Extremely Low FPS on Mac playing Guild Wars 2

[Aschell]

Alright, to start, I rarely use this computer. I don't know all that much about the Mac in general, but I don't have access to my laptop right now, so this is my only option for quite some time. I managed to get Crossover to work on the Mac, but there was a crazy graphics issue and my characters face had all kinds of random sprites flashing everywhere. On top of that, I was only using the Free Trial. I'm not going to pay if I can use Wine. Though my FPS was about 30 on the lowest settings. Because of the graphics it was virtually unplayable unfortunately. So I turned to Wine. I managed to get Guild Wars 2 to install. I get to the character select screen, and I was extremely excited..because my characters faces could actually be seen unlike Crossover. I press play, and my character can barely even MOVE. I have about 2 FPS on the lowest possible settings. Though when I go to Settings Preset in the options, and press "Auto-Detect", I get the following results. Animation, Environment, LOD Distance are set at Medium. While Shadows and Shaders and Post-Processing are on High. So clearly it isn't my graphics card. Yet when I play on the lowest possible settings, it's still 2-4 FPS. Is there any fix to this? By the way, I'm using an iMac. 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 Processor, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB Graphics Card, 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Memory, and my OS is Mac X Lion 10.7.4.

[doh123]

There is little you can do about this. There is a major bug in Apple's AMD Radeon drivers. Prior to Wine 1.5.1 (including Crossover since its still based off 1.4) there is a hack to get around that problem, but it can cause graphics corruption in some games. Removing the hack will fix the graphics problems, but the drivers knock back to Software Rendering mode so it will be extremely slow. Even if you custom compile a newer build of Wine with a patch to add the hack back in for speed, it'll still have graphics corruption most likely. The only real way to get around this issue is to have a Mac with a different GPU. In some of the Macbook Pros with the AMD GPUs, people can use gfxCardStatus to force their Intel HD graphics on and use that instead and on many games it'll work ok... but if you have a machine that has that as the graphics card... well I think your only option is to use a working version of Wine like 1.4.1 but you'll have messed up graphics in places.

[Aschell]

So all I need to do is use Wine 1.4.1? With the likelihood that the graphics will be shoddy?

[Aschell]

So I did so, and you were correct. Wine 1.4.1 gave me a much better FPS, around 17-30ish. But there were messed up graphics everywhere, as there were in crossover. *sigh*, not sure what I'll do. Thank you very much for helping me though.

[doh123]

So all I need to do is use Wine 1.4.1? With the likelihood that the graphics will be shoddy?

yes... the latest version of Crossover is also based off 1.4.1.

Also make sure you have the latest version of XQuartz since Wine needs X11.