Poor Diablo III: Reaper of Souls performance on a rMBP late 2013

Question

I just got a new rMBP (with dedicated video-card) and as a test I decided to run Diablo III: Reaper of Souls on Ultra settings. It looks absolutely gorgeous but its 10-17 fps frame-rate is very disappointing.

Are there any settings I can adjust to improve this performance? In Windows it can be "tuned" to max performance or battery saving; is there a similar setting in OS X?

Right now it's on AC power (plugged on the wall), Activity Monitor is reporting that the video-card is being used for D3, is there anything else that I'm forgetting to check?

Answer 1

There's no such power settings in OS X. And even in Windows, all it does is dimming the display and changing the idle time for sleep.

That's not really going to make a difference(using it plugged in I mean), your performance will stay the same. I guess you're going to have to play it on lower settings if you want a higher framerate.

Answer 2

I'm assuming you have the 15" rMBP with the NVidia GT 750M. If you're trying to run at native resolution, 2880 x 1800, with full effects, that card is likely inadequate.

The GT 750M I would estimate is roughly equivalent with a Radeon HD 6850, 6770, or even lower, placing it fairly low on this benchmark chart for the original Diablo III. The frame-rates there get down into the 20's, and you have a) 25% more pixels then their highest tested resolution, and b) the expansion which likely has had graphical updates in the intervening two years.

If you want better frame-rate, you must trade off fidelity. Lower the resolution, lower graphical settings until you find something you're happy with.

Answer 3

Take the resolution down. Remember that the rMBPs have a native resolution that is way higher than 1080p, and expecting them to game at that resolution is perhaps expecting too much. I use a 2014 13" rMBP (which uses Intel Iris, not an external Nvidia card), and I rarely have any issues running RoS at 1280x80x60 with textures to high and other settings to high or medium. With an external card, I would expect the game to run blisteringly at a sub-1080p resolution. But it's possible we have different expectations around portable gaming -- this certainly isn't a 'gaming notebook'.