Aspyr has updated Civilization V with support for the new Mac Pro, offering OpenCL frameworks to improve performance on NVIDIA and ATI chipsets in OS X Mavericks, as well as 4K resolution. The company says most Civilization V players should see faster game and visual performance as a result.
Civilization V is available on the Mac from the Mac App Store [$14.99], Steam, and Aspyr's GameAgent digital store. The game is being offered for 50% off temporarily on the GameAgent store alongside the update.
Update 8:53AM PDT 3/21/2014: A prior version of this post claimed that Civilization V takes full advantage of both video cards on the Mac Pro, based on information provided by Aspyr via a blog post and press release. Aspyr has updated its blog post and reached out to MacRumors to issue a correction.
The Civilization V update does not utilize both video cards in the Mac Pro. An Aspyr spokesperson explained that the update "focuses on the OpenCL framework so that more processes are centered around the GPU, thereby reducing the overall memory footprint" and that the company "made the decision to focus on one card so that all other ATI and NVIDIA setups would benefit from the structure instead of JUST the Mac Pro."
We have also updated this post with a full-resolution 4K screenshot of Civilization V.
Top Rated Comments
Holy cow.
Is that another Gandhi reference?
I'm much more interested in the use of OpenCL than 4K support. I mean, lots of GPUs (and CPUs) support OpenCL, so that should benefit people who own iMacs and MBPs as well.
Hey guys, our apologies but the blog post that is being quoted here has an error. The OpenCL update does NOT take advantage of the second card, but rather focuses solely on taking full advantage of the OpenCL framework so that iMac and MBP owners would see benefits as well. MacRumors and we will get the edit out asap.OpenCL is a compute technology, not a graphics technology per se. Do we have any more information on how it's being used? Is it being used to power the AI? Effects like the ocean or whatever?
Springsup is right on with the tech. Essentially OpenCL (used properly) allows you to shift computing processes over to the GPU, thereby reducing the overall memory footprint of the game.
We chose Civ V as the focus for this effort for two reasons:
One, Civ V is by far the biggest game on the Mac. It was important to us that if we were to spend the time, money, and resources on an update that we knew wouldn't make any money, it really needed to benefit the most amount of users as possible.
Two, Civ V would get the most benefit from a reduced memory footprint because of the way the game works. :apple:
Thanks for posting the Aspyr news link Commander.data! I had not caught that and its now edited to reflect the work done.
We actually started this effort out many months ago with the intention of only enabling the second card, but once we started digging in we realized we could make a much bigger difference by focusing solely on OpenCL. The misprint is simply that, our blog guy looking at old internal docs and picking up the second card language. Everything else is the same. Civ V is the first big title to support 4K resolutions, the misprint is HOW it does it. Again, our sincere apologies for the misprint.
Its on the wishlist for sure, but for now Intel integrated GPU's didnt make the cut.
Since its utilising OpenCL for its improvements, wouldnt it by default end up using both cards for OpenCL functions on a new MacPro? I thought all GPU cores available to the OS were available to any app that used OpenCL transparently?
I realise you are saying Civ V wasnt optimised specifically to utilize dual-GPU, and it may be arguing over symantics, but wouldnt the second card give an OpenCL performance boost? Or does it have absolutely no impact on performance at all with regards to Civ V?