Mac tired of playing games.

April 11, 2007 11:51 AM

What exactly is happening when my mac "gets tired" when playing video games? How do I correct it?

After installing Boot Camp, Ive been much more inclined to playing games on my mac. After playing games for a while Ive notcied something that might be obvious to some people but its new to me.

Ive played Riven and Jade Empire on Boot Camp and Civilization IV on OSX and its always the same issue: at first all is perfectly well and then everything starts getting choppy and sort of malfunction a bit after playing for about an hour or an hour and a half. Civ characters start moving slowly, everything takes more time, but mostly just choppiness.

It seems to get tired of playing. My first assumption is that the CPU is overworking itself but on a Macbook Pro 2.16 GHZ with 2GB ram, should this be happening?

Anyway, I want to be able to play for as long as I like without giving my mac a break... whats going on and how can I correct it?

posted by theholotrope to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Two possibilities come to mind.

1. Most likely, your CPU or video card are overheating. They will gradually increase in temperature while operating, and if they heat up faster than the cooling system can compensate, they will fall back into a degraded performance mode. The key here is air flow. Make sure you're not blocking any of the fans into or out of your case. Open the case and use compressed air to blow dust out of the fans (careful not to breathe the nasty stuff in).

2. Less likely, your system is using all available memory, and has to swap it to the hard drive temporarily. This will cause noticeable hard drive thrashing (you'll probably hear it). If this is your problem, add more RAM or run less applications simultaneously, to free up some memory.
posted by knave at 12:01 PM on April 11, 2007

I should note, I game on a (PC) laptop, and overheating issues are critical on such small systems. When I said "open the case" I was thinking of a desktop. For a laptop, blow air into the exhaust vent, reversing the direction of normal flow. If that doesn't help, consider using a laptop cooler pad while gaming, so it's not starving for cool air.
posted by knave at 12:06 PM on April 11, 2007

I can't speak to the other games, but Civ has always been notorious for seriously slowing down as games get very large towards the end, especially on the computer players turns. Patches to Civ IV have really helped the issue but I doubt it has been eliminated altogether. I am speaking from experience with the PC version though, so YMMV.

Since this is happening in multiple games, I would also suspect a heat issue, though an hour and a half seems a very long time for that issue to crop up. I have had heat issues on a PC and it usually manifests within 20 minutes.
posted by utsutsu at 12:07 PM on April 11, 2007

If you play games with your MacBook on your lap, you won't be allowing it to cool properly because your thighs will be insulating the hottest part of the machine (if your MacBook is anything like mine, the top left of the machine is the hottest). Air needs to be flowing under the notebook case. Try playing games with the machine on a flat surface, like a table.
posted by humblepigeon at 12:18 PM on April 11, 2007

Games tend to use up as much resources as they can get their hands on, until one subsystem or another becomes a bottleneck. If the CPU isn't maxed, the video card is, or vice versa. Running either at near 100% of its capacity is going to generate a lot of heat.

My girlfriend was having similar problems with games getting slow after playing for a little while on her laptop (a Dell). She was using it on her bed. Using it on a desk resolved the issue. YMMV.
posted by kableh at 12:43 PM on April 11, 2007

Be careful with the compressed air; you can send the fan spinning much much faster than the bearings can handle, ruining the fan.

...dunno if that can happen you *you* but it happened to me and it sucked.
posted by aramaic at 12:52 PM on April 11, 2007

If cooling it down doesn't help, the next thing I'd suspect would be some sort of memory leak...although for it to happen in all games would be pretty odd. (If it was just one particular game I'd say it's definitely a memory leak.) It would be a hell of a coincidence to have memory leaks in all those games; since you're running them on different OSes it can't be blamed on the system or anything else lower-level.

Big signs of a memory leak are if it starts swapping more and more as time goes on -- you'll hear it churning the hard drive continuously. On the OS X side you can monitor it with 'top' at a terminal and look at the pageins vs pageouts. (If they're approaching 1:1 instead of some number of pageins and a much much smaller number of pageouts, you're RAM starved.)

But anyway, I'd try running the thing while sitting it flat on a table (preferably a metal table). You could also quit the game when it starts to slow down, and very quickly fire up an application like "Temperature Monitor" (or let it run in the background and look at the graph) to see if you're running hot, and if the temperature increased at about the point where it started slowing down.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:26 PM on April 11, 2007

If you want to alleviate the heating problem, there are utilities like smcFanControl that can control the behavior of the fan in a MacBook, setting it to spin faster. Or you can muck about with the temperature settings to kick it on at a lower temperature.
posted by scalefree at 1:40 PM on April 11, 2007

And for a cheapo method of cooling, prop the laptop on top of two or three pencils. The bottom can cool off better, and it's free!
posted by zardoz at 3:16 AM on June 20, 2007