I have tried using Bootchamp to reboot from OSX directly into Windows – and it does work all right, but then the volume and brightness controls under Windows don’t work. But if I reboot via preference pane Startup Disk, then brightness and volume controls work the way they should. So I put together a Bootchamp alternative: an inglorious Automator app to reboot into Windows via StartupDisk.prefpane. Here is the app – together with the script which you should tweak to your own liking (change volume names) or re-record in order for it to work: Download

One thing though: this will set Windows as the startup volume and this change will stick until you set otherwise. To overcome this, you can devise another Automator app in the same vein to reboot from OSX into, well, OSX.

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UPDATE 15.3.2013: Today 10.8.3 update came out and it seems to work smoother. Still, applying these tips will give you even smoother performance.
—
So, you have noticed that Mountain Lion (10.8.2) on your new or old Mac feels sluggish and now you are reading this. Good. In this article I’ll give a few extra tips on how to improve this. Keep in mind that these are merely ADDITIONAL tips that do work, and you shouldn’t ignore and apply the more general tips explained elsewhere (make sure you have enough RAM, upgrade to SSD, have enough disk space left). Let me point out that Mountain Lion DOES invariably feel laggy also on relatively new and capable machines such as:

MacBook Pro quad i7 late 2011
(2.2GHz quad i7, 8 GB RAM, Radeon 6750M graphics and Intel HD 3000 graphics, 128 GB SATA3 SSD)

MacBook Air dual i5 mid 2011
(1.7GHz dual i5, 4 GB RAM, Intel HD 3000 graphics, 128 GB SATA3 SSD)

With these tips I substantially improved performance on both of them. These methods will also work and improve performance on older Core 2 Duo Macs as well, but I cannot tell whether the results will be as great. One thing to add: the explained methods work very well and Mountain Lion will work faster to the point of feeling very fast, yes, yet still not as fast as Snow Leopard 10.6.8 – at least on my quad MBP. That’s why I currently prefer using Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to Mountain Lion 10.8.2, which is something I wrote about in my earlier post.

1. First of all, disable vertical sync

I wrote before about disabling vsync (Beam Sync) via Quartz Debug app before and I keep successfully using this trick on Mountain Lion, with a few small changes. Note that disabling BeamSync works a bit differently (less optimal) on Mountain Lion (and Lion) versus, say, Snow Leopard and earlier. This is most obvious that if you merely disable BeamSync system-wide in Mountain Lion, the animations/transitions in Mission Control will become choppy/laggy (zooming in/out Mission Control, switching full screen apps), something which never happened with disabled BeamSync with Expose.app in Snow Leopard and earlier. We’ll fix these transitions later, however, the scrolling in Mountain Lion with disabled BeamSync works great and is super responsive with vsync off in most apps. So the idea is to keep vertical sync off and fix the transitions somehow.

Get Quartz Debug v4.2 from XCode or download it from OSX86.NET:
http://www.osx86.net/view/2224-quartz_debug.html

Run it, open “Quartz Debug settings”, enable “Force Quartz GL” and set Beam Sync to “Disable”.

That’s it. But keep the Quartz Debug app open (just hide it or minimize it) because the changes won’t stick if you quit the app (not even if you force-quit it, the way it used to work in the earlier versions of Quartz Debug). How to tell if your changes are active? Just drag any of the windows around and if you see some border tearing, then it works. Yes, screen tearing is an obvious side effect if you have vertical sync disabled, but that is a minor trade-off for speed.

So now you have vsync turned off and everything already feels faster. Let’s go on to the next step.

2. Show scroll bars only when scrolling – to fix scroll lag

In System Preferences > General, set scroll bars to show only “When scrolling”. This fixed choppy scrolling in a couple of apps and I decided to stick with this setting.

3. Disable laggy trackpad inertia scrolling

Inertia scrolling feels mostly laggy and Apple wants to force it down out throats. Disable it by going into System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad options

and set “Scrolling: without inertia”

4. If you have two graphic chips, switch to a more powerful one (with GfxCardStatus)

Obviously, switching to a more powerful discrete graphic processor (say, Radeon 6750M/6770M, NVidia 330M/650M,…) will speed things up. But don’t worry, you can still have a fast Mountain Lion even if you only have integrated Intel HD 3000/HD 4000 graphics.

Contrary to the title, you don’t actually need GfxCardStatus program to switch to a more powerful graphic processor – you can do this in the Energy Saver preference pane as well by disabling “Automatic graphics switching”. It is just that it’s much more convenient to switch between discrete or integrated graphics with GfxCardStatus, so I definitely recommend installing it.

Download it from here: http://gfx.io/

5. Speeding up or disabling Mission Control transitions

So, we disabled BeamSync and now we have smooth scrolling, but somewhat choppy Mission Control transitions. Fortunately, in Mountain Lion there is actually an option to set transition duration. The shorter you set this, the less lag you will feel. You can not only shorten the transition time – you can also disable the animation completely.

To make a faster Mission Control animation, open up Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.15

To disable animation completely, type:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

Play with what works best for you.

6. Speeding up or disabling full-screen app switching animation

Unfortunately there is no system setting to kill or speed up the often unnecessary slow animation when switching between full screen apps, if you use apps in full-screen mode at all. Fortunately, a program exists, called TotalSpaces, which circumvents this limitation. With it you can dramatically speed up the transitions between desktops/fullscreen apps and even change the type of transition (Cube, Swap, Slide or Flip). You can also choose to not use transitions at all – switching between desktops will then happen instantly and save you a couple of milliseconds time at every switch, resulting in a lifetime saved over a course of a couple of million years. Worth a shot if you ask me. “I want more life, f***er!”

Note that TotalSpaces has no effect on zooming in/out of a full-screen mode. This zooming in/out might still feel slow and possibly even look ugly.

Get Totalspaces here: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/

7. Have your browsing experience fully GPU-accelerated – use Chrome as your main browser

I admit it, I never really liked Chrome browser and have always treated it as some sort of google spyware. But with a lack of better options, I started looking into it and finally found it to be at least for now a FAR faster option than Safari or Firefox, especially with this setup of Mountain Lion I’m explaining in this post. Firefox feels choppy even if it has “hardware acceleration” enabled, while Safari is visibly faster than Firefox, but not without choppiness, and has on top of this the ultra annoying elastic scrolling, which I simply cannot stand. So I played around with advanced settings in Chrome and got it to work blazingly fast.

