CoD 4 very laggy...

Hi all,

Well I purchased a copy of CoD 4 from the Apple Store thinking it would run effortlessly. Sadly not.

I have the setting up at high and res at just 1024x768 and still it lags/pauses at certain areas - its worse when there is a lot going on.

Now, this game isn't even remotely new and my Mac shouldn't have a problem with it on higher resolutions.

I have played Cysis on Vista x64 (on V.High at 1400x900) and it runs very smoothly with no lag.

Is it just because OS X isn't any good for games or is something else wrong here.

Thanks in advance.

I run the Windows version of CoD4 on my PC, which has a single Core 2 Duo CPU at 2.33GHz and a single 8800GT/512. That machine runs it smoothly at 1920x1080 and all of the eye candy turned on.

Something definitely isn't right, it should run perfectly on that machine. It must be something funky with Cider. Have you taken a look at the publisher's site yet?

CiDER isn't the best thing in the world I've found. I have COD4 for Mac and COD4 for PC. On the Mac side it runs kind of rough, when I boot into XP (bootcamp install) and run it, it runs great.

Cider has a lot of complaints on it with game performance.

Now, with that said - many people with "lower" quality machines claim to run cider games better then those of us with Mac Pro's - I should specify - Mac Pro's with 8800GT's. The 8800GT may be an awesome gaming card in windows, but from the complaints I've read recently, it's lacking on Mac. This is from what I've read on other posts when I did searches for similar issues.

I don't know if it's just not a great driver, or the 8800gt just doesn't perform as well in opengl or if there is some configuration tweak we're all just not aware of or if cider just doesn't work well with this particular card or what.

It would be interesting to hear from someone who has both an 8800GT and a near comparable ATI pc/mac card (maybe a HD3870?) and see what kind of results they get with the game... If I had a few extra hundred bucks I'd do it, but I'm kinda broke =(

This link might shed some light - it's an interesting comparison (just stumbled onto it as I was searching to read more about this issue) - all Mac Pro booting with OSX and Vista 64 using a comparison like I had mentioned...

Call of Duty 4 on the fastest Macs

In vista 64 the 8800gt meets or beats the 3870

on osx 10.5.6 the 3870 blows the 8800gt away.

Makes me wish I read more before posting my previous post - at least someone did the test I thought would be cool to do - but on the positive note I didn't have to spend the money to just "try" it

That's weird, It plays fine on my MacBook under OSX.
(Mind you I'm not a very picky gamer, but I didn't notice any obvious slowdown)

Aptmunich said:

That's weird, It plays fine on my MacBook under OSX.
(Mind you I'm not a very picky gamer, but I didn't notice any obvious slowdown)

Click to expand...

You've got a bit of a different beast there - the Mac Pro with the 8800gt seems to be an oddity when it comes to game performance - at least on cider games (to me it also seems to produce a lower framerate on wow in osx than in windows, but I haven't done anything scientific and I also haven't played wow much since I switched).

I'm still reading and searching to find an answer tho as to why this is, and if it affects all cider games or just some or what.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I don't actually own a PC copy of the game, the one I have is the MAC DVD.

It was installed just like most Mac apps, drag n drop to the Applications folder, so CIDER was not involved. This means I can't actually test it in Vista to see if it would run faster - just assuming it will since Cyrsis runs great.

As cwa107 said 'That machine runs it smoothly at 1920x1080 and all of the eye candy turned on', I would have expected the same from my Mac Pro.

So since I'm not running Cider, can anyone shed any more light on this?

Thanks again.

martyp said:

Thanks for the replies guys.

I don't actually own a PC copy of the game, the one I have is the MAC DVD.

It was installed just like most Mac apps, drag n drop to the Applications folder, so CIDER was not involved. This means I can't actually test it in Vista to see if it would run faster - just assuming it will since Cyrsis runs great.

As cwa107 said 'That machine runs it smoothly at 1920x1080 and all of the eye candy turned on', I would have expected the same from my Mac Pro.

So since I'm not running Cider, can anyone shed any more light on this?

Thanks again.

Click to expand...

Right, but Cider is what was used to port the game. In other words, it doesn't run natively on your Mac even though it appears to. Cider is a technology that is based on WINE. Basically, there's an abstraction layer where Cider acts as a translator, converting Windows API calls to OS X friendly ones.

Apparently Cider has a problem with the 8800GT card in particular, where the card isn't used to its fullest capability.

Ah, sorry I never knew that!

I thought I'd be something to do with Wine and ya all thought I had a PC version. I'm new to Intel Macs

So if I purchase a 4870 chances are it'd run perfectly? Shame the Apple version only has 512Mb where as the PC versions go to up 1Gb though.

Nethfel said:

I don't know if it's just not a great driver, or the 8800gt just doesn't perform as well in opengl or if there is some configuration tweak we're all just not aware of or if cider just doesn't work well with this particular card or what.(

Click to expand...

Very interesting how you state OpenGL performance. I figured this is what the game would be running in since Mac OS X doesn't have DirectX.

At work I use a XPS 630i with a GeForce 8800GT and use a 3D modelling/CAD application which uses OpenGL and it runs terrible on the PC. Coincidentally in runs just as bad on this Mac under bootcamp, so its definitely the graphics card.

Infact, the app actually runs better on a Dell Vostro with a ATI 2400XT which is a much slower card in comparison.

ATi maybe the way to for OpenGL then.

I know this is an old thread, but in my desperate search to improve COD4 for Mac so I can stop playing yet another game on bootcamp, I found an interesting post on Mac Rumers.

If you scroll about 1/4 way down to a post from Hooligan, you'll find his settings:

COD4 Mac version settings... [Archive] - Mac Forums

I tried a similar config on my Mac Pro, except with a res of 1680x1050 (native of my monitor) and, to my surprise, the frame rate was incredibly better. Previously I'd top out at about 40fps (very rare), average around 30 (usually just under)fps, I tried the config modified only for my max resolution and my average in multiplayer has jumped to between 45 and 51fps, maxing out at 91fps. A great improvement. Yes, I loose some of the beauty, but ****, I can play multiplayer and not miss 10 frames between when I see someone and I'm dead because I missed the fraction of a second that I was killed in instead of killing them =)

Just thought this might help.

I am running the slightly older version (I'm pretty sure it's pre 1.7 patch) of COD4, I'll be getting the patch tomorrow and applying it tomorrow night. I hope it's the same if not better.

Now if I can just find the butter zone for my mouse... I seem to have some control problems where I am looking one way then suddenly looking another with a slight flick of the mouse.