[HotSoup]

Anyone try playing Halo on a Powerbook 1Ghz (Rev. B)? How well does it run?

Thanks

[Bostic]

Originally posted by HotSoup:
Anyone try playing Halo on a Powerbook 1Ghz (Rev. B)? How well does it run?
Thanks

Runs so so on a rev b 12" with 768ram. Set at 1024x768 and medium graphics is around 30fps but as soon as bunch of Covenent are on the screen it drops to 20's or lower. Power setting on Maximum Performance and the fan is going full blast when the machine gets this much thrown at it. From playing on a PC for a few months and more than a year on the xbox I know all the parts where to expect slowdown and the Mac version follows suit. Online play is a drag right now with Mac's on 1.02 and pc's on 1.03. The vehicle warping is still bad as well hopefully 1.03 will take care of that.

[CrackedButter]

Blame the Gcard for this. Its a crappy Nvidia which is not even a pro card.

I know another buy who is playing it on a 17"PB rev b and it runs fine.

[Liquidity X]

they guy whos playing it on the 17, is he using pixel shaders? can u get him to run a time demo and post his specs and settings?

[arfung]

Is there a command to get Halo to show frame-rates on screen while playing? I ran the time-demo on my PB15AL (1.25GHz), with 1024x768, and get about 14fps. All graphics settings on default (high).

[Bostic]

Originally posted by arfung:
Is there a command to get Halo to show frame-rates on screen while playing? I ran the time-demo on my PB15AL (1.25GHz), with 1024x768, and get about 14fps. All graphics settings on default (high).

When you start halo and the config window appears, select the option in the lower left for the console. Once you're at the main menu of the game hit ` to bring up the console, then type

rasterizer_fps true

Hit the ` again to close the console. I'm still playing around with settings for my 12" rev B, it does perform better at 1024x768 then the other two resolutions.

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by arfung:
Is there a command to get Halo to show frame-rates on screen while playing? I ran the time-demo on my PB15AL (1.25GHz), with 1024x768, and get about 14fps. All graphics settings on default (high).

Amazing how the X-Box with a 733Mhz PIII and a Geforce card that is a few generations old now can do so well with a slow optical drive. Does the Nvidia I/O controller make such slow hardware run faster than all current Powerbooks with better GPUs and CPUs? Amazing.

[CrackedButter]

The guy i know who is running Halo on a 17" is on another forum, i don't know him. But he is at macrumors.com in the mac gaming section if interested. There is a thread titled "Who is getting Halo".

Lets not forget that Halo was modified to run on the xbox and its solely a console machine, it doesn't have to load an entire OS in the baackground first in order to play it.

[bwahahax]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
Amazing how the X-Box with a 733Mhz PIII and a Geforce card that is a few generations old now can do so well with a slow optical drive. Does the Nvidia I/O controller make such slow hardware run faster than all current Powerbooks with better GPUs and CPUs? Amazing.

That's because Halo for X-Box runs at about 320 by 240 I think. What ever the exact resolution, it is much lower than 640 by 480, believe it or not.

[Liquidity X]

I thought X box was progessive HD TV as well as 320x240?

[gbafan]

Originally posted by CrackedButter:
Blame the Gcard for this. Its a crappy Nvidia which is not even a pro card.

I know another buy who is playing it on a 17"PB rev b and it runs fine.

There is nothing wrong with the FX Go5200 card in the 12" PB. The problem is the drivers. With 10.3.2 there will be new FX drivers which should bring a nice speed bump to Halo.

Linkage: Mac OS X 10.3.2 - What is updated.

Linkage: FPS scores for Halo on 10.3.1 and then 10.3.2

I should also add that the 5200 supports both vertex and pixel shaders, which really aren't pixel shaders because those are DirectX only, and well... n/m. Just know that only 3 cards on the Mac support pixel shading in Halo; FX 5200, Radeon 9600, and Radeon 9800.

[iMacfan]

Anyone know if Halo could be playable on my PB 12"/867Mhz/640Mb?

Otherwise I'll be really depressed to hear that my PB is already obsolete. On the other hand, I'll get far more work done...

David

[Pringlis]

Halo runs perfectly on my 1ghz 12". Played a few levels that have many enemies on screen at once in large outdoor backdrops and no 'jittering' at all.

Love it.

[Bostic]

Significant improvement with 10.3.2. No longer a slide show with many enemies on the screen at once. Now if the patch for 1.03 can come out soon, the lack of servers and players is not fun.