Type “chrome://flags” in the URL bar (omnibox) and tweak the settings:

GPU compositing on all pages: enabled
Threaded compositing: enabled
Disable GPU VSync: enabled (mind the wording – you are actually “enabling the disabling” of vsync in Chrome)

Then relaunch Chrome. You should have a super snappy Chrome browser now.

8. Switch to a 2D Dock

I usually do it via OnyX, but it can be also done via Terminal. To switch to 2D, type:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

then restart Dock by typing killall Dock. To return to 3D dock, set the parameter to “NO” and restart the Dock.

9. Minimize with Scale effect

Go into System Preferences > Dock

and set “Minimize windows using” to “Scale effect”. For good measure, you can also disable “Animate opening applications”.

10. Disable elastic scrolling

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

11. Disable zooming in Accessibility preference pane

Go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom

and uncheck all options.

——

All these tips should result in a dramatically more responsive and usable operating system. Of course there are many other things you can try if your system is slow, such as repairing permissions etc.

Hope all this works well for you. Cheers.

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At the time of writing this post, the latest version of OS X is 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. While it brought many nice features and definitely is nicer and faster than Lion, it also comes with some compromises. I already wrote about how Apple uses power throttling in order to make battery run longer and this behavior persists in Mountain Lion.

Oh, woes

Running Mountain Lion, my late-2011 Macbook Pro shows 9 hours of battery left when fully charged. While this sort of battery life definitely is something Apple can brag about, it unfortunately comes with a downside: the graphic interface is pretty much lagging most of the time even on 10.8.2. Choppy transitions, choppy scrolling, lag in general…better than Lion but still… Let me point out that this is essentially a higher end laptop with quad core i7 sandy bridge and a pretty powerful AMD Radeon 6750M dedicated graphics chip. This same piece of hardware performs like a champ under bootcamped Windows 7, which is most obvious in super responsive Windows OS and awesome performance of video games even as demanding as Battlefield 3. All this computing power! Yet user interface in Mountain Lion still lags! My frustration with Apple making such performance-related compromises in its software (along with Apple’s many other sins), had me seriously contemplating a final and permanent switch to Windows. I even went as far as installing Mountain Lion in a VMWare virtual machine under Windows 7, for those few Mac-specific apps I couldn’t live without (even if there is no hardware graphic acceleration (CI/QE) for OSX under VMWare). I just had to try one more thing – installing Snow Leopard on this late 2011 MacBook Pro.

Snow Leopard compatibility with newer hardware

This machine came with Lion preinstalled. So officially installing Snow Leopard on it (10.6.8) is not supported, therefore you are doing this at your own risk. It turns out that the last officially supported MacBook Pro for Snow Leopard was the early 2011 version. Since my particular late-2011 base model has roughly the same hardware as the early-2011 high-end model (6750M Radeon graphics, Sandy Bridge), Snow Leopard CAN be installed on it.

What you need to do is get a retail version of Snow Leopard 10.6.7 install disc. After installing, you will need to update to 10.6.8 (download a combo updater). For precaution and to test if it will install on your system, try first installing 10.6.7 on another partition, maybe even an external drive.

The results

The newly installed Snow Leopard should perform flawlessly – even more so when running on discrete Radeon graphics (use gfxCardStatus to switch to discrete graphics). Admittedly, on my machine I also installed a modded, Leopard-like Dock from the beta version of Snow Leopard, plus I enabled QuartzGL and disabled vertical sync with Quartz Debug, the speed optimizations which I always do. I dumped Safari 5 for the latest version of Chrome (for the first time I’m using Chrome as my primary browser due to its GPU acceleration) and everything is blazing fast. So fast in fact, that it comes as a dire reminder of how fast and smooth OSX really is supposed to work, and frankly, I don’t remember any of my previous machines ever running this smoothly. Scrolling and transitions are buttery smooth; frame meter in Quartz Debug actually shows frame rates of more than 100 frames per second. Does this have anything to do with potentially missing GPU or CPU power management, I haven’t yet found out. Whatever the cause, the battery life isn’t half bad. When fully charged, it still shows around 6 hours on integrated graphics and 4,5 hours on discrete graphics. In my opinion – a nice trade off considering the new performance boost.

I am now running 10.6.8 as my main system, with a 10.8.2 instance on another partition for testing the upcoming iterations of Mountain Lion. We’ll see what newer versions of 10.8.x will bring in terms of better performance, yet I stopped looking forward to it quite a while ago. It would be optimal if Apple could keep its promise about long battery life while computer runs on integrated graphics and let the system optimally handle power usage, however, while running on discrete graphics, there such be an option to turn off power throttling and make the system run at its maximum potential.

Good luck, cheers.

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Are you running a dual boot configuration (OSX and Windows 7), presumably not on a very large SSD drive, and are often running out of space on a Windows 7 bootcamp partition? Instead of resizing the partition, there is a more simple solution – move some of the files from bootcamp partition to another partition/drive and provide a symbolic link to them.

If you use your Windows 7 bootcamp installation for gaming, then you probably ran into low disk space issue more than once, had to delete/uninstall games in order to install another one or temporarily move game files to another drive only to copy them back later. Fortunately, ever since symbolic links have been introduced into Windows 7, you can leave game files or directories elsewhere and simply provide a symbolic link to them. Have in mind that this will work only with Windows 7 installed, not with Windows XP (which doesn’t have symbolic linking).

Moving files to a read-only HFS+ partition (instead of NTFS or FAT32)

Sure, moving files to another NTFS or FAT32 partition and symlinking to them seems like an obvious first choice. But what is actually interesting (and since we’re discussing Mac environment here – is more relevant) is that this workaround with symbolic links will also work if you move files to a HFS+ (OSX) partition (copy them within OSX from a Bootcamp partition to a OSX partition). As you already know, Bootcamp provides a AppleHFS driver which enables Windows to read data (but not write) from an OSX partition. So in order for this to work, the files and directories you move to an HFS+ partition from Windows should be only those that need to be accessed for reading – and game files are usually such. While you might not be able to move complete game install folders to a HFS+ location (there are also files there that need to be written to), experiment a bit and find out which are those folders that include data which is only accessed for reading.

For instance: my bootcamp partition is only 55 GB. What I “want to fit” on it is a Battlefield 3 installation (some 30GB), Win7 system (some 15 GB), other games (30+ GB), VMWare with Mountain Lion (10 GB), other programs (5 GB), …you figured it out, the math doesn’t work. So I solved this limitation by moving a couple of Battlefield 3 (already installed) expansions to a HFS+ drive. As mentioned before, this can’t be done from Windows, you need to boot into OSX and drag files from a windows partition over to a OSX partition.

