Team Fortress 2 Forum

Hi everyone. I see that a lot of people running the game in Mac under 6.2 are giving it a "Silver" rating, but I'm a bit puzzled as to how they could. My in-game performance isn't really very good. The frame rate is .. okay. It's good enough that I can get around. But I have to keep the graphics set very low to achieve it. Additionally, the game is very dark. I have OS X's brightness set to maximum, but I can't adjust the gamma in-game. It's as though my character is wearing sunglasses. What are you all doing to get it to run well enough to warrant giving it a "Silver" rating? And how can I adjust the gamma? It is so difficult for me to play with the screen so dark, and I don't want to turn out all the lights and pull the shades down!

By the way, I am running OS X 10.4.11 on an Early 2006 white iMac (2 GB RAM, 2 GHz Intel Core Duo, 256 MB VRAM ATI Radeon X1600).

I am wondering if updating to Leopard would give me a big performance boost. I've heard here and there that some people have seen huge increases in quality of play. Is it worth the money for this?

Huh. We did some of our in-house testing of TF2 on an iMac that's quite similar to your. Ours is slightly worse in RAM (1GB), CPU speed (1.83Ghz), and VRAM (128MB). But the video chipset is the same, and we were also running Tiger.

We found TF2 quite playable. I'll have one of our guys test again, just to make sure nothing has changed.

In the meantime, have you tried any other 3D games using CrossOver? Does anything work well and look right? Do any other games (other than other Source-engine games) or Windows programs exhibit the same visual or performance problems?

I don't have any non-Source games installed, unfortunately, but I can tell you how The Ship and HL2DM ran. The last time I ran The Ship, it didn't run nearly as well as TF2, and had choppy sound. The framerate was rather poor and skipped sometimes, but I was still able to navigate through the levels. The last time I ran HL2DM, it ran very poorly, but I just started it up again now and it ran much better than I remembered. It's actually nearly as good as in Windows on this same machine, though there are skips here and there as I look around that make it difficult to aim. But this was on a server with no people. I'm not sure how well it would run with others playing.

I don't know if this means anything, but when I start up TF2, a message appears that says "Video Driver Outdated." It says I have Direct3D HAL 6.14.1.1029. I always click "Continue Anyway." Is this wrong?

I would like to test TF2 again now, but I cannot at the moment. When I get back, I will try it again to see if there is an improvement. It is downloading an update to the game and engine right now, so I wonder if that will change anything.

Before I go, do you know how to enable the framerate monitor while in-game? Maybe I could use the graphs to get a better idea of how everything is running.

huge problems here too.

i have to run it at lowest res, lowest settings, blood off, bodies off, etc. just to get a decent framerate on a 2007 2.4ghz dual core aluminum imac (1gb ram), leopard.

and not just that.

say for example in tf2 i connect to a server. tested with servers with extremely low ping, high ping, etc.

i am alone on the map. i get usually 90+ at this point.

i then put a few bullets into a wall. or simply shoot a prop (like a can on the ground or something)

it instantly drops down to 15-20fps. unbearable. until i restart the game.

thanks.
ive had to remove decals, blood, bodies, nearly everything possible and still get crappy framerates after taking a few shots on a map, or playing on a full server (and as mentioned before, very low pings, its not my connection, not my computers specs, but almost certainly crossovers problem)

any ideas?

also -- any plans for dx9 support? :(

To see your frames per second rate enter "cl_showfps 1" into the console.

Let's just say that I'm having the same problem as everyone else in this thread. The best fps I get is perhaps 20-40 while running around and dropping intolerably low in the heat of battle, and this is with all the available settings as low as they can get. I have tried running the game windowed and fullscreen without a noticable change in fps. Just with the frames issue, Crossovers demo isn't convincing me that it's worth the investment. Watching this thread and waiting for some tips and will any of these issues be fixed in either Leopard or Crossover 7?

Oh, I have a mid-2007 macbook pro running OS 10.4.11 with 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 8600 graphics card.

We will do our best to reproduce the problems ourselves and fix them.

