The game is killing my new MacBook Pro. Any thoughts why?

[Lieto]

Please see the screenshot attached.

It's a new MacBook Pro with a fresh system. 

The game crushes the system more or less every hour. And by crashes I mean I need to hard reset it with the power button. Running the game at 3584x resolution  with max scaled UI (not sure if that's relevant)

Other games seems to run fine.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

ONI is not like other games. ONI does not really make use of your GPU.  ONI, instead, does a LOT of calculations that require your CPU.  It also does a lot of moving stuff from memory to the CPU and back again, so that it can do the calculations.

You'll notice at the top that ONI is using 144.7% CPU in your screenshot.  This means that its running about two threads.  It isn't at 200% CPU because time is spent moving stuff from memory into the CPU and back again (along with other OS tasks) that will prevent ONI from actually running two threads at 100%.  

Additionally, there will be thermal throttling to keep the CPU cores from overheating.  Most CPUs will rotate a running thread through each of the cores to distribute the heat, but laptops in general are poor at moving the heat out of the system.  Most laptops I've worked with will not run a thread at full speed for very long before throttling kicks in.

Finally, you'll notice that I mentioned moving stuff from memory to the CPU and back again.  This is a relatively slow process.  You can get the same sort of performance hit by compressing a raw 4k video into h.264 or h.265 formats without using video card hardware, as it involves grabbing a chunk of data from memory, shoving it into the CPU, performing a calculation, then shoving it back into memory. 

[SharraShimada]

I´m not that into Mac myself, so i have to ask. Can you monitor the temperatures of the Macbook components? CPU, RAM... 

Macbooks are known to have not the best possible cooling. And ONI does really stress the CPU. In general this should just result in throttling the CPU, and the game just runs worse. But if the whole system overheats, whats likley on a laptop, other components may shut down due to heat. And then > freeze.

[Lieto]

Quote

ONI is not like other games. ONI does not really make use of your GPU.  ONI, instead, does a LOT of calculations that require your CPU.  It also does a lot of moving stuff from memory to the CPU and back again, so that it can do the calculations.

The thing is that i am playing at absolute max everything and i don't get any performance issues while in the game (aside from fans kicking in). It's just the game crashes the system at some point or the other. It's very annoying since i already lost a few designs that didn't get auto saved in time.

I mean, i get that it's CPU intensive but i have a 6-core last gen CPU, surely it shouldn't crash the system, there must be a fix.

14 minutes ago, Lieto said:

Macbooks are known to have not the best possible cooling. And ONI does really stress the CPU. In general this should just result in throttling the CPU, and the game just runs worse. But if the whole system overheats, whats likley on a laptop, other components may shut down due to heat. And then > freeze.

I'll definitely check the temps.

It's not a normal freeze by the way, i can still move and see my mouse but nothing else is responsive. Part of the reason why i am worried is that i want to make sure my mac is fine. I ran some stress test and it doesn't seem to freeze so i guess its the game.

I've also tried playing it on PC with lower CPU mark and PC didn't seem bothered at all. I ran three games in parallel and CPU usage for ONI was pretty much nothing.

[Mojo Filter]

18 hours ago, Lieto said:

Running the game at 3584x resolution  with max scaled UI (not sure if that's relevant)

 

I would try turning your video settings down.

I play the game on a five year old MacBook just fine at 1440x900.

[MorsDux]

4 hours ago, Lieto said:

The thing is that i am playing at absolute max everything and i don't get any performance issues while in the game (aside from fans kicking in). It's just the game crashes the system at some point or the other. It's very annoying since i already lost a few designs that didn't get auto saved in time.

I mean, i get that it's CPU intensive but i have a 6-core last gen CPU, surely it shouldn't crash the system, there must be a fix.

I'll definitely check the temps.

It's not a normal freeze by the way, i can still move and see my mouse but nothing else is responsive. Part of the reason why i am worried is that i want to make sure my mac is fine. I ran some stress test and it doesn't seem to freeze so i guess its the game.

I've also tried playing it on PC with lower CPU mark and PC didn't seem bothered at all. I ran three games in parallel and CPU usage for ONI was pretty much nothing.

I have had the exact same issue with mouse moving but no change on screen. I had replaced my battery in my laptop (old windows laptop) and the problem was solved. The battery couldnt support the draw of the gpu even though power was connected. Not sure its the same issue but i have heard new macs having the issue of lower cooling than necessary.