For instance, I copied over to OSX partition two Battlefield 3 expansion packs – folders “Xpack2″ and “Xpack3″ (Close Quarters and Armored Kill) from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\Update\”. After copying your gigabytes, boot back into Windows and delete the original folders (in this case “Xpack2″ and “Xpack3″) on the Windows partition – we’ll make symbolic directory links instead of them.

To do so, open the command prompt and navigate to the folder where you want to place symbolic links. In my case I’ll type:

cd “C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\Update\”

and here create a symbolic directory link for game folder “Xpack2″ which will point to a actual “Xpack2″ folder on the OSX HFS+ partition (which shows as drive F: in Windows in my case):

mklink /d Xpack2 F:\BF3files\Xpack2

Just mind the path – I placed my “Xpack2″ folder into a “BF3files” folder I specifically created for this.

All in all, your symlink should be successfully created and some of the game files will be therefore read from another partition while playing a specific game.

This workaround will also work with external drives and such, provided the drive letter of an external drive remains constant and identical to the one specified in the symbolic link.

Using this solution, my SSD Windows 7 partition is only 80% full (say 45 GB out of 55 GB), and I have some 43 GB of game files (BF3 expansions, full games BFBC2, BioShock, ArmA 2, Trine 2, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4) placed to and read from another HFS+ partition – it is actually a HFS+ partition on a secondary optibay internal HDD drive, but you could well use also a HFS+ partition on the primary SSD drive, if you have enough space there of course.

Have fun!

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Update 4.5.2013: The methods I originally described in this post did work fine, but I just wasn’t completely satisfied with the image quality (still jaggies here and there even at 2xMSAA and general lack of detail at 0xMSAA). Turns out the only real fix for my eyes is to use 4xMSAA with postAA low, no injector, no sharpening, no color fixes (other settings: textures+shadows low, effects+mesh: ultra, terrain medium, deco high, no AO). I was surprised to find that 4xMSAA actually does work smoothly on my 6750M with measly 512 MB VRAM at 1366×768 (non-native though, but also non-scaled of course) resolution with new 13.5 catalyst beta drivers. Had to free as much VRAM as possible (desktop at 16bit color in non-aero mode, using only some 5 MB VRAM, kill hardware acceleration in Firefox) and remove all injectors though (FXAA/SMAA/SweetFX) because they were hurting performance in combination with 4xMSAA. The game now looks sharp and smooth, is a pleasure to watch and play, graphics are easier on the eyes and spotting enemies is much easier with details so carved out and image so clear. So basically if you can afford 4xMSAA at a decent (laptop) resolution even at some low settings, go with it.

Other honorable mentions: The other method I tried prior to settling for 4xMSAA was to use SweetFX injector (a great injector btw) combo with SMAA, sharpening, color vibrance and contrast correction, ingame PostAA low and 2xMSAA. Looked pretty much great, especially the colours, you might want to try that out if 4xmsaa is not an option. In my “quest” for the perfect image quality I even came across a very interesting SSAA injector (download SSAA-Tool at http://www.tommti-systems.de/start.html). What SSAA (true supersampling which can actually be forced upon BF3) injector did in my case was to render the image at double pixels (2880×1800) and then display it downsampled to display’s native 1440×900 resolution. As you can imagine, the image quality is perfect this way, but it murdered my framerates in BF3 therefore it wasn’t even remotely usable, but with a high-end card (or a less demanding game) that would be a different story.

So the takeaway of this whole bf3 image improving oddyssey would be: some games can look near perfect with merely an FXAA injector (BC2 and countless others), but shader based antialiasing (FXAA or SMAA) alone is not enough for BF3, this game is simply made the way it is made, the injector spells work only partially. Use 4xMSAA with BF3 (or at least 2xMSAA). At least for me, 4xMSAA on low has better image fidelity than 0xMSAA on ultra, the difference between jaw-dropping versus sort-of-ok-but-kinda-sloppy. Happy gaming, over and out.

————————————
The original post 14.5.2012:
This is a follow-up post to the previous one. This time around, we’re going to sharpen BF3 graphics further and improve the image quality in BF3, at no performance cost and start enjoying some high-fidelity visuals. No, it’s not yet another post about DANOC FXAA.

——-update 30.9.2012——–

Still using the sharpening injector, only I have set “#define SharpenEdge 0.1″, it hits the right balance between keeping the image sharper than default, and the image jaggies can be smoothed out by using the Post AA set only to Medium. This will give a decent image if you don’t have a powerful enough GPU to use 2xMSAA or 4xMSAA. But then again, if you want the best possible image quality, use at least 2xMSAA + Post AA Medium/Low. The visual difference between 0xMSAA + Post AA Medium and 2xMSAA + Post AA Medium could be worth sacrificing a few FPS for.

——-end of update 30.9.2012——–

While the fundamentals of this method are similar to DANOC or other FXAA/SMAA injector, I got super sharp graphics and better IQ (image quality, obviously) in BF3 a bit differently – by trying something maybe a bit counter-intuitive, so here it is:

1. Turn in-game Post AA to HIGH. Yes, this is BF3 in-game implementation of FXAA which I was previously avoiding as much as I could, since it blurs the image so much. But it turns out there’s a benefit to it. So, the first step requires we get this super-blurry image, and then:

2. Apply classic FXAA injector, but with a twist: we’ll use ONLY the sharpening pass (Sharpen.h) which comes with it, and disable ANY antialiasing by this injector. I disabled injector antialiasing by editing these lines in the file “shader.hlsl” to this:

0, //fxaaQualitySubpix (default: 0.75)
1, //fxaaQualityEdgeThreshold
1, //fxaaQualityEdgeThresholdMin

This effectively “disables” antialiasing by the injector. Next, don’t forget to include the “Sharpen.h” by uncommenting the line to this:

#include “Sharpen.h”

Then you can make minor adjustments inside the “Sharpen.h” file by editing the amount of edge sharpening (I leave it at 0.2 or set it to 0.4):

#define SharpenEdge 0.2

Now, some of the results first (zoom to see actual image size):

Quite impressive for LOW textures setting, I think (use medium textures for even more eye pleasing porn). Now, I’m not claiming that this method removes all aliasing, but still it yields much better results than anything else I tried.

Apart from injector file settings, to get the image quality as in the posted images, set textures and shadows low, all the rest to medium, Post AA High, AF 16x, SSAO on.

In Nvidia Control Panel i have texture filtering set to Quality, LOD bias: Clamp.

