1gb or more vram really matters

[Warloch]

AHHHHHHHH!!

Finally got my nvidia 680 GTX 4gb and after my 560ti 1gb I can just say WOW!

I can actually see individual veins in tree leaves in my tree texture mod

V2.0 for CMBN is still a mess. los problems are the worst. Don't know if they are caused by some mod. I'v been playing entirely with CMFI.

But I can say that every texture mod looks different with more vram.

they look more crisp and more detailed

[Ithikial_AU]

Looking forward to getting a new rig myself after Christmas with a GTX690.

[Blazing 88's]

I can wait a year until they are approx. half price.

[Redwolf]

It's more likely that the faster and better graphics processor is responsible for the improvement, not the additional amount of video memory.

[Buzz]

Warloch, Thanks for the texture improvement report. I may try an NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Card in my Mac Pro at some point.

I suspect Redwolf is correct about the faster and better graphics processor.

[simast]

Seeing as you have a monster of a card, you can tweak some settings with NVIDIA Control Panel. Under "Manage 3D Settings" locate and manually add "CM Normandy.exe" to the list. Then change a couple of settings:

- Set anisotropic filtering to 16x

- Disable anti-aliasing option in the game settings screen and use your own combo with NVIDIA panel. You can also set "Antialiasing - Transparency" value there (for supersampling)

- Set vsync to on

- Set triple buffering to on

[Kilroy Lurking]

Unfortunately the Mac NVIDIA control (Preference pane) panel only checks for updates. So it seems that we are stuck with only the "in game" graphics tweaks. However, I am running a GTX 670 which gives, with all options maxed out, really good graphics and response times (except AA which has to be turned "Off", or the scenarios won't load).

David

[Wodin]

I have a AMD 6850 1 gig and it looks lovely with all settings on max...

[Warloch]

Warloch, Thanks for the texture improvement report. I may try an NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Card in my Mac Pro at some point.

I suspect Redwolf is correct about the faster and better graphics processor.

Now I have several 4094 x 4096 pixel sized textures in use. Base grass texture could be even higher.

With one 4096 x 4096 texture my 560ti 1gb was suffering from serious slowdowns and the game was unplayable. I think that CMB engine is not very well optimized at all, but extra mem will provide significant improvement on game speed with higher resolution textures.:D

[Buzz]

With 4 GB of video memory you should have room for plenty of higher resolution textures! I am sure CMBN/CW &FI look fantastic with that much video memory headroom.

Tanks A Lot is working in a great looking high resolution church right now. Give it a try and let us know how it looks.

My old ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB card works but stumbles with a "Z" filled with > 1 GB of all the fantastic Mod HD Eye Candy available for the CM games.

Kilroy Lurking / David,

Are you running a PC (non Mac-EFI) GTX 670 in your Mac?

If so what model Mac are you using?

You may fine this link helpful or you may know of better information.

Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1440150

"I am running a GTX 670 which gives, with all options maxed out, really good graphics and response times (except AA which has to be turned "Off", or the scenarios won't load)."

I understand Mountain Lion needs no additional drivers to boot and start using the card. Could it be the card drivers needs updating from NVidia so AA can be used?

It sounds like a 2 GB GTX 670 is the way to go for a Mac as " no hack the OpenCl drivers to use that feature in Adobe / Apple's apps that use GPU acceleration..."

Thanks for the information.

[Peter Panzer]

As a newcomer to OSX (Montain Lion) and CMBN, am I correct in saying there are no options to manually apply antialiasing with a Nvidia GPU?

I am strongly considering purchasing a 2012 iMac (Nvidia 680MX, 2GB GPU), however I am not sure what use the visual benefits of such a capable graphics processor are if, in the end, the edges of the models are still displayed in a jagged/blurred fashion.

Could some of you more experienced OSX players give me a better sense of what I could expect from the game visually if the Nvidia GPUs operating under OSX cannot be manually set like they can in Windows - perhaps even share screenshots with a specific emphasis on antialiasing capability? Does the high resolution of the 2012 iMac (2560x1440 native) offset the need for antialiasing?

Thanks for helping me get a better understanding.

