ATI Radeon HD 4850 Performance Problems

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ATI Radeon HD 4850 Performance Problems

I am using an iMac to develop a game in Unity. I have run into serious performance issues when the game includes assets with many polygons and textures. The video card is supposed to handle this without a problem, in fact everything works as it should if I run Unity under Windows 7 on my Bootcamp partition.

Seems to me like a video driver issue, does anyone have any advice. I really don't like the idea of having to work in Windows all the time but if I can;t get the video card to work properly I may need to.

iMac 27 inch (iMac11,1), Mac OS X (10.6.3), ATI Radeon HD 4850 Graphics

Posted on Apr 22, 2010 11:22 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 22, 2010 1:07 PM in response to SecondWold

When you say "Unity" are you referring to the feature inside of VM Ware Fusion?
If so then I'll go ahead & say that any virtual-machine that demands high-perfoamnce graphics usually bogs down. Case in point for me: when I run Linux on my Windows box's VM I have 256MB of "dedicated" RAM. The Linux GUI can't even run well at the medium (it runs, but it lags a lot) settings because it doesn't really have 256MB of video RAM to support it. I have TWO Radeon 4850 1GB cards in it so I know it can handle the Linux GUI, or any OS GUI for that matter. But doesn't happen in a VM.

This is the case with any VM really. It's why no one does any gaming on a VM & all use a Boot Camp partition for it. When the OS has direct connection to the hardware it will run great (such as in OSX or in Windows) but when running on a "virtual" piece of hardware it's all emulated, so the performance is just not anywhere near the actual specifications.

If this is NOT what you mean by Unity then... well please enlighten me, cause I can't think of anything else. I'd be happy to try & research it a little.

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Answer 2

SecondWold Author

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Apr 22, 2010 5:44 PM in response to CIA Jones

Thanks for your reply.

By Unity I was referring to the MacOS version of the Unity 3D game development environment ( http://unity3d.com/). Also, I am not running the game under emulation, everything is being executed directly on MacOS.

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Answer 3

Apr 22, 2010 6:04 PM in response to SecondWold

In that case I will turn over the thread to someone who may be able to provide better suggestions. I'll probably do some research into it just to see if I can come up with anything; I'm always pushing myself to learn more about computer technology.

I wish you good luck SecondWold.

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