Recently on X, a developer shared how they had GPT-6 Astra help investigate performance issues with Age of Empires IV on Apple Silicon. Originally, running through CrossOver only got around 8 FPS and kept freezing, but after GPT-6 Astra made adjustments, it improved to 70–150 FPS—nearly an 18x increase at best. It went from unplayable to smoothly playable in an instant. Pretty impressive. So if you’ve run into similar issues, you might want to try asking Astra to help improve things.
A developer used GPT-6 Astra to successfully make Age of Empires IV run smoother on Mac: boosting it from around 8 FPS to 70–150 FPS.
According to a real-world test posted by developer Marc Ibrahim on X, he has now been able to run Age of Empires IV on an Apple Silicon Mac at maximum graphics settings, including large-scale battles and online play. He described that CrossOver originally ran at only about 8 FPS and constantly locked up, but after modification it runs between 70 and 150 FPS. Even he himself never expected the game to perform this well on a Mac. The post has now reached nearly 1 million views.
From the video screenshots he shared, it’s confirmed that his Mac is equipped with the M4 Pro chip, with Age of Empires IV running at 1728×1117 resolution using Rosetta x86_64, D3D12, and Game Porting Toolkit 3.0. After the enhancement, gameplay stayed stable at around 80 FPS, with very smooth visuals.
Ibrahim’s first request to Astra was whether it could create something like CrossOver to run Age of Empires IV, because CrossOver’s FPS was very low, and he wanted to see if it could be fixed. After that, there were many rounds of manual testing, and he kept providing FPS numbers and screenshots to Astra, then asking it to continue investigating. So it wasn’t a case where the game performance improved dramatically after just one round.
Additionally, Ibrahim added in another X post that before the modification, the GPU work needed to complete each frame was only about 9ms, but a full frame took about 160ms. Looking at just the 9ms GPU time alone suggests the graphics chip theoretically could handle over 100 frames per second; however, the actual display was held back by other processes, and with 160ms per frame, that translates to only about 6.25 FPS, which is quite close to the roughly 8 FPS he saw earlier. The post-modification video screenshot shows the GPU at 9.16ms and the full frame interval shortened to 11.75ms, resolving almost all the more than 150ms discrepancy between the two:
Therefore, the real bottleneck isn’t the graphics chip drawing the picture, but the other work that happens before the frame is handed off. Astra kept digging and eventually traced the problem to Wine’s exception handling and Rosetta repeatedly re-translating the same code. It then modified Wine’s handling and added a code cache so Rosetta could reuse previous translation results instead of starting over every time.
From Ibrahim’s hands-on testing, it’s clear that Astra’s value is no longer just writing code—it can also help analyze performance, identify underlying bottlenecks, and propose concrete changes. Although this is still only a single case, getting Age of Empires IV, which was previously almost unplayable, to run at 70–150 FPS on the same Mac is truly impressive.
Source: KOCPC Chinese