Mac camera stutter in Forever: what one detailed report describes, and what to measure

One Mac player’s report from 22 October turns on a single contrast. Standing still, or turning with the keyboard, they say the game held around 60 frames per second. Turning the camera with the right mouse button, they say, dropped it into roughly the 25 to 40 range, and it stayed there for as long as the movement lasted.

The report

Posted on the US forums at 14:48 UTC, it lists the poster’s setup: a base-model MacBook Neo with 8 GB of unified memory, what they call the latest macOS, the built-in display, and the 21 October stress-test client. They tried both an external mouse and the built-in trackpad.

By their account, the keyboard figure held even in fullscreen and during combat, and the trackpad behaved much like the mouse. They describe the game as still responsive: a lower frame rate for as long as the mouse is turning the camera, rather than a brief freeze.

What the poster tried

Before posting, they say they worked through a list of changes:

• graphics preset 1, and render scale at 50% and below;
• V-Sync and the frame-rate target turned off, and optional GPU features disabled;
• a console setting for the hardware cursor;
• battery against mains power, and fullscreen against windowed mode.

In their description, lower render scale raised frame rates overall but did not resolve the drop while turning the camera. A smaller window helped substantially; enlarging it brought the drops back. These are one player’s results on one machine, not fixes we have checked.

Other problems they noticed

The poster also lists bright green arrows, inconsistent shadows, terrain artifacts that looked like polygon edges beneath the textures, and fences around Razor Hill appearing inconsistently. Some of the visibility problems, they say, persisted even at preset 6 with view distance at maximum.

For comparison, they say Retail and TBC Classic run much better on the same MacBook with the same mouse. They acknowledge it is entry-level hardware and say they don’t expect maximum settings. Their point is the gap between keyboard and mouse turning, along with the artifacts, which they suggest may be worth investigating in the macOS client.

What it does and doesn’t show

This is a single, carefully written report from one machine, on a pre-launch client. It does not tell us how other Macs behave, what causes the drop, or whether any setting fixes it. We have not reproduced it.

If you want to measure it yourself

If you see something similar, these suggestions are a way to make your report comparable with this one. They are a proposed method, not results we have measured.

• Pick one spot and one view. Return to the same place, facing the same way, for every comparison.
• Write down the setup: Mac model, memory, exact macOS version, display and resolution, client build, graphics preset, render scale, window mode and window size.
• Compare input methods directly: make the same turn with the keyboard, the mouse and the trackpad.
• Change one thing at a time, and note the result before changing the next.
• Record frame times if you can, not only frames per second. An average can smooth over uneven frames that a frame-time reading would show.
• Note the conditions: power source, and how busy the area was.

A report built this way lets someone else line your numbers up against this one.