Zen Pinball 2 (Mac) - Poor performance after versions 1.36 update (Williams Pack 3)

Cloda

New member
Oct 15, 2018
199
0
Can anybody confirm this for me please or is it something on my system? Zen is busy looking at it but it will help if somebody else can confirm it as well.

I have a standard 13" 2015 Macbook Pro and up until recently all the tables ran very smoothly at 60 frames per second and enhanced graphics. After the update all my tables run very jerkily, no matter what settings I have them on. The table that seems to run worst is the new Theatre of Magic table.

Here are two videos comparing before and after. The first from this link is a game I had on Sunday where everything was working as smoothly as I’m used to. Any jerkiness in movement is not in the gameplay but in the video conversion.

The second below is a quick recording I just made on the same table where you can clearly see that the movement of the ball is not smooth at all. You can especially see it when the ball is moving slowly.


I also played around and found the following...

I usually play on a LG 23MP55 1080p screen with a 5ms response time. It used to work perfectly fine before this update.

Last night, I was using my Mac unplugged and thought I’ll see how the game runs if I use the Mac screen directly. It actually ran much better but I realised that it doesn’t look so nice as what you would expect on the high resolution Mac screen or on the 1080p external screen. I then plugged my screen in through HDMI cable (as I usually do), without me first exiting the game and then it showed the game on only a section of my external screen - see image.

attachment.php


This indicated for me that it runs on the Mac on probably 720p resolution not 1080p. The game still ran well like that in the box on my external screen, even though Theatre of Magic still struggled somewhat compared to the older tables e.g. Attack from Mars and it still didn’t run as smoothly as before.

So, it definitely looks like the game runs worse now than what it did before the update.
 
Last edited:

yespage

Member
Oct 31, 2015
466
2
I can't even get FX3 to open in Switch, if not docked, since the update. Not certain if docking would fix the problem.
 

Cloda

New member
Oct 15, 2018
199
0
I'm super happy to say that everything is working smoothly again after I updated to MacOS Mojave 10.14.4. I hope it solves the other issues that cropped up as well.
 

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