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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?  (Read 4165 times)

TJJ

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Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« on: February 27, 2017, 11:22:59 AM »

I've acquired an old Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa), which has a C2D T7700 (2.4GHz), 4GB, and an Nvidia 8600M 256MB.
I've upgraded OSX from Leopard, through Snow Leopard, up to El Capitan. (wow, what a tedious upgrade path....)

At native resolution (1440x900), it gets 25fps on Starsector's main menu and obviously far less in game.
At this frame rate, the cpu idle time is ~40%, which would hint at the gpu being the bottleneck. (though obviously not that reliable of a metric)

My question is; does anyone have a similar spec'ed machine running Windows, to provide a performance comparison?

On a side note, it's not vital the game is playable on this machine(it isn't); I'm primarily interested in having access to an OSX platform for development/testing reasons.
That said, I was expecting better performance and am wondering if Nvidia's OSX drivers suck.

:edit:

I was a bit harsh with my reading of the fps; seems to stabilise at ~25fps.
I wonder if thermal throttling is kicking in; it does indeed get very hot after 15 mins. (and probably not helped by the numerous knocks the casing appears to have taken)
« Last Edit: February 27, 2017, 12:27:25 PM by TJJ »
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BHunterSEAL

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2017, 11:44:24 AM »

My primary gaming rigs are PCs, but for playing SS on the run I used a 2010 Macbook Pro with a core 2 (don't recall speed), 4 GB RAM and an integrated GPU. It was a little choppy in larger battles but usually very smooth, at least 40 or so FPS, although the bottom of the laptop would get hot enough to burn my skin through a pair of shorts. Granted, this was back in 2013 or so, when the game was less complicated--and I certainly never tried adding any of the mods like SS+ or Nexerellin, which require more juice.

So my suggestion would be trying to use the integrated card instead of the discrete one.
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Alex

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2017, 12:04:51 PM »

I have a regular macbook from a bit later than that (2009), IIRC it can run a 1-1 battle at something like 30 fps, and it went downhill fast for anything more. The drivers also had severe issues with some OpenGL features (i.e. using VBO *at all* cause the fps to become spf, if that makes sense), so I wouldn't be surprised if earlier versions of the drivers/hardware had worse issues.
« Last Edit: February 27, 2017, 12:49:15 PM by Alex »
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Schwartz

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2017, 12:22:54 PM »

My C2D 8700 with integrated Intel struggled in a 1v1 on Linux. I expect it to do a bit better on Windows. I think the graphics card does matter.
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TJJ

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2017, 12:44:02 PM »

Okay thanks guys, looks like I'm getting what's expected.

This is my 1st hands on with an OSX machine (obviously used other peoples', but never owned one I was free to 'learn by breaking it').
After an evening messing with it, I can see some of the attraction; a little familiarity with general layout & shortcuts has gotten me over the initial 'ew!' stage.

Though I can't ever see myself becoming a convert; the Apple ecosystem just doesn't hold any value for me, as it's largely incompatible with my own already well established environment & workflow.

Now I just have to decide if I'll use it enough to justify sticking a (small) SSD in it. (General usability is really held back by the crappy 5400rpm mechanical it has atm).
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AxleMC131

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2017, 04:08:44 PM »

Can't help you much as I don't know a great deal about what goes on inside a computer, but Starsector runs at a fairly steady 40-50 FPS on my machine.

"My machine" being a 2015 HP Pavillion with:
- 2.1GHz (AMD Radeon) processor
- 8GB RAM
- Windows 8 (no one say anything)
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NightKev

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #6 on: March 01, 2017, 11:29:37 AM »

Can't help you much as I don't know a great deal about what goes on inside a computer, but Starsector runs at a fairly steady 40-50 FPS on my machine.

"My machine" being a 2015 HP Pavillion with:
- 2.1GHz (AMD Radeon) processor
- 8GB RAM
- Windows 8 (no one say anything)
Without knowing which AMD processor it is, the frequency is meaningless.
The GPU is important to know as well.

Windows 8.1 is probably better than 10 for now so I'd say good choice there. :P
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #7 on: March 03, 2017, 06:35:28 AM »

Wow, a 10 year old laptop?  I use a 7 year old MBP 7,1 and it works 'fine' for starsector. It doesn't become unplayable with the normal settings.

The nice thing about OSX is it's actually a UNIX distro with a really well polished GUI. So you have access to the bash terminal with mostly normal BSD Unix commands, which computers have been using since the 1960s, so it's easy to find documentation and stackexchange threads on how to use the command line to do really complex, specific things, actually easier than it might be for windows. Also a lot of the Free Software Foundation, GNU, apps designed by scientists, open source stuff have an OSX binary or repository, where they might not even have a windows version-- but if you aren't fluent enough to live there all the time, you can fall back to that polished Apple GUI.

And Apple really did spend decades developing and honing the concept of the GUI, and writing guidelines for how they should be attentively designed and implemented, so that when developers follow these guidelines, the computer really is more intuitive and pleasurable to use in ways that it takes a while to notice but have concrete benefits (I've used windows a lot professionally and have had occasion to notice this). And the OS is designed for the specific hardware and if you fit within the user parameters it's a very slick and easy experience.

That said, Apple is often ignoring their own GUI guidelines these days, and their cheif designer, Sir Jonathan Ive has scoffed at the idea of "skeumorphism" i.e. that the appearance of interface elements should give some clue of what the #$@* they do, so Apple GUIs have become increasingly obtuse and minimalist lately. And many actual *nix distributions are increasingly user  friendly now, and they are more secure, and Apple has this awful walled-garden thing that gets worse and worse all the time, and you wonder what other sort of weird backdoors they're putting in there, etc. And their newest laptops have no ports so if you use them for anything but posting to your instagram in an American starbucks, you will probably need an adapter. I'd say they peaked about 2010-2012.
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JohnDoe

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #8 on: March 04, 2017, 03:39:12 AM »

Just buy a new one man. If your answer is "but I can't afford to" then you need to set your priorities straight instead of playing video games.
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daggertx

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #9 on: March 04, 2017, 06:10:42 AM »

OR video games come before EVERYTHING!!!!

 ;D
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Schwartz

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Re: Expected performance on a T7700 + 8600M?
« Reply #10 on: March 05, 2017, 05:07:51 AM »

As the OP said, it isn't vital that the game runs on his laptop and he generally uses it for other stuff; why the guilt trip?

It's fun to tinker and see what you can do with old hardware. And old laptops are cheap as dirt. Some of 'em quite well built (Thinkpads mostly).
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