[UnixMac]

I have a bloomen Nv6800 ultra and I hardly get playable frame rates on a dual 2.5 system with 4GB!!! Everyother game plays great, except Halo, and the graphics aren't all that great.. STEFV and RTCW are actually better IMHO..

anyone have any ideas?

is it a crapy port job from the PC version? or what:?

[Joppe]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
is it a crapy port job from the PC version? or what:?

No it's a crappy port from the Xbox version, the PC version is just as bad.

.johan

[MindFad]

What settings are you using? I thought your setup with Halo was roughly on par with a similarly specced PC and 6800? Supposedly it is a bit of a stinkin' port: trouble with pixel shader performance and such.

[a2daj]

Turn down the Lens Flare effects to Medium or Low (from the startup dialog box). Because of the way Lens Flares are handled in Halo (due to limitations of Apple's OpenGL), they cause a tremendous performance hit no matter what system/video card you have. Combine the Lens Flare effect with FSAA and you get a huge performance hit. The last level of Halo (with the timer) is one of the worst sections hit. Right at the beginning when MC arrives at the top of the lift, I would get normally get 44 fps staring out of the lift at the wall with 6xFSAA 8xAF at 640x480. With Extreme Lens Flares, it'd drop to 18. This was with my old dual 1.2 G4 with a Radeon 9800 Pro. During the actual driving sequence fps dropped to 5-7 fps with Extreme LF. Many G5 owners with 9800 Pros noticed similar drops.

[mac freak]

As bad as it is on the Mac, it's worse on the PC. My G5 DP1.8/Radeon 9800 Pro gets easily twice the performance my P4 3.06/Radeon 9700 Pro gets, which is completely ridiculous.

[Lateralus]

Yes, it is considerably worse on the PC.

I used to take my G4 to LAN parties and out of everybody in the room, including my best friend who has a 3000+ Athlon XP with 1GB of RAM and a 128MB FX 5200, my 1.33GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 8500 ran the game the fastest.

[a2daj]

Originally posted by Lateralus:
Yes, it is considerably worse on the PC.

I used to take my G4 to LAN parties and out of everybody in the room, including my best friend who has a 3000+ Athlon XP with 1GB of RAM and a 128MB FX 5200, my 1.33GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 8500 ran the game the fastest.

Would it be safe to assume that your friend was using Pixel Shaders and you were using No Shader rendering? There's much less load when using No Shaders. And the FX 5200 sucks for Pixel Shader performance. that card could handicap any system.

The big advantage for performance that Mac Halo has is the Vertex and No Shader rasterizers. I believe the No Shader path moves some bone transformations from the card to the CPU. The Vertex Shaders rasterizer allows the card to do all the graphics related work. The PC version can use the fixed function mode, but I don't know many that bother using it since I've seen a bunch of rendering issues with it on.

But when you using Verex Shaders only or No Shaders on Macs, you lose out on graphics quality.

[Leonard]

There's something wrong with your settings UnixMac, it works fine on my machine. Try what a2daj says, and if that doesn't work let us know. It looks beautiful on my machine and the framerates are fine and I don't even have the Geforce 6800 Ultra.

[Luca Rescigno]

The FX5200 sucks. The Radeon 8500 is probably slightly faster but doesn't support pixel shaders, which of course means that it won't be as demanding.

It runs better on my PC than on my Mac. The PC has an AMD 2400+ (2.0 GHz) and a Radeon 9600 Pro. The Mac had a 1.33 GHz G4 and a Radeon 9800 Pro. Neither one is very good, mind you, but at least it's playable on the PC if I turn off certain settings - generally 640x480 with shadows off, everything else on.

[Weezer]

Hmm, it runs pretty well on my old 933 G4 with a Geforce4 Ti, including vertex shaders.

[mac freak]

By the way, referencing my earlier post, I run Halo at 1024x768, 4xFSAA, 4xAF, everything on for both systems. If I turn off AA the performance of the two becomes much closer.

