Limbo on Mac has very high CPU usage - anyone else experience this?

[mattnworb]

I bought Limbo in the humble bundle yesterday and tried to play it on my MacBook Pro (with OS X 10.6.8, quad-core, 8GB of RAM).

The game runs well and smooth, and looks beautiful, but I couldn't help but notice that it consistently uses over 100% CPU while running (and strangely, even more than this when the game is paused at the menu). Here is a screenshot I took of Activity Monitor showing the extremely high CPU usage (http://i.imgur.com/u1wWk.png). While the game ran perfectly, such high CPU usage results in the fans of my MBP going crazy.

Does anyone else see this behavior on OS X?

Does the Windows version use so much CPU also?

[xbonds32tr]

Wow huge usage :S

[Duane Dibbley]

I just checked, and it's around 150% on my 8-core Mac Pro. The game's graphics use a ton of post-processing, so I'm guessing that's why the CPU usage is so high. The reason it is over 100% is that Limbo must use parallel processing (i.e., it's using more than one processor core at once).

[modbus]

lol macs struggling with LIMBO

[avidwriter]

lol macs struggling with LIMBO

Sadly my Mac Mini had some slowdows at times. I don't think it's the Mac I think the game was not optimized to run on OS X.

[SpriteXP]

Every game is programmed as an infinite loop. Each time the loop executes it renders one frame. The goal is to get as much frames per second as possible so that you get a smooth animation.

The render loop can only execute on 1 core, so that core will run at 100% of it's capacity.

In Windows the maximum percentage that a CPU can do is 100% which seems to make more sense. So a quad core CPU with one core running at full speed will show up as 25% CPU usage.

I've just tried to see how much CPU it uses on my Windows machine and it get's around 10/15% on average. I guess that's because V-sync is limiting the framerate to 60.