The new graphics system in CoH does create a much larger load on the computer, both on Mac and Windows systems.
What really makes it use a lot of power are Shadow Map setting for shadows, FSAA, or Ambient Occlusion.
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All anecdotal here but it seems slower on my system now. This is with everything turned all the way down, but at 1600x1200.
Up until now I've had no problem running CoH and having it sit idle in the background while I do other things in the foreground on my Mac Mini (10.6.3, 4 Gb of RAM, 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo). I knew Ultra Mode wouldn't be for me - this is a unit with the embedded graphics co-processor - but I saw I could fool around with a few options anyway, and did...
And got lag on everything else running. Really bad lag. Typed input appeared at , sometimes, a character per second or less, and I type around 100 words per minute. Thank goodness for generous type-ahead buffers. But even so, it was awful.
So I undid all the changes and restarted, but the problem persists with exactly the graphic settings that worked fine yesterday. The game itself remains very playable and comfortable, but everything else suffers horribly.
Anyone else run into this, and/or have suggestions?