"smoke" or "mist" effects in animated portraits don't clip to the portrait on macOS

Bug Report
1

On macOS with the metal API “smoke” or “mist” effects in animated portraits don’t clip to the portrait. This occurs for both unit portaits that you select and appear in the bottom bar (like the zerg queen) and CoOp commanders appearing on the left side of the screen (like Vorazun). It’s very distracting since it’s large, rectangular, animated smoke or mist covering a portion of the battlefield as long as the portrait is active.

  • the new “cheese grater” Mac Pro 2019

  • AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16GB

  • 192 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

  • macOS Catalina 10.15.6

  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (changing the resolution doesn’t change anything)

  • Display Mode: Fullscreen (changing to windowed doesn’t change anything)

  • Render API: Metal (changing to OpenGL 4.1 beta DOES fix it - so I’m using that as a workaround)

  • Graphics Quality: Custom

  • Shaders: High

  • Lighting: High

  • Shadows: High

  • Terrain: High

  • Reflections: On

  • Effects: High

  • Texture Quality: High

  • Post-Processing: Medium

  • Physics: High

  • Models: High

  • Unit Portraits: 3D

  • Movies: High

2 Likes
2

I can confirm the existence of this issue while using metal API on macOS.

System Specifications:

  • iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)
  • macOS Catalina 10.15.6
  • Processor: 3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
  • Memory: 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB

Settings:

  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080
  • Display Mode: Fullscreen
  • Render API: Metal
  • Graphics Quality: Custom
  • Shaders: Ultra
  • Lighting: Ultra
  • Shadows: Ultra
  • Terrain: Ultra
  • Reflections: On
  • Effects: Ultra
  • Texture Quality: Ultra
  • Post-Processing: Ultra
  • Physics: Ultra
  • Models: High
  • Unit Portraits: 3D
  • Movies: High
  • Indirect Shadows: Off

Switching to OpenGL 4.1 unfortunately isn’t an ideal or desirable solution, as it introduces many other rendering issues on macOS (which many not be solvable). Hopefully this portrait issue can be fixed.

3

I have to add that SC2 performance with AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16GB is tragically sad. Even with any “high” settings settings and 1920x1080 resolution, it hitches and stutters quite regularly. :sob:

4

I have the same issue, iMac 2020, Big Sur, AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB, using the Metal driver in the game client.

And yes OpenGL does fix it, but the OpenGL driver performs significantly worse than Metal, so it’s a compromised fix.