OS X Test Release Hardware Analysis
Two weeks ago a test version of Subnautica for Apple OS X was released on Steam. It now looks fairly certain that OS X support will be coming to Subnautica. During the test period, Subnautica was run 2,680 times by 239 people, on 307 unique machine configurations. Here are some interesting facts about those machines.
The vast majority of machines use OS X Yosemite. The most prevalent individual OS X version was 10.10.3, with 41% of machines. The most prevalent Windows version during the same period was Windows 6.1.7601 (Win 7 SP1 64-bit), with 49% of Windows machines. There are some differences in how Windows and OS X handle version identification, but both appear to exhibit a similar level of version fragmentation among players.
OS X machines are overwhelmingly meeting Subnautica's minimum memory requirement of 4Gb. This is good news. Two months ago, we measured that 9% of Windows machines were attempting to run Subnautica with less than 4Gb of RAM. Subnautica is extremely likely to crash when it has less than 4Gb of RAM, and this suggests crashing might not be as frequent for OS X players.
As suggested by the memory figures, a smaller proportion of OS X sessions ended in a crash during the test period. 13% is still very high. It is possible that due to the nuances of our telemetry system, the absolute number of crashes for both operating systems is lower. The relative difference is good news: Some of us on the team, including me, were concerned that we may experience higher crash rates on an operating system we have less experience with.
Unfortunately, the graphics processing units reported by the test group are generally extremely weak. Fully 42% of systems reported a GPU that was less powerful than the minimum required to run Subnautica (an Intel HD 4600 Integrated GPU). This is very concerning, as it is far worse than the Windows figure measured two months ago, of 25%. We may be in for some very angry, disappointed OS X customers. It is clear that a very large proportion of customers do not check minimum requirements before purchase. I'm not sure what we can do about the mismatch between our minimum GPU requirements and the GPUs our customers tend to actually have. - Hugh