[SharraShimada]

Another possibility: Your hardware is fine, and its just a thing of "Hey i´m using a Mac, throw all weird bugs on me" 

The game was designed for Windows, and then ported to Mac and Linux. Linux version has all kinds of issues with mods. Mac had/has? issues with restriction policies from Apple and graphics bugs. 

Due the much smaller Mac-user base for games, its always hard to track such problems. 

[Gurgel]

You have a slow CPU and slow memory. And, in addition, an Intel CPU and they deal not very well with closely-coupled multi-threaded code. Face it, CPU-wise, your new MAC-book is pretty low-end.

[Lieto]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

You have a slow CPU and slow memory. And, in addition, an Intel CPU and they deal not very well with closely-coupled multi-threaded code. Face it, CPU-wise, your new MAC-book is pretty low-end.

It's multicore geekbench score is higher than desktop ryzen5 3600. How is this low-end for a laptop?

[Satyrical364]

Nobody has any idea what it is for sure, including me. However, anecdotally, anytime I've used a laptop in the past and it crashes on a regular basis while running a program, it's been due to overheating. 

Laptops have all the components together and much smaller fans than box computers. If you run an intense application for any length of time, it's possible they'll accumulate so much heat that it is forced to shut down to prevent permanent damage.

In the past I used a fan-cooled platform that you can place the laptop on, with mixed results.There are other external cooling solutions you might look into.

[Lieto]

That would be a sign of.a faulty system though. A system that is in order would throttle down.

[KittenIsAGeek]

11 hours ago, Lieto said:

I mean, i get that it's CPU intensive but i have a 6-core last gen CPU, surely it shouldn't crash the system, there must be a fix.

ONI won't use six cores.  It will use two threads, which could rotate through the six cores.  

There are some possibilities for your crashes:

1. Heat is causing instability somewhere in your hardware.  You're running two threads continually and laptops aren't usually happy with this regardless of how many cores they have or how new they are.
2. You could be running close to your max memory and stuff is being swapped to the drive.  This can cause hangs or lockups if something critical gets swapped that takes too long to swap back.  This would be an operating system issue.

If it was ONI itself causing the crash, then a lot more players would have that problem.  I can create a crash by loading a game repeatedly about a dozen times until my memory is full, so ONI isn't perfect -- but it shouldn't be crashing during normal play unless something else is going on.

7 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Linux version has all kinds of issues with mods

I haven't experienced this.  Can you give me some specific mods that have issues so I can test them?  I play exclusively on Linux and have since the start.

3 hours ago, Lieto said:

It's multicore geekbench score is higher than desktop ryzen5 3600. How is this low-end for a laptop?

Benchmarks may be decent at comparing two systems, but they're not a reliable method.   Sorry.   Besides, you have six cores, which means a multi-thread benchmark will use all six cores during its tests, so it will definitely perform better than a 4-core system doing the same benchmark.  However, that says absolutely NOTHING about how a two-thread application will compare across the two platforms.  My 7 year old i5 out-performs quite a number of newer systems when it comes to ONI, despite testing extremely poorly on benchmarks.

[SharraShimada]

23 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I haven't experienced this.  Can you give me some specific mods that have issues so I can test them?  I play exclusively on Linux and have since the startt

In the mod section and in bug reports are some issues listed with modded ONI on linux. I´m sure you find what you´re looking for.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, Lieto said:

It's multicore geekbench score is higher than desktop ryzen5 3600. How is this low-end for a laptop?

It is not low-end for a laptop. It is low-end for a computer. Also, a multi-core benchmark is pretty meaningless for ONI.

[arvenil]

I own Macbook Pro 15" 2018 with radeon vega 20. Let me tell you, this is garbage. I never had a such horrible laptop in 15 years of buying different top products.

I do recommend returning it if u can. If you can't then pay for an app (I don't know if I can mention the name) to disable turbo boost. Just google for "macbook pro disable turbo boost".

My 5k EUR laptop died when I was playing ONI so please treat this as a serious warning. It came back from month repair and now I'm always in "disable turbo boost" mode and I can play hours, smooth, no issues, no overheating. If I turn it on my laptop overheats within minutes. It's funny because you can have win10 on your mac (bootcamp) and thermal control works perfectly fine, oni works great, so thermal support is actually better on win10 than on osx on this laptop :facepalm:

EDIT: Why disable turbo boost works? Because if it's on it continuously overclocks cpu and as a result it overheats, once it overheats the cpu, the thermal throttling kicks in and lovers the clocks, making the game unplayable. However it still tries to push overclocking with turbo boost so it ends up in this weird state where it is always overheating, slowing down and actually working slower than with "turbo boost" being turned off. The laptop is literally more performant with turbo boost being off.

