It’s about time.
I just played a match on ptr. Please work on the stuttering issue.
“These stalls will get better over the course of a game and over the course of several games as macOS optimizes Heroes of the Storm behind the scenes”
Is the “optimisation” permanent or will it be lost when closing the game client?
the game now feels great as on Windows
My experience of the stuttering improvement over time was that it was permanent, so please let us know your experience as you play games during the course of PTR and especially if it gets better or worse with the official 48 patch when compared to PTR. I’m keeping a close eye on it and what we really need right now is data.
That the performance got better over time, even after restarting the client, actually made finding the core issue much more difficult as it would seem to go away after a few debugging sessions. I was ultimately able to find the root cause by performing clean installs of macOS every couple days to allow me to capture the worst stalls again.
The best way you can help us right now is to play games on PTR! If you can get 4 or 5 games in, I think you will see a dramatic improvement, and the data will help us a lot.
Thanks!
That’s a relief. Thanks so much for the insight.
I tested it. Conclusion: The optimisation works and survives even a basic reinstallation. IMO this must be communicated even stronger in the patch notes. (And this procedure should not be mandatory and the underlying issue eliminated if possible.) Also, i expect the optimisation will take around 20 matches in the “LIVE” client because “more heroes”.
27" imac late 2013, 32gb ram, ssd, nvidia 780m, medium shaders, low effects, others medium or high, 10.14.6
all games vs ai, ai teammates
I hope you get the data from vs ai matches too because i can’t find any otherwise.
game 1: very frequent stuttering
game 2: restarted client, around 8 new/different heroes, very frequent stuttering for 2/3rd of the match
game 3: 1 new hero, very rarely stuttered
game 4: restarted computer, 1-2 new heroes, almost no stuttering
game 5: basic uninstall and reinstall of the ptr client through bn launcher, almost no stuttering
2 other issues:
New: Clicking on the hero portrait to bring up the talents sometimes needs many clicks to open it.
Old: Changing from fullscreen to windowed with cmd-m still makes the game crash sometimes.
I will report on that.
I just played a game on the PTR. I did find some stuttering at the beginning of the game. After a few moments the game played fine with no issues until the end. Thanks for working on adding Metal to the game. I can now play on high settings with better performance than low settings without Metal. 
Running 10.14.6 (18G95) on a Mac Book Pro with Radeon Pro 460 4 GB
why not maximize all settings? I have 27’ Late 2013 / 8 GB / 775m 2GB and maxed all settings + v.sinch and antialiasing at native 1440p resolution and the game works with 60+ fps
Just to point out that Metal improving performance so much over OpenGL is not because it is so much more superior to OpenGL, but rather it is so much more superior to Apple’s OpenGL. It is an industry wide joke that Apple has not supported OpenGL properly for over a decade so any sort of modern performance features which were added to OpenGL are not available on MacOS.
Your system is vastly different from his. Not only are your GPUs different but it is possible that your display resolutions are different as well. The ultra high DPI displays are very difficult for GPU to drive.
why? We both have 27’ iMac Late 2013. That means resolution is the same and the whole system mostly the same too. Only difference is that he have even better GPU and more RAM. Thats why I asked him about graphics settings he set.
Got it, thanks for the report. This is very helpful.
You are right, it’s very similar and my configuration is a bit more powerful.
Why didn’t i play with max settings so far? I think that used to result in less than 25fps and even less in big fights with opengl. Especially with antialiasing lots of fan noise.
I just played a ptr game at max settings. It was usually at 60fps, 40fps in big fights. A lot more stuttering. (I also saw the black outlines already described in the patch notes this time). With low fan noise. Pretty remarkable! So, Thanks for the suggestion.
I won’t play at max settings in the future but i will probably turn up a setting here and there with metal now.
I would expect the stalls to return for a time after changing graphics quality settings, with the same effect of it getting better over time. Depending on how macOS is managing its Metal cache, the stalls may or may not return after switching back to previous settings.
Thanks for the Metal support indeed. Now I can’t play at all, so that is fun…
I would suggest creating new topics about the issue. It is also important to post your system specifications such as what Mac model you are using (with what hardware selection) and the Mac OS version you have installed. This would be useful to determine if it is a general issue or if it only affects some people.
It SEEMS the optimisation from ptr is used in the live client.
I tested it by playing my first game with the same settings and mode that i used for the 5 ptr games. The heroes were similar. There was very little stuttering.
Then QM, (lots of different/new heroes of course) quiet a bit of stuttering for the first 5 mins. None for the rest of the match.
(Still have to click a few times before the talents open btw.)
I can confirm I had very little stuttering at the start of my games in the live version. Most of the times the games run silky smooth. Very nice 
Only issue I noticed was the black border around some structures.
If your Mac is to old to support Metal you are S.O.L. Like me so I need a new computer or say goodbye to my 2230 lvl account. So cool, I also love that not only did it cut off support few the older systems, it also seem to run very poorly on the newer ones using Metal (they even mention it in the patch notes). My S.O. has a Metal compatible Mac and before this patch the game ran better on mine than hers. Now it can’t run on mine and still runs poorly on her’s. So improvement?
If your Mac is that old you should be upgrading anyways. It’s not the companies fault YOU didn’t upgrade yet.
It technically is as the modern Macs are so impractical and unattractive to upgrade to given their price.
I know someone who still uses a late 2011 MacBook Pro as a daily driver. Rather than buying a newer model they instead brought 2 more of the same model in case of failures. The new MacBook Pros cost a ton more, have fragile keyboards that will easily break the way they use it and are impractically thin. Technically a MacBook could be an affordable replacement, but that is even worse as it has a much smaller display size making it even less practical. After the 3 MacBook Pros die, possibly in 8 or so years, they will be moving to a Windows laptop instead unless Mac does some major improvements…
In retrospect (a night of thinking about it) I think that the macs do support Metal. It must just be a feature set they choose which is not supported. This is why NVidia 2012 cards or AMD 2014 cards are the minimum as there must be specific features that are being used that older AMD cards did not have while NVidia did.
I suggest campaigning for them to lower the requirements. Maybe it is somehow possible they were not aware of just how many old Mac users still play HotS. Specifically the way a lot of people talk about Mac it is easy for people to think the number of Mac players could be counted on a single hand. I do agree with you that raising the requirements like such makes no real sense seeing how GPUs from 2006 could run SC2 without issue and not too much has changed with the engine since then.
It actually runs very well to the point that players who were getting <30 FPS at low now get >>60 FPS at Ultra. The issue is that the Metal shaders are being compiled on demand and this compilation process causes a stall and drops a lot of frames. Once the shader cache is well populated all these stalls disappear, but until then when some effects are first cast one can drop a few frames. Technically all graphics APIs with programmable shaders suffer from this, however SC2 and HotS were optimized for D3D9 shader compilation (during load screen I guess?) which also works for D3D11 but this approach might not be too compatible with how Metal works, after all Apple wanted to shake up the concept of a graphics API.
It is not even like Blizzard has a choice anymore. They could keep using an absolutely ancient version of OpenGL which will eventually be dropped from future MacOS builds or they could move to Metal which is nothing like Vulkan, D3D11/12 or OpenGL. Apple does not support any current graphics API other than Metal and only Apple operating systems support Metal. This is a huge problem within the software industry and is why projects like MoltenVK exist which allow one to emulate Vulkan via Metal.
May also be down to the hardware. All I know is that during the beta many people reported on these forums of temporary stutter problems but otherwise massive frame rate improvements. The issue is that it may be working so well for people like them now they have not vocalized how much of a difference this new patch is making.
In fact the person just before you commented how the new version has improved…