Comments on: Improve Diablo 3 Performance in Mac OS X

By: gus

gus — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:40:38 +0000

lol you mean decrease all of visual features that make the game look awsome
its ok…mac put “m” type cards on expensive systems ..so there is nothing you can do to play this game with decent grafs ….

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 18:00:01 +0000

What kind of settings do you have enabled and where in the game are you to get that frame rate? I get about 15-45 FPS depending on what’s going on in-game with a 2011 MacBook Air with Intel HD 3000, running all settings on low at native resolution. The FPS stays quite high in towns and smaller battles, but drops quite a bit during the crazier battles.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:06:24 +0000

I have the new 13″ 2012 macbook air with ivy bridge CPU and HD 4000 and I get 35 FPS average in native screen resolution of 1440×900. So this is very playable on the new Air.

Note that this game makes the fan start and it pretty noisy

By: SkaDiver

SkaDiver — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 19:23:38 +0000

I have found 2 solutions, mixed them with a 3rd I have done and now I have GREAT GRAPHICS and STEADY FPS even while confronting a whole pack of enemies.

I have posted the solution here to help others:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5738084948?page=1#0

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 16:08:30 +0000

Wow. Seriously.. I would NOT trade high graphics for better framerate on D3.

Not even before the 1.0.2 patch.

Before the 1.0.2 patch though, high shadows absolutely KILLED fps. Even on the latest macbook pro! Now, I have EVERYTHING on high (including shadows) and it’s all fine and dandy! Kudos to the Blizzard mac team!

By: Marucins

Marucins — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:12:21 +0000

Apple finally make playable drivers!!!!!!

By: miceblue425

miceblue425 — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 23:33:13 +0000

I followed a modification mentioned here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5594212543?page=1#7

As you can tell by my reply, my framerate increased pretty significantly. On a 5.1 Macbook, with the standard settings on low, my framerate was pretty terrible. I had to fight the Skeleton King 10+ times since I often found myself not being able to do what I wanted.

Even with the modifications, I don’t see why anyone would want to play Diablo III with an average framerate of 12fps.

By: anon

anon — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 06:52:23 +0000

“Turn Off Secondary Displays [...] the lazy way by turning down brightness to zero and setting the external display to the primary screen. This causes the GPU to use less resources to drive two screens, freeing those resources for the game instead.”

99.99999% sure this won’t stop the GPU from rendering the unlit screen.

By: activ3

activ3 — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 23:15:19 +0000

Battle Net forums have a lot of good info too here’s a thread from Blizz employees:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149615692

By: JMH

JMH — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 23:12:15 +0000

This is the one area where windows machines still have the advantage: gaming. It used to be that Apple had the best graphics capabilities, but those days are long gone. But who cares anyway.

By: Will

Will — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:28:31 +0000

Excellent tip Rob, thanks!

By: Rob Bates

Rob Bates — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:23:23 +0000

This tip applies to both higher end Mac and Window machines and can provide a massive performance improvement. The rendering method for certain effects is determined by the type of GPU used. This means that shadows on a newer video card look better than they do on an older GPU even when both are set to high.
This is defined in the D3Prefs.txt under the Hardwareclass key. The higher the class value, the more complex the rendering method. If you replace this number with a lower value you can trade a slight visual impact for a large performance gain.
For example I dropped from 4 to 3. The only noticeable visual difference was with the edges of shadows not being as soft, but in return I was able to push the resolution a notch, enable AA and enable High shadows. All of this while maintain the same or better FPS.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 19:19:49 +0000

For those with a newer MacBook Pro make sure you are using the GOOD GPU and not the crappy onboard one. Set it in Energy Saver prefs.