Black Mesa Forum

Hi. I'm using Crossover 22.1 and I'm having difficulty running Black Mesa. The game launches with the option -oldgameui (without it it crashes on startup), but no matter what resolution or graphical settings I use the game just runs at 10fps which is completely unplayable. I tried various console commands to improve performance but nothing changed at all with any of them. I suspect it's the fact that the game runs on DirectX 9 since I heard it's poorly optimized for multicore performance.

Does anyone have tips how to make this game actually playable?

My system is M1 Macbook Pro 16gb ram with 14 gpu cores.

I'm 90% sure the issue is CPU bound cause activity monitor only shows 40% gpu usage but over 100% cpu.

Same here, at least in areas that's pretty resource-intensive. Even though I am using Crossover 23.5 with the new included GPTK v0.4 to help the games run better on macOS. So far it does given that the previous Crossover versions doesn't runs very well, though I am still seeing some lags on Black Mesa.

For instance, the Inbound chapter runs pretty well even on high settings. It wasn't until Anomalous Materials chapter when the game really starts lagging, no matter how high or low I have set for the settings. At least in the first areas of dock, entrance, hallways, laboratories, dressing room all the way until the elevator. The lags disappear after that, though they wouldn't come back until Resonance Cascade event when the control room blew up and first appearances of Xen. The lags disappear again afterward aside from some intense explosions or fires happening during the chapter.

I stopped afterward because I am not sure if the later chapters as well Xen would cause serious lags given how much resources the game could require to run these chapters. I suspect that it not something to do with the settings, but rather how the game runs and loads the amount of assets that's causing the computers to lag?

This game has a lot of performance issue on PC as well.

A trick si to set the audio to 4/5.1 speakers and keep motion blur on. Also I suggest to use +fps_max 60

Here some tricks:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/362890/discussions/0/2149847423916111081/