Stanley Spadowski

Um... what the hell. I have the option to match the difficulty after jumping into the pit at the end of Act III. THERE ARE NO BUTTONS FOR THE OPTIONS. I can hover the mouse over the wood frame, but have no idea what the hell I'm choosing. At the very least, can I get a screen shot of the dialog box? This is rather game breaking IMO.

No I don't have that installed. That is a Windows program. As the title states, and also as my reply with specs states, I'm using a Mac with OS X. I'm running the Steam version patch 2.01 of PoE. The only program I use is gfxCardStatus, which does nothing to the card. OS X dynamically switches between onboard Intel Iris or Nvidia GPU depending on the program. When a video game is launched, it switches to the Nvidia. GfxCardStatus is a utility that allows me to force one to be used, and not switch. That is how I was able to test between Intel Iris and Nvidia on the same machine. Also, Nvidia drivers are administered and installed through OS X updates. So, the Nvidia driver I have is whatever is packaged officially with OS 10.10.3. 10.10.5 is out, but I haven't upgraded to that yet. In other words, there is no funny business going on... it's an untampered Mac setup that meets and exceeds the requirements. Cheers

It's definitely the Nvidia driver as the nail in the coffin, which is crazy to me, because it all plays acceptably fine at all max settings outside of Winters March. Also, the Nvidia drivers with Macs are administered through OS X updates. So... it's not like they didn't know about it or it was a surprise from Nvidia. I mean, they have to know about it, because... well... it works outside of Winters March. How the hell did they screw that up? And yes, 14 fps during battles with the Nvidia card in Winters March, dipping down much lower with spells at times. Walking around it's ~17-23 fps. I think you were misunderstanding that 14 fps as the numbers for the Intel Iris pro. With the Intel Iris pro I can get ~30 fps with the graphics slider all the way down, sometimes higher. It dips down to ~21-25 fps during battles, occasionally going down further into the teens. Fortunately battles are played in "slow motion" and paused, so a terrible frame rate doesn't affect PoE as much as it would in a straight up action game. Regardless, Winters March is pretty much running at 50% of the rest of the games performance, which is pretty terrible. Actually, I guess maybe worse, since I'm basing those numbers off of a comparison of max graphics setting to the lowest setting. Yikes.. Cheers

Hmm... Here are my specs: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB 1 TB Flash Storage OS X 10.10.3 I tried forcing the Intel Iris Pro graphics to stay on with gfxCardStatus in order to mimic your MBP without a dedicated GPU, to see if the NVidia GPU is the problem, and it partially helped. There was about a 15-20% improvement in the frame rate when bypassing the NVidia card, which is troubling to me. It still plays and dips pretty drastically compared to all the previous areas. In Winter March it can dip down to 14 fps quite frequently in battle. Outside of Winter March, I wasn't getting the best performance ever, but at least "console like" acceptable performance for a CRPG when using the Nvidia. (35-45 fps on max settings and max resolution) This is my first play through of PoE. I bought it before launch, but put it down only 4 hours into it after reading about the game breaking bugs. I waited for the patches to come, and figured with the release of a DLC, and it being up to version 2.0, that it was ready for a lengthy play through. Imagine my disappointment when I traveled to Winter March ~ 30 hours into the game, and the game turned into a strobed out silent film from 1916... yikes.

It's a consistent ~ 50% drop in performance compared to the rest of the game areas with the OS X port. In Winter March, "completely unacceptable" is the new frame rate. Travel outside of Winter March, and it's acceptable again. I'm so disappointed right now...