So maybe you’re asking – why this alternative sharpening method, when for instance Danoc FXAA injector does just fine and everybody else seems to be using it? Or why use in-game Post-AA instead of injector FXAA together with the sharpening pass?

The simple answer is: I tried it both/all – and wasn’t satisfied with the results at all. This “Post AA High + Sharpen.h” thing was almost an act of desperation, the final thing I was about to try before giving up on trying to get any better image quality in BF3. To be honest: out of the box and on low/medium settings (which quite a few gamers are forced to resort to), Battlefield 3 looks OK, but it just feels like it should look better, and overall just feels a little blurry and unpolished, despite superior lighting and effects. For instance, in BFBC2 I could achieve marvelous image crispness at practically zero aliasing with the FXAA injector, so I found it frustrating that whatever I tried to achieve with the same FXAA injector in BF3, resulted in somewhat non-crisp image and/or jagged edges. And DANOC FXAA injector seemed to spoil the image even more, by making it unnaturally sharp, even without the color correction.

It seems that FXAA injector works differently in BFBC2 vs BF3 because of the differences in lighting between game engines. For instance, in BFBC2 there is a lot more bloom which smooths out object edges, and on top of that these object edges don’t seem to reflect white specular light, and it’s exactly these white object jaggies which are a MAJOR annoyance in BF3 (if you are not using 4xMSAA – and on a low-spec machine you definitely aren’t – yet even 4xMSAA doesn’t smooth out the white aliasing out completely). Apart from white edge “pigeon-shit” aliasing, there’s also black edge aliasing, but it’s not nearly as distracting.

In short, FXAA (and SMAA) injectors did more or less a good job at smoothing out almost all of the edges, except this white edge aliasing on fences and stuff – moving forward in a scene with fences resulted in unsightly edge flickering/flashing. Obviously one thing to try to fix that was to apply more blur to minimize this white aliasing. And this is how we got back to the infamously blurry in-game FXAA (Post AA HIGH) to enhance BF3 graphics. Yet somehow, when you apply the sharpening pass over it, the result is almost, ehm, magical. The shitty low textures actually start looking as if they are at least medium quality, the white aliasing is tamed, and while there is and occasional jagged edge here and there (due to FXAA not fixing it because the line is dashed / or due to extra sharpening), the results are great overall and this is more or less how Battlefield 3 should have looked from the start. Of course, there is also the annoyance of bland colours thanks to much “praised” art direction, but you can fix that by adjusting vibrance/gamma in Nvidia Control Panel.

I’m well aware of the possibility that Nvidia driver FXAA (in 301.24 driver) + sharpening might give even better graphics quality in BF3, but I’ll try that some other time, maybe we’ll even have the highly anticipated FXAA 4 by then. —>UPDATE 1: I tried also the combination of driver FXAA + FXAA injector (with antialiasing off and sharpening on; PostAA in game off), driver FXAA forced through nvidia inspector for the newest 301.42 driver for “Battlefield 3″ profile. The image quality is nice, although it has more aliasing compared to Post AA HIGH + FXAA injector (with antialiasing off and sharpening on). Still there’s less aliasing compared to using antialiasing of only the FXAA injector at the highest setting (FXAA injector with enabled antialiasing + sharpening; PostAA in game off). But what’s most bothersome, driver FXAA seems to give a very noticeable performance hit, so for me at least, it’s not an acceptable option. It just slows the game down for me. So Post AA HIGH + FXAA injector (with antialiasing off and sharpening on) is the winner for now.

UPDATE 2: even on high-end machines with all settings maxed this method might prove useful if you would like to get a bit clearer/sharper image. Here are two cropped screenshots of a scene from BF3 campaign, all settings maxed (4xMSAA and Post AA HIGH) with the injector on versus injector off:

BF3campaign-all-maxed-ultra-PostAAHigh-4xMSAA-injector OFF (very slighty blurry)
BF3campaign-all-maxed-ultra-PostAAHigh-4xMSAA-injector ON (clearer)

Hope this helps a bit,
cheers,
Mark

Test link 1
Test link 2

Test link 2

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The takeaway first: Battlefield 3 (multiplayer as well as campaign) is very playable on 9600M GT with 256MB video RAM and a mid-2009 dual core Macbook Pro, with a few tweaks applied and a few compromises, mostly the resolution at which the game can be played comfortably.

***—–
UPDATE: here is a follow-up post to this one on How to get much sharper, crisper graphics in BF3 (no, it’s not yet another post about DANOC FXAA).
—–***

The results are based on the custom resolution of 900×700 (number-of-pixels-wise this is similar to resolution of 1024×600) and span from:

1. Getting great framerates (30-60+ fps with occasional dips to 25 fps) while compromising image quality at mostly low graphic settings (except anisotropic filter: 4x, no FXAA injector)

2. Getting playable framerates (25-40 fps with dips as low as 15 fps) and noticeably better graphic fidelity at a few settings racked up higher (terrain quality: medium, mesh quality: high, ambient occlusion: SSAO, FXAA injector)

If you want to play BF3 on this sort of underspec’d hardware, you’ll probably alternate between the two sets depending on the map you’ll be playing. Unfortunately, this 256MB card struggles with textures set to Medium, so they’ll have to be set to Low. If you have a 512MB version of 9600M GT, set textures to Medium.

Actual framerates are some 5-10 fps higher than in video below:

The specs:
Macbook Pro mid-2009, machine model MacbookPro 5,3
CPU: Core2Duo 2,66 GHz P8800 (overclocked to 2.87 GHz, voltage set to 1.11 V with ThrottleStop)
GPU: Nvidia 9600M GT 256 Mb GDDR3 (overclocked core/memory/shader from 500/792/1250 to 700/1150/1550)
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1, Bootcamp 3.3
Graphic driver: 296.10 WHQL, no 3D driver installed
Nvidia motherboard driver: 6.05.30
Audio driver: default CirrusLogic that comes with the above version of Boot Camp

Software used:
Nvidia Control Panel
ThrottleStop 4.00
Game Booster 3.3.1
Realmware BF3 Settings Editor
FXAA injector (classic FXAA, not Danoc FXAA preset; can use SMAA injector as well but FXAA injector yields better image quality)
LubbosFanControl 64-bit

In-game settings:
Textures: Low
Shadows: Low
Effects: Low
Mesh quality: Low (or High)
Terrain quality: Low (or Medium)
Terrain decoration: Low (or High)
Antialiasing deferred: Off
Antialiasing post: Off (we’ll use FXAA injector instead)
Motion blur: Off
Anisotropic filtering: 4x
Ambient occlusion: Off (or SSAO)

Sound system: Headphones
Enhanced stereo mode: On
Raw mouse input: On

Additional BF3 Settings editor settings:
Field of view (vertical): 50 or lower
DirectX 11: Enabled
DX Deferred CS Path: Disabled
Shadowmap resolution: 1024
Vertical sync: Off
Stereo 3D: Off

Modify user.cfg file by adding or modifying this line and set:
Render.ForceRenderAheadLimit 1

————————

Set a custom resolution, field of view (FOV) and disable screen scaling:

First of all, notice that we are not using screen scaling here – the point is to keep the image fidelity as sharp as possible. Therefore you will still play the game fullscreen mode (as opposed to windowed), only in a smaller area (cropped to 900×700, on the native LCD screen resolution). In Nvidia Control panel go to Display > Adjust desktop size and position and select “No scaling” and select “Override the scaling mode set by games and programs”.

