to run A16 with 1680x1050 resolution on settings above medium and had ~55-60 FPS, rarely below 50. Now with res 800x600 and lowest possible settings I can barely get 30 FPS. And sound. Sound is always dithering, been broken since ~A17 too, I guess.

 

Devs have really messed up Mac performance, and it doesn't look like they're willing to do anything about it, which socks.

Basically, game on Macs in now in unplayable state.

[ROXXlE]

I have the same issue. My specs are the same as @Lime. I tried lowest quality and it's horrible, unplayable. I have played over 400 hours in this game when it was A16, even with mods installed. The quality back then wasn't great, but at least it was playable in SP and MP. Wanted to play it again, but I can't even start walking or look around without it being terribly slow in movement..

 

Hope devs will fix this eventually, hopefully soon because I really wanna play 7d2d again.

[Beelzybub]

@part12studiosI think that machine defaults to 1440p. You could try lowering the resolution to 1920 x 1080 or 1600 x 900.

Dunno how much you want to invest in an old machine, but a memory upgrade to 16 or 32 Gb will help, (only

if you have the 27" model) as well as upgrading the hdd to an ssd. I haven't used a mac in a while but there was

a good cleanup utility call ONYX (I think) that helped performance a bit.

 

Post a log file and maybe someone can narrow down the problem.

Edited November 11, 2020 by Beelzybub (see edit history)

[Vampirenostra]

Yep first to do with iMac is add an ssd there as the hdd is a premium bottleneck.

For rest of MacBook  Pro users same as myself with absolutely same specs as the rest here with MBP 18... I don't really get your complains on the performance. My MBP works just fine assuming it throttles a lot on horde nights and at big missions like factories and skyscrapers. Yes you are right that it was much smoother before A17, but we're not there anymore, assuming TFP re-arranged the "pathing AI" for zeds, this @%$# loads it heavy. 

Here you go with my settings, give it a try:

Resolution is  1400x900 and I also input: gfx pp enable 0    what gives me like 5-10fps more.

[Aetnaria]

On 11/12/2020 at 8:29 AM, Vampirenostra said:

Yep first to do with iMac is add an ssd there as the hdd is a premium bottleneck.

For rest of MacBook  Pro users same as myself with absolutely same specs as the rest here with MBP 18... I don't really get your complains on the performance. My MBP works just fine assuming it throttles a lot on horde nights and at big missions like factories and skyscrapers. Yes you are right that it was much smoother before A17, but we're not there anymore, assuming TFP re-arranged the "pathing AI" for zeds, this @%$# loads it heavy. 

Here you go with my settings, give it a try:

Resolution is  1400x900 and I also input: gfx pp enable 0    what gives me like 5-10fps more.

Thank you for this information! Last played this game over a year ago, and when I booted it up last night I received the slideshow version of gameplay. Changing to the Lowest quality preset somewhat improved things to the point of questionably playable so long as no sudden moves are needed, but using your exact settings including the "gfx pp enable 0" makes gameplay enjoyable with only slight stuttering (MacBook Pro mid-2015, 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2 GB, Aura Pro X2 SSD 1 TB). Is there a way to save or autolaunch with the "gfx pp enable 0" setting or is this something I simply need to remember to do every time I play?

Edited December 13, 2020 by Aetnaria (see edit history)

[Vampirenostra]

16 hours ago, Aetnaria said:

Thank you for this information! Last played this game over a year ago, and when I booted it up last night I received the slideshow version of gameplay. Changing to the Lowest quality preset somewhat improved things to the point of questionably playable so long as no sudden moves are needed, but using your exact settings including the "gfx pp enable 0" makes gameplay enjoyable with only slight stuttering (MacBook Pro mid-2015, 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2 GB, Aura Pro X2 SSD 1 TB). Is there a way to save or autolaunch with the "gfx pp enable 0" setting or is this something I simply need to remember to do every time I play?

unfortunately I've got no idea if you can pre-set this somewhere in the conning, and guess it will move your installation into "modded" setting, so no achievements would be working as if you enable cheat mode.

[mdedmon]

Signal Boost! I'm having this exact same issue. After joining the 7DTD server, the game is a slide show, even at its lowest quality.  BUT, I have this system setup with bootcamp with Windows 10 running on the other partition.  If I boot into Windows 10, the game plays like a dream on the same hardware specs. I'd prefer to play this game on the Mac side for other reasons, but it's unusable.  Hardware specs below:

 

Model Name: iMac

  Model Identifier: iMac14,2

  Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed: 3.5 GHz

  Number of Processors: 1

  Total Number of Cores: 4

  L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

  L3 Cache: 8 MB

  Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

  Memory: 32 GB

  Boot ROM Version: 146.0.0.0.0

  SMC Version (system): 2.15f7

 

Storage:

Samsung SSD 860 EVO 4TB:

 

  Capacity: 4 TB (4,000,787,030,016 bytes)

  Model: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 4TB                 

  Revision: RVT04B6Q

 

Any info on this would be appreciated.