Half Life 2 Slow On Mac OS..

[Yamcha]

So guys,

I decided to download and install Half Life 2 for Mac OS. And well the performance on Mac OS is terrible.. Booting into Windows gave me double the frame rates..

So whats going on? Is it because of the lack of Direct X? or does it just mean the porting job is horrible..

What is Apples answer to Direct X? was it Open CL, if so does HL2 make use of that?

Just curious as to why games are slower on the Mac OS? apart from hardware requirements...

 

[brianfast]

Half Life 2 plays fine for me at mostly medium settings. Make sure you have applied the graphics update for OSX.

Half Life is using OpenGL to render graphics, not Direct X or OpenCL.

 

[Huntn]

HL2 runs well under Mac Steam for me. (Hardware in siggy.)

 

[maadaa]

Half Life runs terrible on mine

Okay half life also runs terrible on my imac late 2009!

I had windows installed on my mac only because of steam, but when i heard that steam was coming out to mac, i decided to uninstall the windows
partition..

But what's going on! i mean, is it my hardware?? 4 gigs of ram, intel core duo 2 processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400.. What shall i do!! when i use the

recommended video settings in Left 4 Dead 2, it automatically sets the resolution to 800x600 and all the other video graphics to low quality!

SOMEBODY HELP!
thx

 

[Mackilroy]

The 9400M is an integrated GPU, and not that good of one.

 

[Yamcha]

Yeah I suffer from the same problem, I know that 9400M is integrated, but the fact of the matter is HL2 runs much faster on the Windows platform. Now it runs ok at a 1280X720 @ a mixture of medium/low settings on mac, but its not playable at all on native resolution, even with the 720P and medium settings it still dips under the 30fps mark in some situations..

Anyway I guess at the moment Mac still remains not so good a platform for gaming.. I hope that changes, I know Apple has decided to add dedicated gpu's on even the new entry level imacs.. although they are still low end GPUs I guess its a good start..

PS: Yeah I tried the graphics update, I didn't see any improvement on HL2..

 

[Queso]

Definitely the integrated 9400 GPU causing this. I play HL2, Ep1 and Ep2 at maximum settings 1920 x 1080 on my iMac (with 5670) and there's no lag at all.

Here's something most of us learn the hard way. Don't buy the low end iMac unless you really don't care about graphics performance. Go at least one up the range.

 

[Madd the Sane]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Part of the problem is that the Mac drivers aren't up to par with the Windows drivers. Another thing is that Source games use a wrapper library that converts Direct3D calls to OpenGL, which causes some overhead.

 

[Queso]

Source games don't use a wrapper, then natively use OpenGL. The performance difference is down to the way Windows and OSX run 3D applications. On Windows a DirectX game can effectively bypass the OS and access the hardware directly. On OSX all applications have to pass calls to the OS, even the OpenGL-based ones. This slows things up, but increases reliability.

 

[mark28]

I play HL2 at maximum settings at 1680 x 1050 in OS X. It's one of the best ports imo AA is at x2 and AF at x2. ( didn't bother going higher since it looks sharp, but I can test it out )

MBP 2010 i5 though

 

[mark28]

I play HL2 at maximum settings at 1680 x 1050 in OS X. It's one of the best ports imo AA is at x2 and AF at x2. ( didn't bother going higher since it looks sharp, but I can test it out )

MBP 2010 i5 though

I just did the boat scene, with everything maxed and AA x8 and AF x16 at 1680 x 1050. Runs pretty smooth, just like the Windows version