Set the FOV to 50, or even lower, depends what works best for you.

About the custom resolution:

Unfortunately the game starts to feel slow even on a resolution of 1024×768. On the other hand, the resolution of 800×600 is a bit too smallish, so a custom resolution of 900×700 is some sort of a sweet spot where the screen doesn’t look too small on laptop LCD and is not too hard on the eyes. To create a custom resolution, go to Display > Change resolution, click Customize below, then Create custom resolution, enter only the desired width (horizontal pixels) and height (vertical lines), test and save the custom resolution. The new resolution will become available in game.

If you feel that the 900×700 (or similarly sized) area is too small, hook the laptop to an external CRT monitor. With a CRT monitor you can get a larger picture with well smoothed out pixels (not the case with external LCDs). I use a 19 inch external CRT at native resolution 1024×768 @ 100Hz and play those 900×700 pixels on a comfortably large display (again, not scaled). Playing on an external CRT you’ll probably want to set the mesh quality to low, since having it on high in my view only makes a noticeable difference on a native LCD display.

————————

About LubbosFanControl:

Just rack the fans to the maximum (6000 RPM) before playing.

————————

About ThrottleStop, voltages and overclocking:

We are using Throttlestop to set the voltage for a specific FSB multiplier to make CPU run cooler and unlock bidirectional throttling between CPU and GPU (meaning that any of these will shift to a lower performance mode once the other gets too hot). In ThrottleStop, go to settings, select Nvidia GPU and select “Unlock bidirectional PROCHOT”. Then, in the main screen, unselect “BD PROCHOT”.

Other settings in ThrottleStop:

Set multiplier: On, value: 10.0, VID: 1.1125 V (if you have set the frequency to 2.87 GHz in the Nvidia Control Panel). Remark: you could also rack the CPU to the maximum 3.01 GHz at 1.16V, but this way the CPU could get hot enough so it throttles itself down automatically at temperatures close to 100C and you could get performance dips this way. It really depends on how cool the room / surface around the laptop is.

Power Saver: Off
Disable Turbo: Off
BD PROCHOT: Off
SLFM: Off
C States: Off
(all off basically)

Results: CPU goes to 95C max, GPU goes to some 85-87C max which is “low” enough that you won’t be getting performance dips due to auto CPU/GPU throttling. These temps are supposed to be well within operating limits for both CPU and GPU.

————————

FXAA/SMAA injector in BF3:

I won’t go into much detail here, basically you WANT to use Timothy Lottes FXAA injector in Battlefield 3. I use vanilla FXAA injector instead of Danoc FXAA injector (Danoc just distorts the graphics for me, even though the colours are really vivid with it, I prefer using plain FXAA settings and set the preset to the lowest – in shader.hlsl set #define FXAA_QUALITY__PRESET 10.

Anyway, this FXAA injector works miles better (particularly when you ramp mesh quality up to High) and is less blurry than game’s built-in FXAA (Antialiasing post).

Optionally you can use SMAA injector instead. Personally I feel edges are quite a bit smoother with FXAA. If you need extra performance while still retaining some nice antialiasing, but not as smooth as FXAA, I’d say go with SMAA.

Update: to get even better performance with SMAA while still having most of the jagged edges smoothed out, set the Low preset in file “SMAA.h” even lower, for instance edit to something like:

#if SMAA_PRESET_LOW == 1
#define SMAA_THRESHOLD 0.3
#define SMAA_MAX_SEARCH_STEPS 2
#define SMAA_MAX_SEARCH_STEPS_DIAG 0
#define SMAA_CORNER_ROUNDING 100

Don’t forget to select this preset in file “injector.ini”, set “preset = SMAA_PRESET_LOW”.

Download SMAA injector 1.2 here: http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html

————————

Nvidia Control Panel settings:

I have the following settings for Battlefield 3 (or global) profile:

Maximum pre-rendered frames: 0
Anisotropic sample optimization: On
Negative LOD bias: Allow
Filtering quality: High performance
Trilinear optimization: On
Threaded optimization: Auto
Triple buffering: Off
Power management: Prefer maximum performance
Multi-display: Single display performance mode
AA – Gamma correction: Off
AA – Transparency: Off

————————

Game Booster and other tweaks:

Fire up Game Booster gaming mode to stop unnecessary processes while playing BF3.

Other things you can do:
-close browser with Battlelog when you are in game
-close Origin client when you are in game
-close Nvidia tray
-kill other processes in Task Manager (bootcamp.exe, gbtray.exe)

You can also try setting the priority of bf3.exe in Task Manager to High.

————————

That’s it, hope this works well for you. Enjoy the game. Might soon update this post with a video or something.

Cheers,
Mark

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To avoid a lengthy intro, here is the thing: at some point OSX – and I’m talking specifically Snow Leopard 10.6.8 here – started feeling sluggish. The transitions didn’t feel smooth anymore and the general feeling was that OS was not as snappy as it used to be. Turns out all this has something to do with OSX’s built-in GPU power management, which reduces GPU clock speeds in order to save power. So what we want to do here is to turn this sort of throttling off and keep the GPU at its maximum speed at all times.

As all latest Macbook Pros, mine too comes with two built-in GPUs. It’s a mid-2009 model and has the less power consuming Nvidia 9400M and the more powerful 9600M GT. The idea here is to turn throttling off ONLY for 9600M GT and run it at its maximum speed when the computer is plugged into AC power. On the other hand, I want the system to use 9400M, which is less power consuming by design, when laptop is running on battery. Also the point is to keep the 9400M throttling scheme intact, because that’s what helps having an 8-hour battery life.

