[SydeffeX]

Hey everyone. I'm new to the Mac owner collective. Happy to be here.

So far i've had good and not-so-good experiences with gaming on my Powerbook.
First i tried using Virtual PC to run windows games but no good cause it doesnt have a real graphics card, ony an emulated one. No big loss, but a dissapointment.

Anyhow, my question... I've got a couple comparable games, TRON 2.0 and HALO. Tron works splendidly at high rezolutions, while other things are running, with no slowdown. The ATI 9700 really shows off for me. But then I'm trying to run Halo and I have to turn all the graphics to the lowest level, just to get it to run at a decent framerate.
I dont see why Halo would lag that much with such a good graphics card running it. Where can I find adjustment settings for my card? or how can i tweak my machine to run 3d applications better?

[bleee]

Originally posted by SydeffeX:
Hey everyone. I'm new to the Mac owner collective. Happy to be here.

So far i've had good and not-so-good experiences with gaming on my Powerbook.
First i tried using Virtual PC to run windows games but no good cause it doesnt have a real graphics card, ony an emulated one. No big loss, but a dissapointment.

Anyhow, my question... I've got a couple comparable games, TRON 2.0 and HALO. Tron works splendidly at high rezolutions, while other things are running, with no slowdown. The ATI 9700 really shows off for me. But then I'm trying to run Halo and I have to turn all the graphics to the lowest level, just to get it to run at a decent framerate.
I dont see why Halo would lag that much with such a good graphics card running it. Where can I find adjustment settings for my card? or how can i tweak my machine to run 3d applications better?

How much ram do you have for games like World of Warcraft I noticed a huge performance difference between 768MB and 1.25GB. Also from my experience the HALO port from XBOX to PC was a piece of crap utter piece of crap. I'm not sure if they tweaked it a bit more with patches but it ran horrible on my PC and horrible on my dual 1.8 with 1.5GB ram and a 9800 Radeon.

[ericssonboi]

Originally posted by SydeffeX:
Hey everyone. I'm new to the Mac owner collective. Happy to be here.

So far i've had good and not-so-good experiences with gaming on my Powerbook.
First i tried using Virtual PC to run windows games but no good cause it doesnt have a real graphics card, ony an emulated one. No big loss, but a dissapointment.

Anyhow, my question... I've got a couple comparable games, TRON 2.0 and HALO. Tron works splendidly at high rezolutions, while other things are running, with no slowdown. The ATI 9700 really shows off for me. But then I'm trying to run Halo and I have to turn all the graphics to the lowest level, just to get it to run at a decent framerate.
I dont see why Halo would lag that much with such a good graphics card running it. Where can I find adjustment settings for my card? or how can i tweak my machine to run 3d applications better?

I've played Halo with my current setup.. the extra VRAM helps a lot.. I found that when gaming.. memory is eaten up... about 300-400mb.. so make sure you have at least 1GB.

Playing games in VPC is just ridiculous.. i find running VPC is already slow.. let alone playing games on it. I installed it and it took all day to install the OS.

[urrl78]

Did you install the patches? Someone posted it makes a WORLD of difference. Running HALO on my 4200 RPM HD 1.5 Ghz 17" Powerbook works reasonably, I went thru the entire game but there was some stutter even with 1 GB RAM, but so far I haven't gotten around to running any patches; I will lose the ability to run the game without the CD if I do so. So I dunno. Can anyone else say the game actually runs better with the patches? Don't wanna risk it without more info.

[ericssonboi]

Originally posted by urrl78:
Did you install the patches? Someone posted it makes a WORLD of difference. Running HALO on my 4200 RPM HD 1.5 Ghz 17" Powerbook works reasonably, I went thru the entire game but there was some stutter even with 1 GB RAM, but so far I haven't gotten around to running any patches; I will lose the ability to run the game without the CD if I do so. So I dunno. Can anyone else say the game actually runs better with the patches? Don't wanna risk it without more info.

I couldn't even run it with the patchs ...
Once i loaded the patches.. the game wouldn't run at all.

[U n i o n 0015]

You do OWN the game right?

Halo should run fine if you've got the original CD and have patched it. The latest patch boosted performance quite a bit. Plays great on my AlBook, played pretty terribly on my TiBook.

[Scooterboy]

Halo played well on my PowerBook, but I did spend some time getting the graphics settings just right. Still, some scenes still stuttered. Run the time demo and play around with the settings until you get a satisfactory compromise.

Quake 3 Arena games like Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy ran nicely.

Now playing KOTOR and outdoor scenes are nearly unplayable, with framerates dropping to 1 every 5 - 10 seconds! I haven't installed any patches for KOTOR as of yet.

Anyone try Doom 3 on a PowerBook yet?

[littlegreenspud]

I am running Doom3 on my AlBook 1.5 64M video 1 gig Ram.

My settings are:
1024x768
High Quality
High Quality Special Effects - yes
Enable Shadows - no
Enable Specular - yes
Enable Bump Maps - yes
Vertical Sync - no
Antialiasing - no

Go to ATI Displays and set Ansiotropic Filtering to off and Vertical Sync to off.