[iREZ]

Im in the market for a pb and it's mainly going to be for graphic applications (freehand, quark, photoshop,illustrator,etc..) but I also wanna occasionaly play games like HALO, how does the 12 inch rev b perform compared to the 15 inch 1GHz, and which has more bang for the buck. The only real difference I see is the 64 mb vs 32mb.

[effgee]

The only real difference I see is the 64 mb vs 32mb.

Uhm, no. There's quite a few more. In order of relevance:

• considerably faster GPU (ATI 9600 vs. nVidia 5200)
• faster HD available as BTO option (4200rpm vs. 5400rpm = 20% speed difference)
• faster front side bus (not 100% sure, I think it's 133MHz vs 167MHz?)
• bigger screen = less switching back & forth, less scrolling = higher productivity
• faster RAM (2100 vs. 2700)
• max. RAM (1,25GB vs. 2GB)

The 12" PB is not an ideal machine for graphics work. If money is not your biggest concern, you should get the 15" PB, you'll be much happier in the long run. The 12" PB will get the job done, but not as efficiently as the 15" or the 17" (let alone a desktop machine, be it a G4 or a G5). And before anyone might think I'm biased - I just bought a rev. B 12" PB w/768MB RAM and am perfectly happy with - it's the perfect travel companion.

More info here.

(edit) Stupid me - the list above doesn't even take into consideration that the 15" is available with a 1.25GHz G4 vs. the 1GHz G4 in the 12". That alone will probably make an overall speed difference of 10-15% or so.

Cheers,

eff

[HotSoup]

Originally posted by Bostic:
Significant improvement with 10.3.2. No longer a slide show with many enemies on the screen at once. Now if the patch for 1.03 can come out soon, the lack of servers and players is not fun.

Ahh, is that why I can't join many online games? I usually get a lot of 'Game closed down' and I only see King, CTF and slayer matches.

[forcelite]

So whats the technical reason for why there is a lack of servers?

Is it just cause there are not that many mac users playing the game?

Can mac users connect to pc users games?

I dont have the game so sorry for the newb questions


Thanks

[Bostic]

The majority of PC users out there are running on version 1.03. Users running 1.02, including all us Mac folk can't see 1.03 games and vice versa. The ones we do see are either other Mac users or cracked versions of 1.02 for PC. On the PC version as soon as you select Multiplayer, Join Game it does an update check with "An update is available" message forcing you to download the patch to play online. 1.03 helps to minimize the pistol bullet lag, Warthog warping and adds in a patch to help cut down on Team Killing.

[rocketbandito]

Originally posted by iMacfan:
Anyone know if Halo could be playable on my PB 12"/867Mhz/640Mb?

Otherwise I'll be really depressed to hear that my PB is already obsolete. On the other hand, I'll get far more work done...

David

I posted this over in the games forum... while Halo is "playable" on my Rev A 12" PB (867/640), it's not really "fun." My timedemo runs about 19 fps... but it drops into the low teens, or lower, any time there's a substantial number of enemies or other characters around -- and by "substantial" I mean like 5 or 6. Some people might be more forgiving of this than me, but I wouldn't recommend Halo on this system. I think it just chokes out the CPU.

[arfung]

I am running the game on a 1.25GHz 15"ALbook. I found that I could get a huge boots in framerates by turning off pixel shading (but leaving vertex shading on) from the dialog that Halo opens at launch. Now, it runs at 30fps pretty much all of the time (at 1024x768 on external monitor).

[elvis2000]

Originally posted by Bostic:
Runs so so on a rev b 12" with 768ram. Set at 1024x768 and medium graphics is around 30fps but as soon as bunch of Covenent are on the screen it drops to 20's or lower. Power setting on Maximum Performance and the fan is going full blast when the machine gets this much thrown at it. From playing on a PC for a few months and more than a year on the xbox I know all the parts where to expect slowdown and the Mac version follows suit. Online play is a drag right now with Mac's on 1.02 and pc's on 1.03. The vehicle warping is still bad as well hopefully 1.03 will take care of that.

I had this on my PC before "switching" to Mac. My PC was no slouch --- 2.4GHZ P4 with 400mhz Bus, Radeon 9700 Pro, 1GB RAM...

Halo ran like sh*t on it.

Don't think this is a Mac thing.

jw

[crouchingtiger]

just finished Halo on a TiBook G4/800. Performance was pretty good throughout -- certainly it didn't contribute at all to any of the times I died. =)

played at 1024x768, no shaders (not supported), high detail.

[CrackedButter]

I'm playing it on a 1.25Ghz PB and its running okay, however i have a habit of keeping the processor reduced and thus its a little slowie at times but considering its running on reduced i am amazed at how it performs.