First, to have seamless switching between the two GPUs without logging out and back in, we will have to install a cool program called GfxCardStatus. It also features power-source based GPU switching, meaning that if we run 9600M GT on AC power and switch to battery power, the system will start using 9400M instead of 9600M GT. That’s the easy part.

Next: how to prevent 9600M GT from going into power-saving states and make it run at maximum power all the time? I found out that one way to do it is to disable a kernel extension AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext by moving it or renaming it (it can be found in /System/Library/Extensions/), but that disables throttling on both GPUs and we are left with no power saving benefits on 9400M; having no GPU throttling on 9400M cuts battery life from 8 hours to 4 hours, which is definitely not an acceptable option.

Let’s get back to AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext. Locate this file (and make also a backup copy of it), right click on it and select “Show Package Contents”. Find file Info.plist and open it with an appropriate editor (you will need Property List Editor from Developer Tools, PlistEdit Pro or a similar program that allows editing of .plist files). Within this plist file, navigate to IOKitPersonalities, AGPM and then find the corresponding model of your Macbook Pro (mine is MacbookPro5,3). It reveals settings for IGPU and GFX0 and LogControl. Turn LogControl to 1 (we will need this to monitor changes of GPU power states in Console). It doesn’t take much to figure that IGPU stands for integrated GPU, 9400M in my case, and GFX0 stands for 9600M GT.

Look in “Heuristic” – there are settings for Threshold_high and Threshold_low. They are not very self-explanatory, but some people on some forums have figured out that state 0 is the state of maximum power (highest GPU clock, memory and shader speeds) and state 3 is the state that saves most power (lowest clocks and voltage).

So the trick here is to set thresholds for going into power-saving states 1, 2 and 3 impossible to reach. The easiest to do so is to set their thresholds above 100.

Original settings, GFX0:

And now modified settings, GFX0:

Explanation: just added “1″ before an original number, so for instance, 65 becomes 165, just for reference, otherwise it doesn’t matter which number you use as any number above 100 will presumably do just fine. Also, power state 0 is the state of maximum power and I have set its Threshold_Low 0 and Threshold_High 90. The following state, state 1, had in its original settings Threshold_Low 68 and Threshold_High 65 (inverted, I know, odd, I know!), but I just simply bumped them to Threshold_Low 168 and Threshold_High 165.

When you finish editing, save the Info.plist. May require some permission acrobatics on your side, but once you get the modified Info.plist saved in the kext package, you will also have to repair permission on the modified kext, otherwise it might not load at startup. You will need Kext Utility for that. I used version 2.4.2 for Snow Leopard and 64-bit kexts. Run Kext Utility and wait one or two minutes for it to repair permissions in the Extensions folder. Then reboot the machine.

Logged back in, let’s check if everything works as planned. At this point I assume you have already installed GfxCardStatus so we can switch between the two GPUs on the fly.

First check System Profiler > More Info > Extensions to check if our modified kext has been loaded. If you see AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext there, it’s been done. Now let’s check how our power state changes are being logged and view the log in the Console. In Console, select “All messages” and filter strings matching “AGPM”. Now, if you are running 9400M (IGPU), you should be seeing quite frequent power state switching in the Console. Now switch to 9600M GT (GFX0) via GfxCardStatus. Then run Exposé repeatedly for 5 to 10 seconds. What you should be seeing in the Console is that GFX0 has been set to the highest power state (state 0) and remains there without any further switching. The last message you should be seeing in the Console (unless you switch back to 9400M, of course) should be something like:

AGPM: GPU = GFX0 G-state set to 0 from 1, ControlID = 17

Noticed how more fluid OSX user interface is now? Good. Now if you switch to battery, the GfxCardStatus should automatically switch to 9400M and you should be getting the same long battery life as before (6-8 hours).

If you feel these power state numbers (0,1,2,3) are too abstract, you can do your own checking of GPU power states translated to more realistic numbers with Nvclock. Nvclock (Linux utility that has recently been ported to Darwin/OSX) will reveal actual clock speeds (core/memory/shader) you are currently running. Explaining Nvclock is a bit beyond this tutorial, suffice it to say that I’m running 9600M GT at maximum speeds 540/792/1350 (540 MHz core, 792 MHz memory, 1350 MHz shader). These numbers reveal an interesting fact that Apple Nvidia Driver runs the GPU at slightly higher speeds than factory settings (which are 500/792/1250). No overclock to brag about, but fine by me, anyway.

While this sorting of hacking works just fine in my case, remember you are doing this at your own risk, and make backups beforehand.

Cheers,
Mark

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(disables BeamSync automatically at every login)

Here is a simple Automator application I put together to automatically disable BeamSync when logging into Snow Leopard. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but gets the job done; I have been searching online for that one program which supposedly existed some time ago on the link http://glyf.org/beamsync/beamsync.gz, with no success. The other option – to modify com.apple.windowserver.plist with Property List Editor and put value of “deferredUpdates” to 0, just didn’t work for me, not even when doing a terminal command “sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -integer deferredUpdates 0″ and rebooting – the changes just won’t stick.

Anyway, to use this Automator action, you WILL need a Quartz Debug app (version 3.0) from the earlier XCode Leopard bundle (not from Snow Leopard). You can actually download it from this link. Quartz Debug app should be located in the Applications folder. Another thing you need to make sure is that when you launch Quartz Debug app is that the Beam Sync Tools window should already be open – to do so, launch Quartz Debug, open Tools menu, select Show Beam Sync Tools and quit Quartz Debug. Next time you launch Quartz Debug, the Beam Sync Tools should also open automatically.

To automatically disable BeamSync at login, just add “qd” to login items in the Accounts preference pane. Download the app “qd” here.

Hope it works well for you. Cheers.

P.S. Disabling Beamsync results in faster drawing and therefore a more fluid interface. Practical benefits are noticeably smoother scrolling (Safari, Twitter and within apps in general), smoother QuickLook previewing, smoother Exposé and Spaces transitions, more fluid video playback, etc. The downside to it is that you’ll see some tearing of window edges when moving windows around, but it is not too bothersome – for me at least. The increase in frames-per-second is substantial and really makes the interface feel “fresh” again.

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aka “Performance gaming on a low-end Macbook Pro laptop”

This post (which admittedly has nothing to do directly with being more productive on a Mac) was initially meant to be a lot more thorough and longer and cover step-by-step all the essentials on how to optimize old Macbook Pro with ATI X1600 graphics to run games well. Instead I decided just to focus on how to optimize it to run well one of the most demanding first player shooter multiplayer games right now, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BFBC2 or BC2). You can then, however you find appropriate, apply these methods on other games as well, even though I have to admit that the time to upgrade the “gaming rig” has now finally come. Besides, there’s been said a lot online on how to optimize performance of Bad Company 2, so let’s just see how to get it to be playable in our case. We’re talking only fairly decent 20-30 FPS here, low resolution of 1024×768, low settings, all while retaining good visual quality and what’s also of utmost importance: keeping the game responsive and snappy.

