Borderlands Forum

I was running Borderlands (through Steam) under OSX 10.6.8 (using the -ONETHREAD launch option, as suggested in a Tips & Tricks thread). Performance was poor, really the bottom edge of playable, but consistent. I upgraded my machine to 10.8.5 for unrelated reasons, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Borderlands ran much faster. Unfortunately, the game periodically begins to slow down, and eventually hangs, with the CPUs maxed out. Sometimes this happens only after I've been playing for a while, sometimes it happens as soon as I launch the game. This happens with and without -ONETHREAD. There are no other applications open when this happens.

Would appreciate any advice, if anyone is still reading the forum for this game.

A quick set of questions...

What version of CrossOver are you now running?
What version were you running where Borderlands ran fine?
What GPU (graphics card) are you running with?

All of these are important because with CrossOver 12-13.0.1 we've implemented a few different things that could be causing the issue you're seeing so knowing the right version of CrossOver and your GPU will help us determine the first things we would suggest you do.

Sorry for the delayed reply.

I'm running Crossover 13.0.1. I was running OSX 10.6.8, and upgraded to 10.8.5, and am fully patched, as far as Software Update is concerned. My machine is a MacBook Pro with the NVIDIA GT330M chipset. The system profiler actually reports two video cards: Intel HD Graphics, and the NVIDIA; I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that it's using the NVIDIA for the heavy lifting.

Thanks for following up,

John

Seeing the two video cards in the system information jogged something in my memory about a system preference for trading video performance for battery life. I went looking for it, and verified that 'Automatically switch graphics modes' (under 'Power Saver' preference) is turned off, so presumably it is using the NVIDIA GPU all the time.

No worries...

But, what version of CrossOver were you running when it worked fine?

I assume that you're probably having trouble with the Command Stream (Performance Enhanced Graphics).

You can try this theory out by opening your bottle manager, selecting the bottle Borderlands is in, then going to the "advanced" tab and toggling the the checkbox there.

IF that doesn't help... you can also try the legacy window manager.

Should either setting improve your situation, write back so we can log that and try to fix Borderlands on a more permanent basis.

Same version of Crossover (13.0.1). That's why I was surprised at the performance difference, because it was an OS upgrade, not a Crossover upgrade, that changed the behavior.

I'll try disabling Performance Enhanced Graphics and see how that works.

With Disable Performance Enhanced Graphics turned on, the game gets to where it switches to full screen mode, and the screen goes black. No sound, no video, but the CPU usage ramps up.

With Disable Performance Enhanced Graphics turned off, but Use Legacy Window Manager turned on, the game starts okay, but the mouse control is messed up. It's like moving the mouse too far left or right hits a hard stop, I can only turn 90 degrees either side of dead center. Using key bindings for turning, I can turn all the way around. I didn't stay in game long enough to evaluate performance.

I was checking to see if changing the "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows" in the Control Panel Wine configuration utility had any effect on the mouse problem, and I got the performance problem immediately when I loaded the saved game (the blue and purple 'wormhole' effect that it displays on map load was running at maybe one frame every 5+ seconds). That was with 'Use Legacy Window Manager' turned on.

While working with Apple support on what I thought to be an unrelated issue, I think I have hit on the solution to this problem. The Apple tech talked me through a procedure he described as 'dumping virtual memory': shut down the machine, press and release power button, hold down 'ctrl+opt+P+R' until the machine chimes twice (should be less than 20 sec), then release keys and allow to boot as normal. According to him, this forces the machine to clear data that is held in memory even across cold reboots. This data may be flagged in such a way that it cannot be swapped out. If enough of this sort of data is stuck in memory, applications may be forced to use virtual, rather than physical, memory, degrading performance. After that procedure, performance in Borderlands is consistent again.