OS X Counter Strike 1.6 poor performance in OSX

[domemvs]

Hi everyone!

I'm an old CS 1.6 Player and I really liked the fact that Valve ported this game to be played natively on Mac OSX via Steam. I'm not a real gamer but in the past I used to be and from time to time I'd like to "dive" into the past and play a little CS 1.6.

I used to do this with Bootcamp and Windows 7. This really worked flawlessly. The performance was great and it was a pleasure to play this game. Natively in OSX my experience is completely different. I experience very low FPS from time to time and it is only playable with the resolution set to 640x480. Even then I have massive FPS and performance drops.

Based on the fact that in Bootcamp it worked perfectly, I concur that the hardware cannot be the reason. I think it's either a driver problem or a poor porting-work by Valve.

Do you have any kind of suggestion? Are there any general settings in the system prefernces that prevent my good ol' 9400M from performing flawlessly? Are there - similar to windows - newer NVIDIA drivers which can be installed? Or at least some kind of a control center to play around a little with settings of the graphics card?

(BTW: I don't have Boot Camp anymore, so that's no solution ;-) )

Thanks!

 

[saturnotaku]

I think it's either a driver problem or a poor porting-work by Valve.

Do you have any kind of suggestion? Are there any general settings in the system prefernces that prevent my good ol' 9400M from performing flawlessly? Are there - similar to windows - newer NVIDIA drivers which can be installed? Or at least some kind of a control center to play around a little with settings of the graphics card?

It's probably a bad port because Valve's other games don't run as well on OS X as they do in Windows. There's nothing you can really do about it either because the GPU drivers are built into OS X and are only updated when Apple releases a new revision (10.x.x).

 

[MichalM.Mac]

Look at minimum specs for CS 1.6 Windows vs. Mac (or any other game on HL1 engine). They probably didn't bother with porting too much because why should they. Old games + 9400M was already quite old when they relased HL1 games for OS X.

I would not blame solely drivers in this case.

 

[saturnotaku]

Actually, scratch what I said for a moment. You could try emulating the game via WINE or Crossover. The latter has a free trial so you can see if it will actually work. At this point, it couldn't hurt to try.