Half-Life 2 Forum

After getting through HL2 and Episode 1 with smooth performance (except for the loading freezes, etc.) I'm surprised to find that Episode 2 isn't even playable. It's fine for walking around, but as soon as enemies come onscreen it becomes choppy. Overall the graphics seem fuzzier than in the previous games. (Alyx still looks hot)

I'm on a MacBook Pro, most recent rev with the NVIDIA card and 4GB of RAM. My DirectX is set to -dxlevel 80.

Anyone else have a better experience?

Yes, folk! I have a much better experience in this game:)

It runs like on my PC (which is same as my laptop, but has Pentium D and 3Gb of RAM and my MacBook Pro is new MA895 model)!
But in DX8 mode too :( I tried DX9 - no luck ...

I also tried latest Nightly builds - even fonts doesn't display with tf2 patch :(

But with 6.2 version everything works fine! Game is running with 1440x900 Resolution and graphics settings I didn't change, very good :)

I have all updates from Apple, running latest Leopard and latest CrossOver Mac 6.2

Thanks, that's good news. I was thinking of doing a fresh installation over the holidays anyway, so I guess I will now.

BTW, I'm currently running 10.5.1 and CrossOver 6.2.

Me i have a macpro tower using two dual core xeon processors at 2.66 gightz. I am also running only a gig of ram which made everything in half life 2 fantastic except episode 2. Now you would think that my system could run this with no problem. But something keeps popping up when i go to steam and it says you need to update your drivers so i am guessing that the infrastructure in crossover is being misdiagnosed. Resulting in a driver update even though i have all drivers updated. I am also running a ATI radeon 1900 xt pci-e with 512 megs of ram on it. I have got leopard 10.5.1 OSx so there is nothing wrong with that. So why is episode 2 so choppy when i run or drive a car? this is so frustrating and i want to play episode 2 all the way through but i get discouraged when the stodgy scenes start up and i quit. It doesnt happen in half life 2 or episode one,and i do all the tweaks of minimizing the values in the advanced part of my options,and that does not help at all either.It does in half life 2 and episode one but not 2. I dont know if it is using a new engine or what to give a more cinematic feel but it does not work well. So hopefully the techs can come with a new way to work around the problem,and i am guessing its something to do with directx part of it.Since episode 2 is a newer chapter it would seem that it would require a newer directx engine,if its the ten version then this is all for nothing. As i understand it directx ten is for windows only and not for this program or macs. But i could be wrong about that as well. Either way its sad we cant keep playing the continued story of gordon freeman.

Chris, first of all update to 10.5.2 and install the graphics driver update.

HL2 EP2 uses an updated version of the Source Engine, which is somewhat slower as-is. This can be seen at the framerates the engine considers OK. The most important tweak is to disable HDR, as this hits a performance bottleneck in CrossOver(or rather the MacOS drivers).

The outdated driver warning is harmless, you guessed correctly that Steam doesn't realize its not running on Windows. We currently forward the MacOS driver version to Steam, but the Mac driver numbers have no correlation with the Windows versions. In our current development code we're instead hardcoding the latest known Windows driver version and reporting that. That makes Steam happy, but as soon as a new Windows driver ships the hardcoded version is outdated, so the warning pops up again.