So far lets recollect a bit of information:
-> bullet holes can cause these problems
-> for some, the game is slow from the start
-> Half Life 2 Deathmatch is affected as well

Did I understand it correctly?

I will leave the game the ship out of consideration. It is an unsupported game, and I have no idea which things it does that might be not well-implemented in crossover(render target locking for example).

Regarding dxlevel 90 support, I am working on that, and I want to enable it on Linux for Crossover 7.0. On the MacOS side, as explained in other threads, I hit a couple of graphics bugs which I just cannot workaround. The most problematic issues are missing support for GL_EXT_texture_sRGB, and GLSL compiler bugs which make shaders fall back into software rendering, resulting in framerates around 5 fps. I reported the bugs to Apple, but until they fix them there isn't much I can do about dxlevel 90 support on MacOS.

• and performance in general is, terrible compared to when playing in e.g XP bootcamp

or at least, on this new imac.

imac 2.4ghz core 2 duo
1GB RAM
ati radeon 9600 pro 256MB
os x 10.5.1

you think it may be network/online-play related?

iirc half life 2 single player ran great at decent settings, heaps of enemies on-screen, etc.

You are not alone, in boot camp I play with the defaults which is high/med graphics settings and 1920*1200 resolution. Runs fantastic.

In crossover I have to play in 1024*768, low resolutions on everything and I still get bellow 30fps constant, running choppy.

2.4ghz duo core, 2gigs ram, ati 2600 256mb ram.

Oh and I still do not know how to fix the not being able to read what is typed in game. Could someone point me in the right direction?

I am pretty sure your Imac does not have a radeon 9600 😉

If it is one of the new radeon HD cards(2600 or something), there is a problem like this discussed in this thread:

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=3379;forum=1;msg=6974

We're constantly having driver troubles on MacOS. The older radeon X1600 and geforce 7300 cards work somewhat reasonably now. We didn't look much into the Intel GMA cards regarding games because they are rather slow anyway. The Geforce 8600 and radeon HD drivers still have many problems.

The gf 8600 cards are bugged with crashes and broken rendering, and the performance doesn't fullfill our expectations yet. From the radeon HD cards we heard about crashes in the beginning, but somewhen Apple seems to have fixed them. Now there are still performance troubles, as you report.

We are working on improving the compatibility by debugging drivers, reporting the bugs to Apple and finding workarounds, but unfortunately it is a tedious job and requires optimizing each game against each driver/card/operating system combination. There are also situations where working around the bugs is not possible, in that case we have to deactivate some features until Apple/Nvidia/AMD fix the bugs(for example dx9 support for hl2).

In the last weeks we've been working on the geforce cards, and we have isolated some bugs that cause rendering issues and reported them to Apple. Unfortunately we still have problems with disappearing geometry because our workaround triggers a bug in the alpha test. We had some delays with getting a mac with a radeon HD, so we're just getting started on this card/driver.

The original report about performance problems on a X1600 puzzles me though. That card is working pretty nice for us. Are you sure that you don't have some process running in the background that eats CPU time? Also, the X1600 is not the strongest card. Running the game on the highest resolution(1440x900 here) with shaders and textures set to high will be slow, because HL2 with high shaders uses very heavy pixel shaders, and the X1600 is just too weak for this at such resolutions.

Well, I tried running TF2. I checked the framerate using the command suggested. It was a little hard to read it, but the colour changed when it went high or low, so that helped. It went as low as around 8-10, and never seemed to exceed 20-25. It was usually around 15. This was in the brief time before the game crashed, giving me the Engine Error:

CUt|LinkedList overflow!

These framerates were while just leaving the spawn in cp_well. There were only 2 or 3 other people around me, and fighting had not yet started. The game crashed around the time I reached the locked gates in the center.

The other day I had turned the settings up a bit, so these framerates were with the following settings:

Model detail: High
Texture ": Medium
Shader ": Low
Water ": Reflect world
Shadow ": Medium
Color Correction: Disabled
Antialiasing mode: None
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8X
Wait for vertical sync: Disabled
High Dynamic Range: Bloom (if available)
Use 'bloom' effect when available: unchecked
Motion Blur: Disabled *

I will try turning them back down now and seeing if there is a change.