[ReggieX]

Originally posted by mac freak:
As bad as it is on the Mac, it's worse on the PC. My G5 DP1.8/Radeon 9800 Pro gets easily twice the performance my P4 3.06/Radeon 9700 Pro gets, which is completely ridiculous.

The 9800's a better card.

[MilkmanDan]

Run fine on my 12in Powerbook, 1.33 ghz, GeForce 5200 Go, 768 RAM. I even use a BT mouse.

[Luca Rescigno]

Nvidia cards seem to work better than ATI ones for Halo on the Mac. My brother's GeForce 4 Titanium runs it really well, even at a fairly high resolution with detail objects and all that stuff on. Much better than my 9800 Pro did.

There's also the highly subjective "runs fine" designation that causes so many silly internet arguments...

Oh yeah, the nice thing about Halo PC is that you can reduce the complexity and make it run faster by using an older version of pixel shaders. Rather than turning them off completely, which makes the game look awful, you just switch it to use pixel shader 1.4 or 1.1 features instead of 2.0, and it helps performance without degrading quality.

Macs, on the other hand, have FSAA. It slows things down a lot, but PCs can't use FSAA at all with Halo.

[a2daj]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
Nvidia cards seem to work better than ATI ones for Halo on the Mac. My brother's GeForce 4 Titanium runs it really well, even at a fairly high resolution with detail objects and all that stuff on. Much better than my 9800 Pro did.

That's the first time I've seen any of these claims since 1.05 came out. Care to post benchmarks and system specs? With the 1.03 patch, the NV Shaders were released but there were no model reflections. There were a lot of ridiculous claims that cards that could do NV Shaders now looked just as good as ATI cards running the full pixel shader rasterizer. Couldn't be true because of the lack of model reflections. No shiny Master Chief and lack of gold visor. The NVIDIA cards with NV Shaders were only doing a tiny fraction of the work. Even with the 1.05 patch and the arrival of model reflections for NV Shaders, the cards still don't do as much work as the ARB Fragment Program renderer (aka ATI Pixel + Vertex Shader). But with the increased workload I hadn't seen anyone claim the GF4Ti would run Halo faster than the Radeon 9800 Pro.

[mac freak]

Originally posted by ReggieX:
The 9800's a better card.

True, true, but only by ~10%.

[DBvader]

How odd, I would imagine Halo performance to be fantastic on your machine, unixmac. As far as the PC vs. Mac is concerned, my Mac (Dual 867/9600/1GB) gets better framerate than my PC (2000+/Ti4200/512 MB) by 3-4 FPS. The newer macs I have ran the game on (such as a 20" G4 1.2 GHz iMac, and a 1.6 GHz iMac G5) have ran the game on par with my Dual 867 despite the weaker graphics card.

Back to the issue at hand, If I were you, I would mess with the prefrences and run time demos until you get the speed and quality you want.

I also saw that you are running the game on 1024x768 (what a shame for such a wonderful machine). I have had expereience on a few games (UT2K4 and Generals) where the performance actually increased when I raised the resolution and AA settings. My only guess for this would be forcing a more efficient pipeline...but maybe its worth a try.

[a2daj]

Originally posted by mac freak:
True, true, but only by ~10%.

Care to quantify that with some data?

edit: NM. I got this mixed up with a different thread in a different forum. Someone else was claiming the 9800 wasn't much better than a GF4Ti...

[Scooterboy]

This good to know as Halo was the my next game purchase. I just finished Jedi Academy, which ran fine on my PowerBook. How do you think Halo would run on my setup (check sig)?

[macaddict0001]

just as good as jedi academy

[Abit667]

I've found it runs better on PCs then on macs by far...all my friends machines though are ~3Ghz P4 with Radeon 9800s or FX5800s etc. You can run it with PixelShader 2.0 support on PC and it runs at 16x AF and a bit of AA at high res without any problems. I'd just be glad that we actually have a mac verison that can be played with the PC guys, and it's at least playable on my iBook.