So “our” machine is the first-generation Macbook Pro with specs:

Macbook Pro 15″, machine model: MacBookPro 1,1 (62 months old)
CPU: Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz (T2500 CPU)
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600, 256 MB
OS: Windows XP SP2 via Bootcamp (version 3.2)
Game: Bad Company 2 and Bad Company 2 Vietnam (fully updated)

Definitely a vintage machine by today’s standards. Yet it could run first-person shooters very well so far. Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 for instance both ran at around 40-70 FPS (tweaks applied of course) which is overall extremely satisfactory. In BC2, however, you will get varying levels of performance – generally all Vietnam maps will run next to spectacular without any drops in frame rate, while the regular maps run generally well, but experience FPS drops (to something below 20 FPS) in situations where there happen to be lots of trees (not the case with Vietnam though) or dust/snow/explosions on screen, like Valparaiso, Laguna Presa or Nelson bay. With the following enhancements applied you will get smooth performance in maps like Harvest day, Oasis, Isla Inocentes, Heavy Metal, Laguna Alta, Arica Harbor, Atacama desert and as previously mentioned, Vietnam maps (I btw recommend you get this expansion pack if you haven’t already because the difference in performance is substantial).

So here’s the brief summary on how to tweak BFBC2 performance for X1600 on MBP and an intro to what will be explained in a bit more detail further.

1. Check if the game is actually using both CPU cores (trivial but important)
2. Kill or pause unnecessary processes and tame the necessary ones, especially Punkbuster
3. Goes almost without saying but still – get the most suitable drivers for the X1600 GPU (in my case the latest and modded drivers from Catalyst 10.2 suite) and DirectX
4. Overclock the GPU, then overclock it a little more (we’ll see how to apply the extra GPU overclock to the game)
5. Optimize game settings (basically all low, except textures high, makes the game still look good)
6. Apply settings and other GPU tweaks using ATI Tray Tools (settings that work) and also Catalyst Control Center
7. Undervolt the CPU with RightMark CPU, max out the fans and lower the internal temps
8. Tighten RAM timings with Memset 4.1 (probably a very minor effect, but hey)
9. Lower DPC latency by updating other drivers (sound, wi-fi) and uninstalling unneeded devices, set timer with Time Resolution.

————————-

1. Force game to use max CPU

This first tweak is not a tweak really, it is a more of a workaround around the glitch of BFBC2Game.exe not using both CPU cores, at least on the very machine in question. To fix that, just launch the game in windowed mode or alt-enter to get from full screen to windowed mode and run Task Manager. There you can (will probably) see that the game is not using both cores at once, but switches from using one core to using the other. Just right click on the process BFBC2Game.exe and select “Set affinity”. Even though probably both CPUs (CPU 0 and CPU 1) are already selected (ticked out), just make sure they really are and click OK. This way the game will immediately start using both cores, and you will see the change in the usage monitor graph.

Before:

Now:

Sounds like a cheap trick, happens to be the most important one. Before I found out about THAT particular “method”, my in-game CPU usage was 60% with almost unplayable FPS. Now the CPU runs at 90-100%, the way it should anyway. I have to apply this “tweak” every time I launch a game.

————————-

2. Kill unnecessary processes and tame unruly processes, especially Punkbuster

Ok, now that we got the BFBC2 game running at its maximum, we have to assure it actually GETS the maximum possible processing power, so we have to look into other processes that are running on the system. At this point I have to mention that I’m using this WinXP volume strictly for gaming, so there are absolutely no unnecessary programs running in the background and potentially hogging the system. The system is clean, yet I still kill all the unnecessary processes via Task Manager (or rather kill them with a batch file). Examples are CCC.exe, MOM.exe, jusched.exe etc; all the stuff that does not need to be there while you are shooting folks in game. That is the easy part.

However, there are processes that you DO need for gaming, and therefore can’t kill, and they will hog up your CPU, if they are not tamed. One of them is Punkbuster. It will at random times use up 30-50% of your CPU, and of course you will see a FPS drop when that starts happening.

The trick is to get Punkbuster to use only the desired/acceptable % of CPU (and this is somewhere between 2% and 5%) while still assuring you don’t get kicked out of the game. We need two tools for that: Threadmaster with Threadmaster GUI and Process Explorer.

Install Threadmaster (even though it says it’s for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003) and Threadmaster GUI. Add the PnkBstrB.exe to blacklist and assign 3% CPU limit to it. Set 10 seconds sample time. Add BFBC2Game.exe to exceptions. You can add some other processes to blacklist as well – I also added “explorer.exe” to blacklist and assigned it 1% CPU. Save settings. Done.

To monitor if the limits are well in effect (while gaming of course), use Process Explorer. Open up processes in separate windows for BFBC2Game.exe and PnkBstrB.exe and minimize them. This way you won’t lose monitoring data once you exit the game and processes close. Since you’re doing these tweaks anyway, you’ll figure it out for yourself. To conclude: after a heavy session of gaming, PnkBstrB.exe should have an almost flat graph with only occasional spikes (peaking at 1-3 %). Despite that, larger spikes will probably occur in the time frame of the 10 seconds sample time. After that the unruly app will be tamed to the previously set limits. If you look at the process BCBF2Game.exe, it should have a graph with heavy usage around 95%, and that’s exactly what we are looking for here. If that is the case, well done.

The last suggestion concerning getting rid of unnecessary processes, is that you use Game Booster. It will put on hold some processes you’re probably not aware of. Just use it, even if benefits from using it are most probably minuscule.

————————-

3. Get latest graphic card drivers and latest DirectX

I’m using the latest Catalyst 10.2 legacy driver for X1600 (driver version 8.695.000, dated 10th feb 2010), downloaded from ATI, modded with Mobility modder. It does seem to give much better performance in Vietnam maps than the outdated Apple’s X1600 Boot camp driver, even though the old driver seems to load maps a bit faster. How to modify a 10.2 driver with Mobility Modder, is explained on the previous link.

I’m having latest DirectX 9.0c installed (files ending in *43.dll).