By the way, it is still very dark! How can I fix that?

Oh, and I forgot to mention. I am running in a window at resolution 1680 x 1007 (which is enough to cover everything it can while windowed). I thought that since the game defaults to windowed that that was the best choice.

Brighid, it sounds like there is something wrong. Can you check a few things for me?

Can you send me a screenshot with the darkness to stefan@codeweavers.com? Propably one from in-game and one from the main menu?

What does "mat_dxlevel" say when you enter it in the in-game console? The darkness and slowness suggest that the game is in dxlevel 90 for some reason. Crossover 6.2 does not support sRGB write correction yet, and the vertex shaders of this game fall back into software rendering on MacOS.

Can you try to disable high dynamic range(it should not have any effect in dx80, but it is worth a try). Also, try to set filtering to bilinear for testing.

Can you try to disable shadows? A few problems with offscreen rendering support in crossover breaks them, and makes them slow(maybe you have a shadow over the whole screen, that might cause the darkness).

Your resolution of 1680 x 1007 is very high for the X1600 card. We default to windowed because otherwise the game shifts the video output to the right for some reason. Alternatively, you can run the game at full screen at the highest available resolution, but that will put even more load on the X1600. To do so, you have to remove the "-dxlevel 81 -windowed" parameters from the startup options, otherwise it will be reset to windowed mode.

Okay, I turned all the settings, aside from resolution, as low as they will go. Now the framerate is more acceptable, seeming to linger around 30-40, and dropping as low as 20 when there are many people fighting around. Sometimes, it would go as low as 15 or so. However, obviously, it doesn't look that good. The characters all look like their eyes are bugging out, which makes me a little uncomfortable!

When I run the game in Windows on this same machine, I can put most of the settings rather high, play at fullscreen 1680 x 1050, and still maintain very good framerates. I don't know the numbers, but if I had to guess I'd say around 30. If it's important, I can give you the settings I have there and also provide framerates.

I just want it to be as good, or nearly as good, as that, so I can stop using Windows and start spending more time in the OS I actually enjoy.

Sorry, Stefan, you posted while I was writing this, but it looks like I did some of what you asked anyway!

When I enter that command in the console, it says:

"mat_dxlevel" = "81" ( def. "0" )

I just think it's so strange that you consider the X1600 to not be able to do very well, because it runs Source games beautifully in Windows, and Command & Conquer 3 in OS X runs very nicely, too.

I am pretty sure your Imac does not have a radeon 9600

my bad, meant to say radeon hd 2600 256mb :)

also, which setting needs to be changed to enable facial animations?

is it depending on the res.. or model detail? (when using crossover i run the game at 640x480, lowest everything... framerate is everything to me)

@Brighid: I had a look at the screenshots, and they show the normal TF2 brightness. I'd say it is your perception that they are dark. The bug we apparently have is that the in-game gamma control doesn't work. I must admit that I never tried it myself, so I have no idea what is wrong with it. We implement gamma changing, and it works with many games on Linux. I don't know if it is a HL2 or mac specific problem. (OK, just tried it, works nice for me on Linux. Apparently it is broken on the mac). As a workaround there might be a gamma control in macos, maybe this has an effect on TF2. I don't mean the monitor brightness control, but rather some additional gamma control.

As for the X1600 performance. What's considered "good" and "bad" is often quite subjective. I personally consider average framerates below 60 fps as "bad", because in some corner situations the framerate can drop quite a bit, and as soon as I'm below 40 fps I notice it in the mouse movement, etc. That's ok in single player games, but in multiplayer games it is a competitive disadvantage.

30 fps at your resolution sounds reasonably; You won't be able to get 60 fps, that's why I said the X1600 is too slow. It should definitely do better than your 15 fps though. In my long gone benchmarks I think I got 30 fps at 1440x900 in Half Life 2 at high shader settings in average situations(I have some ravenholm testing timedemo, I can upload it somewhere if you want to compare). In RTS games like C&C3 20 fps usually feels perfectly smooth, as long as the mouse is independent of the framerate. Over the holidays I am away from my mac, so I can't do any further testing and bugfixing, but I have added performance testing back on my list of things to look at.

