Macintosh Civ V - Graphics Quality

[dfiler]

I'm interested in hearing more about the graphics quality people are seeing in Civilization 5 for the Macintosh.

Here's my experience...

While awaiting the Mac release I had the opportunity to watch some 1080p youtube videos and also see Civ5 running at a friend's house on a full-blown gaming PC. The graphics were stunning!

Last night I fired up the Mac version on my 27" iMac for the first time. While the graphics are nice, they aren't as "wow" as I remembered. All of the video options are set to high but anti-aliasing is off because it is grayed out and not enable-able.

My iMac is running the latest OS (10.6.5), has 8gigs of ram, a 2.8Ghz i7 and a 512MB radeon hd 4850. After a bit more reading on these forums, I discovered that this graphics card is not capable of directx 11. While the Mac version is running on openGL (correct me if i'm wrong), it does indicate that perhaps this graphics card is incapable of the superb graphics I witnessed elsewhere. Explaining the exact difference in quality is difficult, but it is an immediately obvious phenomenon.

Does this sound correct? Is the 4850 the limiting factor?

Also, is it possible to hack MSAA (anti-aliasing) to work on this card? Is anyone getting anti-aliasing with the Mac version of Civ5?

 

[Leadfoot5]

I'm interested in hearing more about the graphics quality people are seeing in Civilization 5 for the Macintosh.

Here's my experience...

While awaiting the Mac release I had the opportunity to watch some 1080p youtube videos and also see Civ5 running at a friend's house on a full-blown gaming PC. The graphics were stunning!

Last night I fired up the Mac version on my 27" iMac for the first time. While the graphics are nice, they aren't as "wow" as I remembered. All of the video options are set to high but anti-aliasing is off because it is grayed out and not enable-able.

My iMac is running the latest OS (10.6.5), has 8gigs of ram, a 2.8Ghz i7 and a 512MB radeon hd 4850. After a bit more reading on these forums, I discovered that this graphics card is not capable of directx 11. While the Mac version is running on openGL (correct me if i'm wrong), it does indicate that perhaps this graphics card is incapable of the superb graphics I witnessed elsewhere. Explaining the exact difference in quality is difficult, but it is an immediately obvious phenomenon.

Does this sound correct? Is the 4850 the limiting factor?

Also, is it possible to hack MSAA (anti-aliasing) to work on this card? Is anyone getting anti-aliasing with the Mac version of Civ5?

I have the exact same setup and have the exact same question about MSAA. Hope someone can help us figure out how to enable it, because I can run Civ 5 in bootcamp on this same machine and MSAA works, so it's certainly not a limitation of the 4850 video card.

Al

 

[El Caballerion]

Yep. Graphics definitely lack a 'wow' factor, and I have a 1gig graphics card. It looked flawless on bootcamp though...

 

[dfiler]

Thanks for the confirmation.

Have you also seen Civ5 on a dx11 capable PC? I'm curious if others have the same impression, that graphics are worse on the Mac even with the lack of anti-aliasing figured in. Or at least the Mac version doesn't look as good as the PC dx11 version

As I understand it, the textures are higher quality with dx11 and are decompressed on the graphics card. Also, water reflections are not available in dx9. Of course, that could be a complete butchering of the technical details.

What i'm seeing are graphics on par with the dx9 examples in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=381048&highlight=msaa

With that said, I'm still loving this game.

 

[dfiler]

One more thing to note:

The selected unit is supposed to be highlighted with a yellow circle. However, this circle is almost invisible! Or at least it is almost invisible with the graphics being produced on my iMac. Sometimes I have to click the "unit needs orders" button a few times before finally figuring out where that unit is on this 27 inch screen.

My theory is that this isn't a bug per se. But rather a factor of the lower graphics quality. On Windows PCs, it seems that this selection circle is more obvious, almost glowing with light. Wow, I just noticed when watching a youtube video that this circle should have a dot revolving around it. It probably does, but being nearly invisible, I never noticed. On the Mac the circle seems flat and blends into the background. Perhaps this is a result of a missing effect as well... ?

