EQMac.com

Hello All! Looking for some advice from someone who has possibly done this. Currently I'm running EQMAC on a 2008 MBP thats 2.8GZ Core2Duo with 4GB RAM and 512Mb Video. To be honest I'm not happy with my current performance in EQMAC. I have textures and settings all turned down, nothing from luclin enabled. I even run a viewport of 800x600 with spell effects on minimum. But I'm using window mode with spaces to both box and using safari/email. I even changed desktop to 16bit and eqclientini options to 16bit. I wonder if installing tiger would make a big difference in performance for EQMAC, has anyone tried this on an intel machine?

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Essentially no.

OS, takes memory, up to a gb or more. An intel machine, so rosetta, and more memory. Each instance of EQ, 1-2 GB each. Safari makes extensive use of memory. Not sure of the footprint of Mail (use something else). Emulated and not enough memory, it will be slow.

Setup a macro (applescript) to launch your EQ instances then quit the finder, saves some memory. Make sure you quit Safari and anything else before setting up your instances. About all you can do.

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its really all about cpu speed for eqmac on intel machines, took overclocking my cpu to 3.9ghz to get it nice and smooth, tiger tends to be the preferred OS though, might get a little performance boost but nothing miraculous.

a program called Atmonitor is good for measuring your FPS, you may even find that if the CPU is the bottleneck, messing with viewport and dropping resolutions and colour depth makes barely any difference, it is what i found.

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From another thread:



You might take a look at blued, the bluetooth daemon in top. OS X builds at that time had issues with it, even with bluetooth turned off, in some cases using up to 40+% of the processor time and insanely high VM allocations. If you google 'blued' there are a number of fixes out there.

If you have a 10.6 (even 10.5) machine that you use only for EQ, have enough memory (min of 4GB, preferably 8GB+) then you can essentially turn VM off:

CAUTION - Only try this if you know what you are doing!

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

This can be reversed with:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

This seems to address almost all intel issues with the exception of large raids in indoor zones, something networking related it seems.

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Why only do this if its a mac exclusive for eq? I'd like to boost my performance on my intel mac mini 2.53ghz 4g ram. I use it for everything though. So not recommended I try?

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If you run an app and run out of memory, depending on what the app is 'expecting', you can run into some nasty errors, so when I said exclusive to eq, I really meant only concurrently running apps of a known size that will fit within the hw bounds. 10.6 is better with dealing with this than 10.5. Actually older apps, like the eq client, are also better suited for this, as of now. Would hate to see anyone lose important work lost by a kernal panic.

A bit of background, this is being done on a lot of macbook air's with ssd drives. These relatively expensive drives 'wear out' over time with each access, so eliminating vm paging significantly reduces drive access, and extends the life of the ssd. So if you do some searches, you'll find more info and what to watch out for.

Rosetta is the key here, it's not just emulation. Rosetta caches, and optimizes on successive runs of that code. Memory, not having to be paged in from vm, plays the significant role in performance. Accounting for the memory needs of rosetta on intel is important, if you're just running intel apps, things are much simpler.

And by the way, after 'turning vm off', you have to restart. There are also a number of invisible swap files that can be deleted and reclaim a large amount of disk space if things work well for you.

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