I think the facial animations might be a dxlevel 90 or 95 specific feature. So they won't work in crossover yet.

Stefan, thank you for your responses. I did not find any way to increase the brightness elsewhere, but I did find a way to increase the contrast in universal access, so perhaps that may help.

So, is it not possible to run the game in a full screen with 1440x900 right now? I know I could run it in a window at that size, but then it either doesn't fill the screen, or I must reduce the OS resolution each time I'd like to play, which is something of a nuisance.

I'm glad you'll take a look at performance! That's a big thing for me. Regarding performance, would Leopard help improve framerates and graphics? I am still undecided on whether I'd like to upgrade yet.

By the way, I thought I should mention that I tried running it at a lower resolution (windowed at 1344x797, with OS resolution set to 1344x840), and it is noticeably smoother. The framerates aren't much higher (if at all), but they seem to be a little stabler, at least.

Oh, and also, changing the contrast only made it harder for me to see, so if you have any suggestions on how to increase the gamma, I'm open to them!

I am not sure if Leopard will fix your performance problems, mostly because I have no idea where they come from. It might fix it, or it might not. The performance issues Leopard fixes are mostly Steam and game startup and loading times.

I found a configuration that is supposed to make TF2 run smoother without killing the visuals. Trying it out, I'm getting about 40-90 fps! There are a few catches though.

It affects the visuals so the spy flickers black while cloaking/is shot at. (I'm not complaining, it makes spies easier to spot :P )
The water appears purplish, and is totally opaque while in it.
Ubers look flat.
The menu text disappears after you join the server, even if you installed the fix.
Wall and floor textures disappear, leaving you running around a black map. This can be easily fixed by typing 'retry' into the console.

These visual glitches were present even with the PC users, though, so it's a part of the config. I hope it helps.

Download it at http://www.gotfrag.com/tf2/forums/thread/313604/

Something else I found was a program that is supposed to make TF run smoother on older PCs, but there are programs to download and for now I'm content with the above config. If someone else wants to try it out;
http://www.tf2insider.com/increase-your-tf2-performace/51/

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

I think the facial animations might be a dxlevel 90 or 95 specific
feature. So they won't work in crossover yet.

:( i see

what about the huge fps drops after only firing a few rounds (especially with decals/bullet holes on)? or when shooting a prop e.g a drink can in 2fort? (from 90-100fps [as mentioned before i try to play all low settings.. not only set in the menus but using custom config turning off bodies, blood, decals, etc. and at 640x480] and suddenly down to 25-30fps). also note that this is when on a server all by myself; when playing on a full server it's much much worse.

and even if you're unable to add dx9 support for os x with the release of crossover 7.0, can we expect at least some performance improvements?

johntorque, I suspect that you hit one of the performance bugs on radon HD cards I mentioned. We will do our best to fix those bugs in Crossover 7.

During some coding I ran into something by accident: The high dynamic range setting does have an effect with dxlevel 81. The rendering effect is minimal, but it has a huge impact on performance.

With HDR rendering, Team Fortress 2 reads the final rendering result from the back buffer into a texture, then draws the texture onto the back buffer again with some post processing effects. The readback of the back buffer hits a performance limitation in crossover - The framerate is doubled by deactivating HDR, at least on my laptop.

For efficient readback we need frame buffer objects, and support for the GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit extension. The fbo code is deactivated because it has a few bugs itself, and it hits a few driver bugs. Even with fbos activated, the readback is still slow because MacOS doesn't (yet) support GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit. On my Linux system, using fbos and this extension, HDR has decent performance.

If you want to play with fbos, you can set the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/OffscreenRenderingMode = "fbo"

It is a string value, create it if it isn't there yet. The default value if no key exists is "backbuffer". Feel free to play with it, but for now I recommend to keep HDR off.