The commander’s guide
Graphics and performance
Choose Petalwar graphics quality and frame rate, understand the Insane setting, and see the starting settings for your Mac.
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Graphics and frame rate
- Quality. Options → Graphics offers Low, Medium, High, Epic and Insane. Insane grows grass tufts, wildflowers and pebbles across every meadow, adds finer shadows and draws at full resolution; it is meant for very fast graphics cards. The meadow takes ten to twenty seconds to grow in and is left out at the strategic zoom.
- Frame rate. Choose 30, 60 (the default), 120 or Unlimited. At 30 and 60 the game holds the rate steady by adjusting its render resolution within a range for each quality level; Insane, 120 and Unlimited keep a fixed resolution.
- First launch. The first time you start Petalwar it picks a quality level for your Mac, and never overrides your own choice afterwards:
| Mac | Starts at |
|---|---|
| Any base chip: M1, M2, M3, M4 and later | Medium |
| M1 Pro or M2 Pro | High |
| M3 Pro and later, and any Max or Ultra | Epic |
| Intel | Low |
A Mac with 8 GB of memory or less starts at Medium at most. Since Petalwar 0.5.11 a base chip starts at Medium, where it keeps its frame rate in busy matches; High is a click away in Options.
- The whole map. Zoomed out beyond 4.5 kilometres, the forest is drawn from every third tree, each a little wider, so the view of the whole valley stays light on the graphics chip.
- Memory. A match needs about 4 GB on top of what the game holds when it opens, and it loads only the factions in play. If your Mac is short on memory when you start playing (macOS reports memory pressure, or half of it is in swap with less than that free), a Before you play card says so with the figures; closing other apps or restarting the Mac fixes the stutter it would cause.
- Updates. When a newer Petalwar is published, the title screen offers it. Download the update opens the download in your browser and closes the game, so the installer can replace it.
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Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance are trademarks of their respective owners. Petalwar is an independent game and is not affiliated with or endorsed by their makers or the Forged Alliance Forever project.