Team Fortress 2 Bad Performance on Mac

Question

I was wondering if anyone else has had bad problems with Team Fortress 2 running on a mac (not bootcamp or anything like that) for example here are some of the problems I've been having:

• When doing anything server related (joining, refreshing lists) my internet doesn't work (only TF2 can connect to the internet)
• Won't connect to most severs (requires about 2-3 attempts to connect)
• Takes about 2 - 5 minutes to connect to a server (and freezes my mac - well the beach ball starts spinning)

Anyone else having similar problems?

Answer 1

I suspect that you're hitting your real RAM ceiling and your machine is swapping when you're loading or connecting to games. I'm guessing you're at 4gb - I sincerely hope it's not less.

To confirm, open up Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) and go though all the steps of loading and connecting to a game. Switch to Activity Monitor while you're in a game, your System Memory will probably have very little "Free" memory left.

You can attempt to free up more RAM by quitting other applications that are running when you're playing TF2, but I suggest upgrading to 8gb (if your machine supports it). It's under $100 and makes a huge difference when doing all sorts of RAM-hungry stuff (photoshop and parallels at the same time? not a problem!).

Or, you can try to adjust the settings down to a more manageable level for your amount of RAM. Lowering the texture quality is probably the easiest way to achieve this, but try out the rest of the settings to see what works for you.