MacBook Retina Resolution and FPS.

#1 - June 25, 2016, 10:17 a.m.
Blizzard Post
I'm a bit confused by the new graphic settings in the Legion Beta for mac os.

Setting the screen resolution does not appear to affect the game world, only the UI elements.

The only thing that appears to increase the game-world resolution is to enable anti-aliasing choosing the SSAA option.

Is that correct? Or a bug?

I get awful FPS using SSAA unless I change the option in the advanced tab to reduce the scaling from 200% to <= 100%.

In 6.x I usually set the resolution reasonably high then disable AA all together. This yields decent graphics quality, and FPS in the 40+ range.

In 7.x, setting a high resolution and disabling AA looks awful, as if the game is running in 1024x768 resolution and upscaled. Enabling SSAA makes the game look amazing, but drops my FPS to < 10.

Im running a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
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#5 - July 5, 2016, 4:36 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Assuming you're running in Fullscreen or Windowed mode, resolution should change the game world's resolution; however, for retina display macs, it has half the effect by default. Retina display macs default to a render scale of 50% in legion, which means for what ever resolution is selected, the game world will be rendered at half that resolution. For example, a 5k iMac with a resolution of 5120x2880 will default to a 5120x2880 resolution with full scale, crisp, UI and will render the game to a 2560x1440 backbuffer. The main motivation for this is because every mac with a built in retina display currently ships with a mobile GPU that has trouble rendering the game at full resolution.

If you want to increase the game resolution without changing the UI, you can change the render scale slider in the Advanced tab to anything you want (65%, 75%, 100% etc). 100% is the WoD default and default for non-retina macs.

SSAA (supersampled antialiasing) sets the render scale to 200% to do its supersampling, so in the iMac's case, SSAA would render the world to a 10240x5760 backbuffer, apply the AA and then supersample the backbuffer to the screen, which unsurprisingly would bring that mobile GPU to a screeching halt FPS wise.

It's also worth noting the AA options dropdown on the first graphics settings page will set your render scale to the default value, 50%(retina mac), 200% (ssaa) or 100% (everything else). If you want to change your AA mode/settings without changing the render scale, you need to change your AA mode/settings from the advanced tab. The AA dropdown on the first page is a set of presets. If you don't want to use the limited set of presets, you need to change the AA/render scale options from the advanced tab exclusively.