Very low framerate, modest hardware

[Bergeton]

Hi, I bought A Machine for Pigs on GOG and I'm having severe performance problems.

My computer:
Macbook Air (late 2010)
2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM
Nvidia Geforce 320M (256 MB)
OS X 10.8.4

I can play Amnesia The Dark Descent perfectly smooth with high/medium settings
(High textures, medium shadows, paralax on, 8x anistropy, shader effects on).
A Machine for Pigs, however, runs, to be blunt, like Bantha poodoo.
No matter how low I set the graphics options, the framerate is so, oh so, slow.
-Unless I'm right at the edge of a map, and staring at a wall, then it runs great.

I know A Machine For Pigs is supposed to be slightly more demanding than The Dark Descent but this can't be right, surely?

Anyone else experiencing performance issues in OS X?
Can anyone think of any solutions?
(don't you dare say Bootcamp, if I wanted to play in Windows I would )

Any help is greatly appreciated

[spidernetlabs]

This happens to me as well and it's not only a Mac OS X issue; it happens on Windows too. They are working on a patch, so finger crossed.
You can try this, and see if it helps:
open main_settings.cfg (Library/Application Support/Frictional Games/Amnesia/Pig) with TextEdit or similar programs and change MaxChannels="64" to 48, StreamBuffers="8" to 6 and StreamBufferSize="262144" to 32768.

[Bergeton]

This happens to me as well and it's not only a Mac OS X issue; it happens on Windows too. They are working on a patch, so finger crossed.
You can try this, and see if it helps:
open main_settings.cfg (Library/Application Support/Frictional Games/Amnesia/Pig) with TextEdit or similar programs and change MaxChannels="64" to 48, StreamBuffers="8" to 6 and StreamBufferSize="262144" to 32768.

Thanks for your reply.
I can't say I noticed any significant improvements after editing main_settings.cfg.
Looking forward to that patch

[Inkstud]

I'm also having performance issues that render AMFP unplayable on my mac. I've tried editing the .cfg and lowering all the graphics settings as low as they can possibly go, but still have really bad issues with (apparently random) frame dropping and stuttering / freezing. The Dark Descent runs perfectly on my machine, so I can't believe it's a problem with my specs.

Guess I'll just be keeping an eye on these forums until it's patched. In a way, it's good to see that other people are having the same issues.

[Bergeton]

In a way, it's good to see that other people are having the same issues.

Tell me about it.
Google turned up pretty much nothing, zilch, nada, zip about performance problems so I started feeling quite helpless.
Hopefully this is something that can be improved with zealous coding, if not, I'll be sad.
-for a while, then I'll start spinning up the turbines in my "gaming rig".

[Robby]

I have:

Geforce 9500GT 1GB DDR2
AMD Athlon X2 II 250 (3.0GHZ, DC)
2GB DDR3 RAM (PC can't tell if 1066 or 1333MHZ)
Windows 7 32-bit

And the game runs at a fine 30FPS generally, even with FRAPS recording. Dunno what the problem is with your setting, but it's fine over here.

[Bergeton]

I have:

Geforce 9500GT 1GB DDR2
AMD Athlon X2 II 250 (3.0GHZ, DC)
2GB DDR3 RAM (PC can't tell if 1066 or 1333MHZ)
Windows 7 32-bit

And the game runs at a fine 30FPS generally, even with FRAPS recording. Dunno what the problem is with your setting, but it's fine over here.

Clearly everything is fine then.
Thank you for your input.

[jens]

We are working on improving the performance, but unfortunately a 320m is quite a bit below the minimum requierments of a GeForce mid-range 200 series. For a machine for pigs it will unlikely ever work very well.

[Bergeton]

We are working on improving the performance, but unfortunately a 320m is quite a bit below the minimum requierments of a GeForce mid-range 200 series. For a machine for pigs it will unlikely ever work very well.

Well I'll still keep my fingers crossed.

But the performance is a little disappointing considering Frictional Games' declared interest in creating immersive, good looking games for low spec systems. Even The Chinese Rooms own Dan Pinhcbeck stated in an interview with Gamesabyss that "...there's been a lot of work on making sure it plays to low system specs but retains the high visual quality...".
Also you yourself posted here in the forums that if "...Amnesia works very well on High settings for you, then AAMFP will work very well on Medium..."
Just putting that out there, slightly disappointed, hopefully right now it's just a matter of further optimizing.

EDIT:
I forgot to say that I am very happy you took the time to reply, I'm not trying to piss on anyones' parade!