Deus Ex Forum

I've always had a devil of a time trying to get this game to work the way it should, especially on my old GMA 950 MacBook. But here are some general observations I've made when comparing the GOG and Steam releases of Deus Ex - GOTY edition:

a) Deus Ex seems to give the best results (both on my GMA 950 MacBook and my MacBook Air with Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics) when used with DirectX rendering, with DirectX 9 installed using the built-in CrossOver installer. The OpenGL renderer only barely works at 640 x 480 resolution (the opposite of my experience in getting Unreal Tournament to run. When creating a Steam bottle within CrossOver, DX9 is automatically installed.) Disabling Window Manger Control and Decorations also helps with crashes and resolution switching crashes. Chris Donhal's enhanced OpenGL renderer for Deus Ex seems to have no effect.

b) On my MacBook, the enhanced DirectX 9 renderer available here causes the game to sputter and die, as does any attempt to run the game over 1024 x 768, likely due to limitations in the GMA 950. On the MacBook Air, the enhanced renderer works beautifully, at full 1366 x 768 resolution.

c) A viable fallback option is to use the 3Dfx Glide renderer with the nGlide compatibility wrapper; the game works well in nGlide, except that 32-bit textures don't work and widescreen resolutions aren't available.

The tl;dr version:

1) If you have a GMA 950, using the DirectX renderer with DirectX 9 installed in the bottle will help, but you are likely going to be constrained to 1024 x 768.

2) If your Mac has better graphics hardware, use the DirectX renderer, with DirectX 9, and try using Chris Donhal's enhanced DirectX 9 renderer as well.

3) If all else fails, playing it under 3Dfx Glide with nGlide will also allow the game to work.

Edit: Oh yeah, and mods like Shifter et al. all seem to work as well.

Have you tried the procedures I wrote in the Tips & Tricks section? It's the tip for installing in a Windows Vista bottle without variable speed and audio sync issues. Essentially uses a replacement launcher that someone wrote.

I haven't actually had any issues with out of sync or abnormally fast gameplay or audio, which is odd. The only problems I've had are getting the game to work with higher resolutions and graphics settings on my older GMA 950 MacBook.

You would only have the issue if you're system has multiple CPUs. Still might be worth a shot. In the least, you might like the alternative launcher better. I believe you can achieve better resolutions with it:

http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/#downloads

Also some good texture mods available that can make the game look much better over the original textures, especially with higher resolution gameplay.

OpenGL mode seems to be working nicely on Linux other than one error on exit when it tries to remove the OpenGL context, and it somehow fails. It seems not to cause a problem, other than delaying the return to the normal resolution.

I did get one flickering texture in one clip scene, but it wasn't really an issue. I will have to play more of the game later to see if it is an issue elsewhere.

It doesn't have the frame-rate issues I've had with the Direct3D driver, and seems to work quite smoothly. The graphics quality is also much better when using OpenGL with the default Game Of the Year Edition texture set. I haven't tried any community texture sets yet.