Playing dota 2 on imac

Anyone playing Dota 2 on Mac? Performance?

I’ve been less than thrilled with the performance on my 2008 Mac Pro with 6870. My cousin just got a 2013 Mac Pro D300 and even he isn’t having a good time with performance neither (choppy).

What’s everyone else’s experience? There seems to be oddly little written recently on the topic.

Seems fine to me, on my 27″ iMac with 4850. Of course, I don’t play much.

Seems fine to me (my framerate is at least 30fps on average) if I make sure to disable anti-aliasing. I think I disable one or two more graphics options (I think one is ambient creatures), but I can’t remember at the moment. I would think that your machines would play the game better than mine.

Running on a 2011 Mac Mini (core i7), 16GB RAM
Running at 1920×1080

It plays like garbage on Mac, because the drivers for Mac OS X are trash, and don’t have the optimizations you see in the Windows drivers. For example, there is no way to enable SLI processing on the Mac. I have a late 2013 Mac Pro (little black garbagecan-looking mac) which cost me about $3,000. The only way DOTA 2 is playable is after installing Windows 8, booting into Windows (and not OS X). For fun, I disabled SLI on the Mac running Windows, to compare playability with Mac OS X (where SLI is disabled due to lack of driver support for that feature), and Windows still beat the pants off OS X.

My desktop PC equipped with a $300 nVidia GTX 780 can play DOTA 2 at 60fps at a 3840 X 2160 (4k) resolution. I have to drop the graphics “render quality” down to 70% on the Mac Pro (running Windows 8) to maintain 60fps. It drops to 50-ish fps when all 5 or more heroes are casting spells at the same time on the screen. The desktop PC handles everything at max settings. The GTX 780 also has a 2nd display connected to it, at 2560×1600 resolution, which is running a Google Hangouts video chat at full screen.

The only time I’ve seen the gaming experience on the PC running the GTX 780 come was when I tried to run fraps while playing at 4k and also having Google Hangouts video chat running on a 2nd screen. Resulted in 30fps in the game.

Linux performance is comparable to Windows, although it may be a hair more compute intensive on Linux. As of Ubuntu 14.04.1 there seems to be problems with multi-monitor setups, there are major FPS issues when playing DOTA 2 and running Google Hangouts or Skype at the same time. The same hardware with Windows works fine.

The Mac has zero gaming capability, and I was extremely disappointed with having to install Windows to get the most out of the system. I realize this information is late, but it may help people avoid an expensive mistake as shopping kicks into high gear this holiday season.

Dota 2 certainly doesn’t require SLI and is CPU-limited on my 2.66 GHz 2006 Mac Pro with a radeon 4870. I get between 30 and 60 fps most of the time, with all options enabled except ambiant occlusion and antialiasing (which doesn’t work). VSync is enabled because, for some reason, I get some weird stuttering without it even when the fps counter says it’s above 60. Vsync fixes that, but once every second or so, everything that moves (hero, creep, the camera) would “jump” by a very short distance as if it needed to synchronise with its true position in the game. It’s a bit annoying, but I find it more tolerable than without VSync.
During intense combat and on other occasions (that seem a bit random), fps can go below 30. But for an 8-year-old machine, I find the performance quite good.
The game should run flawlessly on a current Mac Pro. If it doesn’t, it means there’s a bug somewhere.

I only play against (hard) bots cause I don’t have any friend playing the game, and watch live games on occasion.

I won’t put the blame on the OS X drivers without knowing more about the issue that affects a given configuration. Valve codes for the Windows PC first, and does some on-the-fly translation into openGL code with a custom wrapper.
Make sure that multicore rendering is enabled.

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