I guess I should say the 2nd 30 seconds of pretty much every HOTS game I play, gets really laggy. When my team meets the other team in the middle, my game will freeze, jump around, it’s severe lag, etc. It’s unplayable for me.
Is my computer just solidifying the connection or something?
After about 20-30 seconds of this, then everything settles down and is typically ok. But when the teams first meet in the middle, ugh. It’s awful.
Any ideas/suggestions how to prevent this?
I am playing on a 2015 iMac, with 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, with 8 GB memory.
Thanks.
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I’ve got a more powerful Mac than you do and I lag and freeze at the initial team fight as well. It’s been happening since they changed the engine to use Metal. As far as I know there isn’t any way around it except to wait and hope they fix it soon.
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Huh. Ok, thanks. This has been going on forever, so I don’t have much faith they fix it anytime soon.
Same has been happening to me for years
If it’s been happening before the Metal upgrade, it could be an issue with your hard drive if it’s not the graphics. My previous iMac (with a non-Fusion drive) had a failing internal drive and the game was unplayable for the first minute or so because it was installed on the bad drive. I bought an external SSD and put the game on that and it instantly improved. So you might try installing it on a different drive if you have a spare external drive lying around.
Now with this new Metal engine, the problem is back and it’s not my machine’s problem this time so it can’t be fixed by throwing money at it 
The stuttering with metal bug is so strange. I would love to understand it more from a technical perspective.
My concern is that it is something the dev team would not be able to fix 
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I have a 2018 6-core i7 Macbook pro, 32GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD and Radeon GTX Pro w/ 4G and ever since Metal the game has been hardcore choppy and laggy. It starts to clearup after a while when playing, HOWEVER… this was on Mojave.
Upgraded to Catalina 10.15 and now the game is almost unplayable. Actually, scratch that, it IS unplayable. There is horrific lag like before, but now it’s constant and there is a 1 second pause/freeze about every 8-10 seconds of playtime. It’s horrible…
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Check your (root, not user) Library/Logs/Diagnostic Reports folder for logs at the time of the freeze. These were happening to me too and we’re causing a “GPU Reset”. The issue has fixed itself after a NVRAM reset. I have posted about it in the forums here: Game Freeze and 'GPU Reset' in MacOS 10.15.1 - #4 by CatwalkGhost-2672
Thanks for the tip. I have checked both system /Library and my home folder ~/Library diagnostic logs and nothing of the sort with GPU/reset, etc. Mine does not lock up for 10 seconds, it’s just an annoying 1/2 - 1 sec pause/complete freeze about every 8-10 seconds of gameplay. It’s constant and really annoying. (almost like a garbage collection issue)
UPDATE: I downloaded Boot Camp, then downloaded Windows 10 for the sole purpose of playing HOTS.
I’ve played about 10 games since, (so small sample size), but the lag/stuttering issue at the beginning of EVERY game is gone! I’ve had hardly any issues with choppiness and/or lagging since. It used to happen a little bit every single game, and now it’s gone. It’s great.
Downloading Boot Camp and running Windows 10 has quite a few steps, and you want to be sure to do it correctly or you could mess up your Mac, but if you do it right, everything runs smoothly!