I'm seriously hoping that the next patch will improve the graphics. Perhaps the 10.6.5 update is responsible for some effects not being rendered at all. After all, it is responsible for the right quarter of the map/screen being gray. If it isn't drawing an entire portion of the screen, it seems logical that it might also be failing to render an effects pass or two.

I'll try to post some screenshots tonight.

 

[Xyth]

Quoting myself from another thread:

Windows Civ5 relies on Direct3D, Mac Civ5 relies on OpenGL as do all Mac games. The most recent versions of OpenGL (4.x) are similar in capability to the latest versions of Direct3D (11) but unfortunately Apple for some frustrating reason have not deigned to update OpenGL further than a messy hybrid of 2.1/3.0, approximately 4 years out of date.

This is why Windows games almost always run better than the Mac version on the same system. This is also why Mac Civ5 has quite high system requirements.

 

[Leadfoot5]

Thanks Xyth, that makes sense. I've really got no reason to be annoyed since I got the Mac version for "free" through Steam. Guess if I want all the graphical bells and whistles, I'll continue using Boot Camp.

 

[dfiler]

Windows Civ5 relies on Direct3D, Mac Civ5 relies on OpenGL as do all Mac games. The most recent versions of OpenGL (4.x) are similar in capability to the latest versions of Direct3D (11) but unfortunately Apple for some frustrating reason have not deigned to update OpenGL further than a messy hybrid of 2.1/3.0, approximately 4 years out of date.

This is why Windows games almost always run better than the Mac version on the same system. This is also why Mac Civ5 has quite high system requirements.

Ahhhh. I was afraid of that. Thanks for confirming the (a) reason why the graphics aren't looking as good as I'd seen elsewhere.

When Apple gets around to updating openGL in OS X, does that mean that existing games will see an improvement? It seems obvious that some of the improvements would need to be invoked via different code, but are there some that would automatically kick in? In a perfect world, the code is already there but the game is falling back to whatever version and features are available.

If Civ5 has the longevity that Civ4 had, many of us will be running Civ5 on OS X Lion at some point. I would hope that 10.7 at least has a full implementation of openGL 3.0. But would it make a visual improvement other than framerate?

 

[bkcir]

Anti aliasing isn't enabled on the DirectX 9 version either.

 

[naphouse]

One more thing to note:

The selected unit is supposed to be highlighted with a yellow circle. However, this circle is almost invisible! Or at least it is almost invisible with the graphics being produced on my iMac.

I opened up a ticket with Aspyr about this. It happens on my MacPro with an ATI4870 too. It looks like the gamma is set much too high. I tried to compensate by creating a new monitor profile with a lower gamma, but the OS doesn't let you drop it far enough to make a real difference. Aspyr seems to be under the impression its just a monitor calibration issue, but obviously it's not. The game looks great under boot camp, so the difference is quite striking. It's much slower on the Mac side too. Under boot camp, I could play with all the settings on the highest and it wouldn't bog down until the late game, but on the Mac side, the default medium settings become choppy fairly early along even on a small map.

 

[Aoxomoxoa]

I opened up a ticket with Aspyr about this. It happens on my MacPro with an ATI4870 too. It looks like the gamma is set much too high. I tried to compensate by creating a new monitor profile with a lower gamma, but the OS doesn't let you drop it far enough to make a real difference. Aspyr seems to be under the impression its just a monitor calibration issue, but obviously it's not. The game looks great under boot camp, so the difference is quite striking. It's much slower on the Mac side too. Under boot camp, I could play with all the settings on the highest and it wouldn't bog down until the late game, but on the Mac side, the default medium settings become choppy fairly early along even on a small map.

Yes, this is the case or me too. I can barely make out the hex grid. When I meet Egypt or Siam, the graphic is blown out in brightness big time.In boot camp it looks like the color levels are right on.

 

[civ_king]

10.6.5 dumped on performance, not to mention the antiquated OGl, AKA blame Jobs