Strange MacBook + WoW problem

RobH

RobH

RobH

Soldato
Joined
9 May 2005
Posts
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Location
Nottingham
This has been happening ever since I installed WoW on my Macbook on Thursday, this problem has also remained after a complete reinstall of OSX.

Basically I can load up WoW, login and play no problem but after about a minute, sometimes shorter the framerate will drop to 3-5fps and stay like it. The normal framerate averages about 20fps normally. The framerate drop is instant, from 20 down to 3, I can be standing still or moving and it will do it. I investigated my CPU usage during this and saw the following results.

strange.png


The red box shows when WoW is running fine with a high average FPS, the bit in the midle shows when it screws up and runs at a low FPS and the yellow box shows the activity when I close WoW.

I should also mention that if i let the computer go into standby or shut it down then power it on again, I can load up WoW and it'll be fine for another minute or so, re-loading in the same session will cause it to still have low FPS which is visible from the title screen too.

Any idea's I'm new to OSX so I don't know the best way to investigate a problem like this.
 
Im not familiar with osx mate to be honest (although i fancy a macbook :P) but could it be the cpu throttling due to heat (or similar)?

Does it do it with other games/ intensive apps?
 
Bizarre, what RAM have you got in there? The only thing I can think of is as WoWs RAM usage increases it's somehow causing a problem with the graphics card. You do have a matching pair of RAM sticks don't you? :)

I've played WoW for several hours straight on mine (2.0Ghz, 2Gig) with no slowdown.. so it definitely SHOULD work ok.
 
It's behaves exactly the same with the 2x256MB that it came with and the 2x1GB i installed. I know people have had it running at a decent framerate on both setups. Even I can run it fine for about a minute and the fact it runs fine on bootcamp (which runs the CPU's hotter) should show it's not the hardware (unless OSX is doing something to the hardware).

I'd like to see if it affects any other games, does anyone know of any 3D game demo's that run on intel mac's?
 
UPDATE: Seems my MacBook stutters an awful lot whilst playing back video's too, I'm not talking 1080p HD movies, just a simple DVD (007 die another day), I'm going to call applecare now I have evidence that a Apple application shows this graphical lag.
 
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Update 2: Tested Cinebench and it clearly shows the problem. I wake my MacBook from standby and run the HW openGL test, it runs smooth as anything, no problems at all. I re-run it and bam! it drops into a stuttery lag. Also the same if I run a video for any length of time although the video is still watchable you can see the lag in the playback.

As far as I am aware there are only 2 other people I have heard of with this problem and they were on the WoW Mac support forum. The one guy was on his 2nd MacBook and he took it to the Apple Store and show them the problem in WoW and Quicktime, they gave him a replacement straight away.
 
Just updating you, I spend about 90 minutes on the phone to AppleCare on Tuesday (not using the 0870 number thank god) and they failed to fix my problem, they ordered be a brand new one there and then. Today a new one delivered at 12 and they picked the old one up at 1:30. I'm glad to say that the new one works flawlessly, it was definatly a hardware fault on the old one. Apple have been very helpful in geting this sorted although it still seems to be a rare problem that my MacBook was suffering from.
 
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