————————-

4. Overclock the GPU and use the trick to make the game use a higher clock

I’m overclocking the ATI Mobility X1600 in the Macbook Pro using ATI Tray Tools (ATT). I will not go into the process and details of overclocking, because it is well explained elsewhere. The point here is another: how to apply a higher GPU overclock so that BC2 game still remains stable. It happens that at higher clocks the game will freeze when it tries to load a map, and you’ll need to hard reset the laptop. The trick is to load the map at a lower clock and switch to a higher clock only when you are already in the game. That’s why you need to create at least two overclock profiles (say with lower and higher clocks) and assign hotkeys to trigger them. I am using a lower 445/522 (core/memory MHz) and a higher 465/522 clock and the latter is what the game still accepts without crashing. Even though by testing in ATT I can get to maximum 495/531 without artifacting, I cannot use this clock in the game because it freezes after a little while. However, as it’s a rule when overclocking, my clocks may not work for you (even if it’s the same machine) or, on the other hand, you can go even higher, so just do your own thorough testing.

And a little sub-tip: when you are switching clock speed in BFBC2, press ESC beforehand to get to the scoreboard screen, and only then do the switch. Otherwise if you try to switch mid-game, the game may freeze. And when a game on a map is over, switch to a lower clock before the next map starts loading.

————————-

5. Game settings

Edit the settings in settings.ini (in “/My Documents/BFBC2/” directory) like this, save the file and make it read-only.

[WindowSettings]
Width=1024
Height=768
Fullscreen=true
RefreshRate=60
VSync=false
[Sound]
Quality=low
VoipEnable=false
SpeakerCount=2
[Graphics]
Effects=low
Soldiers=low
Vehicles=low
Overgrowth=low
Undergrowth=low
StaticObjects=low
Terrain=low
Shadows=low
Bloom=false
HSAO=false
MSAA=0
Water=low
MainQuality=custom
Texture=high
DxVersion=9
Aniso=0
Detail=low
RenderAheadLimit=0
Fov=55

Basically all settings except textures are set on low. You could, however, set soldiers and vehicles to medium or high without a performance drop. And, if you are really bothered by how water surfaces look, switch it to medium.

We are using RenderAheadLimit=0 here, which tells the game to use graphic driver settings, and we will set that driver value to 0 (instead of the default 3) in the next step with ATI Tray Tools.

————————-

6. ATI Tray Tools settings and tweaks (and to a very minor extent settings in Catalyst Control Center)

Direct 3D:

Antialiasing: Application-controlled (meaning no AA), no adaptive AA.

Anisotropic filtering: 2x, performance, no high AF /// we override the Application settings which tell the game not to use any AF – for some reason the performance with no AF, application controlled, is much worse than our setting.

Flip queue size: 0 /// Yes, set this to zero. It means the CPU will not render ahead any frames for the GPU. It just happens to give best results under the circumstances – increased responsiveness and frame speed even on graphically more demanding maps such as Laguna Presa, Oasis, Port Valdez etc.

Optimizations: Anisotropic filtering optimizations on.

Catalyst A.I.: disabled /// tested and having it set to low (standard) or advanced seems to produce additional input lag without cranking out any additional FPS. I am aware that the general recommendation is to set it to Advanced, but it’s not what works in my case.

Texture preference: High Performance /// seems to play a bit nicer than High Quality, not much of a difference, really.

Mipmap: set to Performance.

Vsync: off.

Other ATT settings (see pictures below):

Catalyst Control Center settings:
Disable Powerplay in CCC. After that you can exit CCC and kill CCC.exe and MOM.exe processes (as mentioned before).

————————-

7. Lowering the internal temperature and monitor it

Use RightMark CPU to undervolt the CPU and use Macfan to have the fans run at 6000 rpm when gaming. Monitor the temps using CPUID HWMonitor. My temps hit max 80C (CPU) and 77C (GPU – diode), which is supposedly acceptable.

My CPU voltages (stable, could go as low as 1.05V at 12x)

————————-

8. Try tightening RAM timings with Memset 4.1

It could supposedly give a very minor FPS boost, so I’m just using it. It makes me feel better at least. Download Memset here.

Default settings (left) and tweaked settings (right):

————————-

9. Lower DPC latency

Improve system responsiveness by lowering latencies. Measure with DPC Latency Checker (using V1.3.0)

You can lower latency by uninstalling the devices (in Device Manager) you don’t need for gaming – in my case those are: trackpad, iSight camera, ethernet, DVD drive and some others.

The next thing you can do is to update the drivers – I have updated wireless and sound drivers.

And another thing is to keep timer resolution to the minimum. Use Timer Resolution for that.

If you are connected via ethernet cable, then disable the wireless card. And vice versa. Wifi does seem to generate latency spikes though so go with ethernet when you can.

————————-

Conclusion

It’s definitely time for a hardware upgrade but you can (hopefully) have some more fun with your old machine, at least for a little while longer.

Happy gaming!

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Ever since I installed 10.6 Snow Leopard, the all-new, slow, laggy Exposé has been a constant annoyance for me. The windows in the 10.6 Exposé were now all neatly aligned and labeled, but the transition animation was choppy, adding to the perception of a slowed down OS. As always, I am running the OSX user interface mostly with BeamSync turned off, but that didn’t help the choppy 10.6 Exposé much. Being an optimization freak, a slow interface is sort of a worst thing for me. The general conclusion was that Exposé in the previous version of Mac OSX, 10.5 Leopard, was faster, smoother and also more intuitive, and the question was how to get the same functionality of Leopard’s Exposé back into Snow Leopard.

Luckily, a guy named miknos at MacRumors Forums came up with a solution and all I can say is thank you very much. The fix requires to replace Snow Leopard’s Dock.app (found in System>Library>Core Services) with a fixed Dock.app from an early BETA version of Snow Leopard. I’m running 10.6.3 and the solution works with a 10.6.4 as well. It requires you to download the fixed dock and use some Terminal, so here are the instructions, copied from the MacRumors forum:

——————-
Instructions:

1 – Download the fixed Dock.app from this link on a MacRumors forum thread. Extract to Desktop.

2 – Create a new folder on the desktop called OldDock.

3 – Open terminal and (changing username) type:

sudo chown -R root /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app
type your password if necessary

sudo chgrp -R wheel /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app

Now copy/paste everything. Don’t forget to change to your username:
sudo killall Dock && \
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app /Users/USER/Desktop/OldDock/ && \
sudo mv /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app /System/Library/CoreServices/

Restart and Enjoy! To revert, just put the dock.app inside OldDock folder in Desktop and repeat everything.

—————————

Read the whole thread here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611

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