[Lieto]

10 hours ago, arvenil said:

I own Macbook Pro 15" 2018 with radeon vega 20. Let me tell you, this is garbage. I never had a such horrible laptop in 15 years of buying different top products.

I don't want it to turn into mac debate but I am a mac user since around 2003 and it's stability and resale value is unmatched.

This is my 3rd mac laptop in those 18 years and the first 2 lasted around 9 years each without crashing or needing a repair once (the previous one from 2011 with 2720QM Sandy Bridge still works perfectly fine). The only time i ever rebooted it is when i was installing an update. For context i had PC laptops over the years too, neither lasted for more than 2-3 years.

The current one was running multiple blizzard games for hours without any heat issues so i am a bit hesitant to blame everything on hardware. (I own another windows gaming desktop but ONI is the kind of game i like to play on the couch :p)

[Glassyfo]

1 hour ago, Lieto said:

I don't want it to turn into mac debate but I am a mac user since around 2003 and it's stability and resale value is unmatched.

This is my 3rd mac laptop in those 18 years and the first 2 lasted around 9 years each without crashing or needing a repair once (the previous one from 2011 with 2720QM Sandy Bridge still works perfectly fine). The only time i ever rebooted it is when i was installing an update. For context i had PC laptops over the years too, neither lasted for more than 2-3 years.

The current one was running multiple blizzard games for hours without any heat issues so i am a bit hesitant to blame everything on hardware. (I own another windows gaming desktop but ONI is the kind of game i like to play on the couch :p)

Try running it through WINE if you can. If you still have problems, then it's your hardware.

[arvenil]

On 4/1/2020 at 10:26 AM, Lieto said:

I don't want it to turn into mac debate but I am a mac user since around 2003 and it's stability and resale value is unmatched.

This is my 3rd mac laptop in those 18 years and the first 2 lasted around 9 years each without crashing or needing a repair once (the previous one from 2011 with 2720QM Sandy Bridge still works perfectly fine). The only time i ever rebooted it is when i was installing an update. For context i had PC laptops over the years too, neither lasted for more than 2-3 years.

The current one was running multiple blizzard games for hours without any heat issues so i am a bit hesitant to blame everything on hardware. (I own another windows gaming desktop but ONI is the kind of game i like to play on the couch :p)

Hi. I was in the same position as you. I still have two macbook pro 13" 2013 which work really great and I'm a huge fan of them. I'm talking about new generation. The new 16" 2019 Macbook Pro is supposed to have better thermal cooling than mine 2018, so I would suspect you to have better luck with cooling, however the hardware (cpu) is the same and the symptoms look the same as from mine 2018. Your laptop will probably not die like mine, but I doubt TurboBoost issue was solved.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 4/1/2020 at 2:26 AM, Lieto said:

The current one was running multiple blizzard games for hours without any heat issues so i am a bit hesitant to blame everything on hardware. (I own another windows gaming desktop but ONI is the kind of game i like to play on the couch :p)

As I have said before, ONI isn't most games.  You can NOT use other games as a comparison for potential ONI performance.  Most games rely on graphics hardware for a good share of the work.  ONI does not.  ONI's graphics are relatively simple.  Switching from hardware to software rendering on my computer doesn't change ONI's performance noticeably, while any other game would slow to a crawl.

Laptops that have good graphics hardware often have decent cooling for that hardware, so games can run for hours without overheating.  However, since most games don't really put a lot of load on the CPU, even gaming laptops skimp on cooling the CPU.  I'm not disputing that your laptop isn't a good laptop for gaming.  I'm pointing out that ONI doesn't use your laptop's hardware like other games do.  At all.

 

ONI is primarily a computation application.  At its core, ONI grabs a hunk of stuff from RAM, pulls it into the CPU, performs several calculations on it, then shoves it back into RAM.  This is very similar to how HD video rendering is done, whether you're compressing raw video into the latest codecs or you're using Blender to create a 3D life-like animation.  If you compare how rendering performs between computers, you can compare how ONI will perform between those computers.   Comparing 3D graphics or gaming performance will tell you nothing about how ONI will perform.

[Badpip]

Don't blindly trust apple  for all their product, they have lot of bad product too, for exemple some of their laptop charger are bad, even dangerous because they have  bad chinese composant inside who can cause short circuit, and they are twice more expensive than others.. they have good product too but don't blindly trust them.