Team Fortress 2 Forum

Hi there,

I've been using CX for a few months now and it's been running pretty swimmingly. A hard drive crash, however, meant I had to reinstall Mac OS 10.5.6 recently.

Before the reinstall, Spies around me cloaked and uncloaked, "shimmered" when struck, and so on with no problems whatsoever. The framerate never took a hit whenever I saw this graphical effect at work. After said reinstall, however, every time I see a friendly Spy's cloak, or an enemy Spy cloak/decloak or get struck so that he is able to be seen (basically whenever the system has to render the cloak's translucent graphics), my framerate takes a severe hit, seeming to knock it down by 50% or so, making the game unplayable. I searched around and found this thread; however, the solution given there says that an ATI card is required and that it may cause kernel panics in some systems, obviously not a very palatable side effect.

I'm not expecting perfect graphics out of my system (specs are below), especially given the video card, but the game has been playable in the past before my operating system reinstall. Was there an OS update that caused this problem? Are there any solutions to this, besides the one in the thread above?

My specs:
MacBook (early 2008 model)
2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo
2.0 GB RAM
Intel x3100 integrated video

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Are your in-game video settings any different than before? Do you know how to check if the launch options for TF2 are correct?

If you think an OS update caused this, you could probably try rolling back your video drivers. This could be pretty dangerous to your system if you don't know what you're doing. It would involve opening a Mac OS X update package with something like Pacifist and replacing some of the kernel extensions in your System folder. If you want to try this, message back and I'll give you a list of steps.

I suspected that it had something to do with my heapsize at first, so I set that parameter to 1024 MB (I forget the number in KB) at launch. It didn't fix the problem, so I messed with the resolution.

After the reinstall I set my resolution to a 4:3 ratio, in order to improve performance a bit by using a resolution that would still fit on my screen (as I play windowed). I tried just now to run in a 16:10 resolution, and the problem is gone.

I thought it a bit strange that this sort of setting would affect this graphical effect, but I'm glad it's been fixed. Do you guys know the reason this might happen?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

@Collin:
What version of CrossOver Games are you currently using to run Team Fortress 2?
And supposedly the newest CS version is no longer compatible with the Intel GMA X3100 chipset.
7.1.0 of Cross Over Games appears to work with the GMA X3100, but with some fps issues throughout the game.

I might try and run Cross Over's newest version just to see if it may magically work.
If it works without framerate issues, I will be extraordinarily happy.

I will let you know if it works.

My current specs are :
Model Name: MacBook,
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.1 GHz,
Memory: 2 GB,
Chipset Model: GMA X3100

Installed Cross Over working version:
Version 7.1 (7.1.0)

-Ty. (Lyn is the person who created this account, but I am the one who uses it)