Allocate more RAM?

[dekema2]

I am on a computer built in 2014 (MacBook Pro with 2.6 GHZ Intel i5 processor, 8 GB RAM), however Simutrans seems to perform as if my computer cannot handle the program. It seems to lag while zooming and moving. Is there a way to provide a speed bump?

[Combuijs]

My guess would be that this has something to do with SDL, the graphics library Simutrans is using. Is performance better when you make your window or resolution smaller?

[dekema2]

My guess would be that this has something to do with SDL, the graphics library Simutrans is using. Is performance better when you make your window or resolution smaller?

Yes, performance is improved drastically when the window becomes smaller. Also the framework I am using is SDL 1.2. I believe there is a newer version, should I be using that?

[Ters]

The SDL2 version of Simutrans has been rumoured to perform better on Macs (or rather, the SDL 1.2 version of Simutrans is rubbish on Macs). SDL2 is a recent addition to Simutrans, and I'm not 100% sure it is used by the official releases.

[DrSuperGood]

Does your computer have a "retina display"? The resolution of such a display is pretty extreme and due to the software rendering used by Simutrans it could easily cause performance issues, especially if graphic performance is sub-optimal.

Also make sure your computer is plugged in when playing. Otherwise the power management system might throttle performance to conserve power. If playing on battery you will want to use a lower resolution anyway for extended battery life.

Unfortunately it is not possible to hardware accelerate Simutrans graphics due to the way the game is designed. For that reason it puts virtually no strain on your GPU, which usually produces image data far more efficiently than the CPU can.

[dekema2]

Does your computer have a "retina display"? The resolution of such a display is pretty extreme and due to the software rendering used by Simutrans it could easily cause performance issues, especially if graphic performance is sub-optimal.

Also make sure your computer is plugged in when playing. Otherwise the power management system might throttle performance to conserve power. If playing on battery you will want to use a lower resolution anyway for extended battery life.

Yes, I have a Retina display on my MacBook. One thing I also noticed not too long ago is that as my battery approached empty, the performance did seem to get extremely sluggish. However, after installing SDL 2 and moving to 120.0, everything works like a charm.

[Ters]

Simutrans is an old fashioned game (since it is old), doing things the way they were done 15+ years ago (when Simutrans was first made). It therefore doesn't get any benefit from hardware acceleration (GPU in particular), and only to some extent from multicore CPUs. I don't know if we ever figured out why SDL 1.2 is so slow on newer Macs. The huge increase in resolution on Retina displays might be involved, but I don't know why SDL 2 is faster in that case. The important thing is that it is, and that SDL2 seems to be default now, at least for Macs. But then maybe someone who knows Macs should update the installation instructions to point to SDL 2 and not SDL 1.2.