[Kilroy Lurking]

Buzz,

I just built this PC with the idea of using it just for a few games.

However, I found that by carefully incorporating Mac friendly components, Mac OSX runs fine and I hardly ever boot into Windows now. The cpu is a 3.4 GHz i5 with 8GB RAM and a NVIDIA GTX 670. The OS (Mountain Lion) is on a Corsair 180 GB SSD.

Compared to my previous PC (a Pentium D) this Rig is screamingly fast. I have tried to resist tweaking settings unless they are "ingame"! - the graphics are more than OK as is, for now anyway. By the way the drivers for the NVIDIA GTX 670 are native to OSX ML.

David

[Buzz]

Just up for a breather after a few hours of Christmas Ever CMSF MAC Bundle! Just so much fun.

Thanks Kilroy Lurking, Sounds like a screamingly fast build! Congratulations and thanks for the info. I "should" try a build myself as I have always wanted to for a separate "game machine". I would enjoy tinkering with the build. Very good to know the NVIDIA GTX 670 runs CM well in OSX ML.

Peter, I am not an experienced OSX player but when I get time I will try and locate some links for you.

Happy Holidays. Off to put out Santa's Whiskey:D

[Buzz]

Peter Panzer,

Got a moment to catch up on the road.

I am not running OSX (Mountain Lion) yet. I am on Lion 10.7.5 on an old ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB card.

In the past it has been said "… OpenGL Nvidia has generally done a better job." I suspect the most recent drivers make a major difference in performance of any graphics card. My old ATI 512 MB card works but stumbles with my "Z" folder filled with > 1 GB of Mods. I do often set models and textures to BEST with antialiasing & shaders but w/o shadows.

CMBN, CMFI and CMSF are all 'single-threaded' games as far as I know so that can't make use of multi-core CPUs.

Per Schrullenhaft > 1 year ago, "The issue that you're seeing with the "ground constantly changing" is due to video/memory management that CMBN is doing internally. The game has to decide when to switch out textures for lower resolution versions (LODs, "Level of Detail" models and textures) in order to maintain a certain amount of performance and memory availability. Unfortunately at this time the calculation is done strictly within the code with few user inputs. Perhaps in the future there will be some more specific user tweaks to adjust this video behavior, but that may be a 'family' or two away (CMBN most likely will NOT see such user configurable options)."

So since I don't have an Nvidia card (yet) I can't give you 1st hand data.

Warloch's 680 GTX 4gb is a very, very top of the line card! He should have no GPU issues with memory at all.

Warloch or Kilroy Lurking (NVIDIA GTX 670 another fine GPU) may better be able to address tweaking ability of Nvidia cards OS (Mountain Lion).

Sorry I don't have more real Nvidia facts for you as I understand how great the CM series of games are and look when everything (including the fantastic mods available). As I stated before, I may simply make the time to build my own hackintosh and I will go the Nvidia GPU route.

BTW - Aris / Fuser noted "Mods may slow down (few seconds,...) loading times, (after all, the exe loads whatever it finds in Z) but once in game, the difference is not noticeable. 3D objects are huge frame rate eaters. Trees and foliage, specially, and making them translucent or not is not going to improve performance since 3D objects are still there (although transparent). Huge battles, with many soldiers, logically slow down performance too, but not because there are many textures, but because there are many 3D objects and polygons."

This seems to indicate if you plan on huge battles you will benefit from more GPU memory?

[Redwolf]

You misunderstand, Buzz.

Just the overall graphics quality the LOD (level of detail, the omission of detail in the distance) also has nothing to do with amount of video memory.

You draw less details in the distance mainly to reduce the polygon count. That reduces the textures drawn in the distance, however it doesn't reduce video memory consumption. On the opposite now you might also have to load second version of the same texture for the lower poly count 3D model in the distance.

People really need to get this stupid idea out of their heads that amount of video memory is a good way to judge whether a video card is any good. There are tons and tons of cards out there with lots of VRAM that are simple scams to entrap people who think that way. These cards don't have enough memory bandwidth to visit even a fraction of that memory during each frame drawn, much less multiple times which is required in the real world. WAKE UP PEOPLE.