Workaround: Intermittent slow downs during gameplay on MBP w/ Retina display

[bog]

Back when I had my old Core Duo 17" MBP, PBA worked great ... no issues. Two years ago I obtained a 15" MBP with a Retina display and from that point on, whenever I played PBA I'd have periods of slow downs lasting anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds and then it would resume normal play.

I tried every workaround on this forum, the deletion of registry keys, manipulation of display settings (90 degree rotation and back), you name it ... nothing worked.

Recently I purchased a second monitor to use with my MBP ... nothing fancy, a 24" HDMI Samsung with 1080p resolution (SD300 Series S24D300HL).

What I found is that playing PBA on this screen works without a single slowdown ... just like when I was using my old 17" MBP.

It would seem that this slowdown issue, at least when it was happening on my MBP, was due to the Retina display. Maybe it's frame buffer handling for the much higher res display? I've run a great deal of hardware diags on the system as well. There doesn't seem to be any kind of hardware issues present. It just seems that PBA doesn't work consistently with a Retina display.

Bottom line, if your only system is a Retina based Mac, and you are plagued with these slowdowns, you might want to try a second monitor. I'd suggest trying nothing beyond standard HD (1080p).

 

[relaxation]

Thanks for the reminder in the post below, as I wasn't familiar with the iOS/OSX build so take my ramblings below with a grain of salt.

The bigger the resolution of the display gets the more calculations the graphics processor has to do in DX11.

Think of it this way.. there's usually 150 light sources on any given SS machine and they all cast light a certain relative distance, now if you go from 2,073,600px (1920*1080, 1080p) to 5,184,000px (2880*1800, 1800p), it's x2.5 the number of pixels that have to be calculated in those same relative distances.

CV is one of the biggest slowdown culprits because that long lamp affects so many pixels on the screen, the other it's ToTAN when you zoom in for the skillshot because you're zooming into an area that has a lot of light calcultions.

The solutions are, lower your resolution (you did via external, not sure if you can/how drop it in OSX), or get an external GPU to run over your Thunderbolt ports for descrete gpu performance. My GTX 960 can do 1440p simply but ToTAN can give it a spot of trouble at 2160p, perhaps CV too but I avoid that anyway.

The last solution is run DX9. My HD6670 played @ 2160p(4K) resolution and that's less performant of your Intel Iris Pro 5200

 

[MadAxeMan]

OSX users can't use DX11 or DX9, as DirectX is Microsoft
The OSX version more like the iOS version, very "dumb" down compared to both the much nicer looking PC versions
I think someone mentioned it was indeed ported from the iOS version, but that is probably just an assumption on their part
Hopefully we'll get a Metal version option like PC users get with dx9 and dx11, but not holding my breath

I do think the issue is the larger resolution screens, like the retinas, and pretty much anything that goes over 1080p
Not sure if it's solely a particular operating system issue, as this has been reported since Mavericks (probably even sooner, I wasn't around before then)
It ran fine on my old MBP 17" dual core, that was 1050
Perhaps the solution is setting the resolution within the game, like most other games do.

Unfortunately, my iMac doesn't have a video out for a separate monitor, so I can't try it