Slow on iMac

[Nothinglikesleep]

I thought this game would run great on my mac at medium levels but I ended up having to turn off SSAO, a number of special effects to the point where i can get the game to run smoothly on bare bones settings. And it still lagged a lot in areas like where the water monster is and where the bridge control puzzle was. I'm running:

3.06GHz Intel Core i3
1920-by-1080
4GB (two 2GB) memory
500GB hard drive
8x double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400
with 256 mb

With latest version of snow leopard

Any advice? (also how do I update my drivers? even though i think they should be up to date)

[jens]

At medium settings it should run fine with that computer, I've run the game on the same configuration except a 320m for graphics, as long as you keep the ssao to 8 samples and quality to medium and do not turn of edge smoothing or increase any other settings. This if you run in a lower resolution than 1920*1080 that might be a bit overkill.

Make sure to not have any other applications running, for example having firefox running can really affect the performance of the game.

[Nothinglikesleep]

Hmm there is nothing running in the background, i turned everything to medium settings and SSAO to 8 samples and it still lags considerably. This is the only game currently downloaded on my computer also so I know I have a lot of memory. Do you think I should re-install the game?

[Urkle]

what resolution do you run the game at? and what texture quality is it set at?

My first thought is that the video card doesn't have enough video memory free so it's swapping textures in and out of the card (which will cause the game to be laggy). I know on my home linux box when I upped the system to 4GB of system ram instead of 2 (so that the on board ATI HD3000 would use 512MB instead of 256MB) it made a world of difference.

Do recall that Mac OS X is using quite a bit of that RAM for all the programs running (ie.. to do the expose effects etc.. as that is all run through the card). So 512MB is really helpful when running snow leopard. Plain leopard wasn't as "hogging" of the video ram.