Set performance to highest in energy saver

In "Timedemo demo1" (run twice take second reading) I get 26.2 FPS, quite playable, it stutters some times when loading new creatures but sits between 30-60 fps normally.

And if you are willing to overclock your 9700 you can get more, I have run at 432/222.75 (Stock is 391.5/202.5) and I get 27.3 in timedemo demo1

[Ruahrc]

I agree I think a lot of the performance can depend on the quality of the port... I do not own the latest 3D games like Halo or Tron but I do have a couple for the mac.

Warcraft III is fairly recent and it runs great on my PB. Maxed settings, 1280x854 native resolution, 4xAA and it still runs smooth.

Baldur's Gate II: it does not run well at all. Very choppy and sometimes unplayable. The specs on the box list a G3 233MHz as the CPU requirement- it is an old game. I heard the OS9 port of this game was pretty good but the OS X port sucked. Yep it does.

Rise of Nations: very recent 3D RTS. It runs great. Again max detail and native 15" PB resolution- I get between 40-60fps, it goes into the 20's and 10's in huge battles but it's always fine and extremely playable. Much more graphics intensive than Baldur's Gate II!

So I think that the port of Halo just sucks (the PC version was reported to be pretty crappy as well). Unfortunately with gaming being very fringe on Macs quality ports or even natively written games (such as Blizzard's products) are few and far between, although it is getting beter.

Ruahrc

[Krauti]

You will notice that the CPU is not able to saturate the Radeon9700 quite often, especially in Unreal-based games (Americas Army for example), with no difference in framerates between highest and lowest settings.

[JKT]

Halo will run pretty well on your PowerBook if you are willing to compromise:

Either set a lower resolution (640x480 or 800x600) while maintaining all the highest or near highest graphics settings, or if you choose to run at a higher resolution, tone down the graphics settings. I forget the exact names of the values, but switching off the specular graphics using the panel that appears when you first launch the game will lead to a very significant speed boost at all resolutions. This is with all the latest patches installed etc.

Another thing to check is that your Energy Saver setting for the processor is set to Highest rather than Automatic when running the game (System Preferences>Energy Saver>Options>Processor Performance)*. Also, if you want to eek as much performance as possible out of a game, restart your PB and then hold the shift key down when logging in to your user account (which logs you in without any start-up items loading). Edit: I say to restart as this will clear all your swap files and give you a "fresh" VM thus reducing the amount of swapping that will occur during your gameplay to the minimum possible.

N.B. *In all likelihood this is set at Automatic by default (and Reduced when running off battery) which is fine for day-to-day use, but does have a few fps impact on games. The reason to run in Automatic mode by default, fwiw, is that there is an annoying whine from the CPU when it runs at the Highest performance setting - you don't notice it unless you are in a deadly quiet room, but when you do, it'll bug the hell out of you

[littlegreenspud]

JKT, I thought I would try your recommendation to stop any start-up items loading before running Doom3. Well I got 20.2 FPS compared with my normal 26.2! So I made up a new user with no start-up items and still got 20.2, then I enabled the ATI Monitor application and tried again. This time I got 26.5 FPS.

So, yes stopping start-up items does work - but only if you don't disable the ATI Monitor!

[dmlawmac]

Originally Posted by littlegreenspud

JKT, I thought I would try your recommendation to stop any start-up items loading before running Doom3. Well I got 20.2 FPS compared with my normal 26.2! So I made up a new user with no start-up items and still got 20.2, then I enabled the ATI Monitor application and tried again. This time I got 26.5 FPS.

So, yes stopping start-up items does work - but only if you don't disable the ATI Monitor!

I own a new PB G4 1.67 w/ 64meg 9700. What is this "ATI Monitor" application? I don't see it on my comptuer. I don't really play any games...

[littlegreenspud]

dmlawmac

I believe it was installed as part of an ATI update. You end up with a preference panel in your system prefs that allows you to override vsync, ansiotropic filtering, FSAA etc. Also it puts in an application in your start-up called ATI Monitor.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by JKT

...but switching off the specular graphics using the panel that appears when you first launch the game will lead to a very significant speed boost at all resolutions.

Oops, decided to play Halo again last night - what I meant was the Pixel and Vertex shader options in that panel that appears prior to the game loading (which allow for the specular graphics effects to be used).

[JKT]

Originally Posted by littlegreenspud

JKT, I thought I would try your recommendation to stop any start-up items loading before running Doom3. Well I got 20.2 FPS compared with my normal 26.2! So I made up a new user with no start-up items and still got 20.2, then I enabled the ATI Monitor application and tried again. This time I got 26.5 FPS.

So, yes stopping start-up items does work - but only if you don't disable the ATI Monitor!

OK, so there is at least one exception to the rule!

What you could do is create a separate Games user account with the ATI Monitor as the only log-in item.

[urrl78]

It will be very interesting to bring Halo back out of mothballs when Tiger arrives and see if there is any smoother gameplay.

[littlegreenspud]

No change to FPS with 10.3.9.