[a2daj]

I don't believe FSAA works with PC Halo... You can enable and take the performance hit, but there's nothing you can see visually. And comparing an iBook to high end gaming PCs isn't fair in any RDF.

[the_glassman]

It's a pretty bad port on both platforms. Of course it was originally a third person openGL game designed for Mac and PC that went to a first person shooter designed for a console.
The first demo ran great on a blue and white G3 like anything else it was turned into bloatware by Microsoft.

[willed]

Originally posted by the_glassman:
It's a pretty bad port on both platforms. Of course it was originally a third person openGL game designed for Mac and PC that went to a first person shooter designed for a console.
The first demo ran great on a blue and white G3 like anything else it was turned into bloatware by Microsoft.

I didn't know there was ever a Mac demo (before MS bought Bungie)! Does anyone still have a copy??

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by willed:
I didn't know there was ever a Mac demo (before MS bought Bungie)! Does anyone still have a copy??

It was demonstrated at MacWorld in 1999, never released.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by the_glassman:
It's a pretty bad port on both platforms. Of course it was originally a third person openGL game designed for Mac and PC that went to a first person shooter designed for a console.
The first demo ran great on a blue and white G3 like anything else it was turned into bloatware by Microsoft.

The MacWorld demo was actually fake...I believe the Halo team themselves said this in an interview later on. To think it was possible to achieve this level of graphics on a B&W was absurd.

[exca1ibur]

Originally posted by willed:
I didn't know there was ever a Mac demo (before MS bought Bungie)! Does anyone still have a copy??

http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/gam..._1199.zip.html

[a2daj]

Originally posted by Horsepoo!!!:
The MacWorld demo was actually fake...I believe the Halo team themselves said this in an interview later on. To think it was possible to achieve this level of graphics on a B&W was absurd.

I've been waiting for you to provide proof since the last time you made that claim.

In the MW video interview I saw Jason Jones said that about a week and a half before MW they didn't have a Mac version and had to demo the PC version to Jobs. They then got the Mac version up and running for demo.

In the Evolution movie they never mention anything about faking the MW demo. There's a section of the movie where they're showing the MW 99 era engine and mention playing multiplayer in third person. They also mention that the E3 2000 demo was scripted but nothing about a movie.

[deboerjo]

It's gotta be something in your settings, UnixMac. My friend is running Halo on a G5 1.6 single with an FX5200 and he gets great framerates at 1024x768 (looks like crap though 'cause of the minimalist settings).

As for PC version vs Mac version, I'd have to say the PC version was a much better port. My gaming box is a 1.2GHz Celeron (!) and a GeForce4Ti 4200, and I run with all the options turned on (looks beautiful) at 1024x768 with good framerates, though I usually turn it down to 800x600 for the 3rd level.

The MW demo was not "fake". It was scripted; it did not represent the actual game's control or even physics, but it was actually rendering the scene using the in-game rendering engine and models, using the G3's rendering hardware.

-Jon

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Leonard:
There's something wrong with your settings UnixMac, it works fine on my machine. Try what a2daj says, and if that doesn't work let us know. It looks beautiful on my machine and the framerates are fine and I don't even have the Geforce 6800 Ultra.

seems like I should be able to max out the settings, and frankly I can't come close, and the graphics are worse than STEFV which moves like glass.

[a2daj]

As I mentioned before you have to turn down lens flares. I've already explained why so I won't waste anyone's time detailing the problem but since you haven't said whether or not you tried I figured I'd point it out again.

[macaddict0001]

Originally posted by exca1ibur:
http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/gam..._1199.zip.html

holy i just saw that trailer that was sweet halo really should have been third person it wouldn't matter because you would use the crosshairs to aim anyway

[macenthusiast]

it seems that I can only turn down lens flare to low. Is there a console way to turn it to 0?