Team Fortress 2 Forum

I ran the demo of CxG a while ago, and I never ended up buying it because performance was pretty crappy. The settings I ran were all default (only model and shader were on high), I just increased the resolution up to native. Framerate was fine for the most part, but it dropped into the 20's during large firefights. The worst part was the stuttering. The game would just pause for a split second every so often and that was definitely the most annoying thing.

Everyone else seems to have decent performance and completely different complaints now, so I'm curious if anyone else gets the micropauses during the game.

I am not suprised..TF2 has been having memory leaks in CxGames 7.2 .Further more , TF2 in native Windows already has performance issues.

To play TF2 well , you need a recommended one 1 gig of ram for now...kinda sad...as it uses bout 524 mb ram at startup

The memory leak is a bug in the game itself, it occurs on older crossover versions and windows as well. But yeah, it is true that 1 gig of memory are required for proper gameplay. It should still run with less memory, but you'll most likely get annoying delays due to paging activity on bigger maps.

Lowering the graphics details reduces the size of memory footprint.

Honestly I don't think the PC version would run much better. 128 MB simply isn't enough VRAM to run the game at really high rez. I've got an MBP with 256 MB VRAM and I can run TF2 at very high settings in CrossOver before I get framerate drops. If you have a copy of windows installed, try installing TF2 there to see how it runs...

It may help to play fullscreen, that way Mac OS can stop the desktop compositing, saving maybe 20-30 megabytes of video memory. The double buffered desktop + a double buffered texture for each window consumes quite a lot of memory.

CrossOver doesn't have any video memory management inefficiency, but we have pretty little control over what is stored in vram. It is almost entirely up to the driver to manage this. On Windows, Direct3D apps have better control over video memory management. They can persist and evict resources manually, but often aren't too good with that, or put everything into the 'managed' pool and tell windows to manage things for them. On OpenGL everything is driver-managed by force.

Alright, just to clarify some more points:

I have 4GB of ram in the MBP, is there any way to get the bottle to use more?

I've run TF2 in a Boot Camp'ed XP 32-bit before. I ran 1440x900 with the highest possible settings sans AA and motion blur and it worked pretty well. The minimum framerate was 30 and that was fine.

The biggest problem comparing TF2 on Windows to on CxG is that even if TF2 is holding a decent framerate in CxG, it won't feel like it. The framerate is jumping between 40-100 constantly and it will feel like the framerate is at 15, whereas in windows it can hold at a constant 30 and it'll feel a lot better.

I realize 128MB of VRAM isn't ideal, but if it was okay for TF2 @ 1440x900 in Windows, maybe it just isn't cut out for the same resolution in CxG?

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

It may help to play fullscreen, that way Mac OS can stop the desktop
compositing, saving maybe 20-30 megabytes of video memory. The
double buffered desktop + a double buffered texture for each window
consumes quite a lot of memory.

CrossOver doesn't have any video memory management inefficiency, but
we have pretty little control over what is stored in vram. It is
almost entirely up to the driver to manage this. On Windows,
Direct3D apps have better control over video memory management. They
can persist and evict resources manually, but often aren't too good
with that, or put everything into the 'managed' pool and tell
windows to manage things for them. On OpenGL everything is
driver-managed by force.

Like what Stefan said , it is the Direct3D apps that have better control on video memory management on Windows ..either that or let Windows manage things for it ..While on the other hand in Mac or Linux the OPenGL driver manages things by force.
So in a way , your windows games on mac have very little say in the usage of the vram.

forgive me if i said wrongly >.<

Hao Lei wrote:

Alright, just to clarify some more points:

I have 4GB of ram in the MBP, is there any way to get the bottle to
use more?

I've run TF2 in a Boot Camp'ed XP 32-bit before. I ran 1440x900 with
the highest possible settings sans AA and motion blur and it worked
pretty well. The minimum framerate was 30 and that was fine.

The biggest problem comparing TF2 on Windows to on CxG is that even
if TF2 is holding a decent framerate in CxG, it won't feel like it.
The framerate is jumping between 40-100 constantly and it will feel
like the framerate is at 15, whereas in windows it can hold at a
constant 30 and it'll feel a lot better.

I realize 128MB of VRAM isn't ideal, but if it was okay for TF2 @
1440x900 in Windows, maybe it just isn't cut out for the same
resolution in CxG?

I agree with this. I think the big problem too is the mouse is always laggy or unresponsive (not visibly but it's there... due in part to the cursor redraw or whatever the Xover staff have explained to me on multiple occasions). This mouse lag subtly makes you feel like your lagging. The choppiness of the frame rates only makes it worse though.

Hao Lei wrote:

Alright, just to clarify some more points:

I have 4GB of ram in the MBP, is there any way to get the bottle to
use more?

CrossOver doesn't allocate a static amount of memory to Windows apps. It is not a virtual machine, so Windows apps request memory from MacOS dynamically, like normal Mac apps do.

Hao Lei wrote:

I realize 128MB of VRAM isn't ideal, but if it was okay for TF2 @
1440x900 in Windows, maybe it just isn't cut out for the same
resolution in CxG?

There's an important difference between Win XP and MacOS: The OpenGL composited desktop. If MacOS is clever, it deactivates the compositing while a fullscreen app is running. Unfortunately, we cannot force it to do that, and we cannot check what is going on. At 1440x900 @ 32 bpp, the compositing will most likely allocate an additional back buffer, consuming about 40 MB of video memory. Windows XP does not do that(but Windows Vista does, if you enable Aero)