performance and resolution on macos with retina
if you play mtg-arena on a thunderbolt non-retina thunderbolt display with a retina macbook, resolution is simply a mess!
- the automatic resolution is usually ultrahigh
- you can set the resolution down to something the machine can handle (e.g. 1600), but typically the game resets this pretty much with the next loading screen and goes back to high resolution
- norally this is annoying an leads to bad performance at something like 2500px
- but every few months some new patches make the problem much worse. instead of 2500px it suddenly trys to run on 4k, wich immediately renders the client 100% unplayable!
can you pretty please address this?!
why cant you just use the settings that i set manually?
even the ******* content download screen with a static background eats 800+% virtual CPU (~90% of the processing power of the machine) with the final-fantasy patch?! are you serious?
and before you ask: yes, this "kernel_task" might not be called MTGA, but its only needing CPU if i run the arena. so whatever system-calls you do, they are so unoptimized that the system simply folds
mikraw#16478
shared this idea
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mikraw#16478
commented
great. we are back to the start - arena mostly unplayable slow
i guess since 1-2 weeks now. i mean, WTF?! the fact that it ran smoothly some few weeks ago is clear indication that this is just a mess with the client, not a problem of my machine. WTF?! WTF!
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mikraw#16478
commented
might be temporary (i hope not - touching wood!) but with the latest build 2025.49.50.3126.1160287 from 2025-07-08 the macos client runs silky smoot again!
THANK YOU
PS: i changed *absolutely* nothing on my setup…
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mikraw#16478
commented
I bet with you that what happens is this:
1) i set lower resolution
2) you load the low-res assets
3a) either you render 5 pixel assets at a 4k resolution (just why?!?) on a 2500px screen
3b) or less likely you leak the high res ones. or load them back in because you always jump back to high reseither way, at this point game performance is unplayable. again. and again. and again
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mikraw#16478
commented
on a 15 inch retina display, the game jumps back to 3800px resolution(!!!!!) unasked and constantly
THIS
IS
NOT
NEEDEDthis hurts performance
this renders perfectly decent hardware unable to run the game for heavens sake!if someone wants to play ultra high res and has hardware that can handle it, they will set it, dont you worry
for the rest, you can render 2000px on that screen and you have plenty of detail and a performance that can be handled by all hardware!JUST DO IT
also the pattern of "1st match of the day(!) somewhat ok performance, 2nd match worse performance, 3rd match unplayable performance" restart does not really help
comeon! its not that hard to understand that you leak some resources and that you have to JUST FIX IT
this was an issue in the past. it became better with patches. and every other new set release its just as bad as it was. seriously!