Team Fortress 2 Forum

Any updates would be appreciated.

Love your product... and so do the guys at TWIT and Macbreak, hehe.

Usually we don't want to give out too many details about our upcoming plans, because there can be bad obstacles until the last minute and people tend to understand rough announcements as promises. So this is what I've been doing all the time, but do not read that as promises that 7.0 will have any specific feature:

However, the main HL2 & friends focused work is towards getting dxlevel 90 / 95 running. Unfortunately for the Mac users, we found a number of blocker bugs in MacOS drivers. I reported them to Apple, but for now we have to keep general Shader Model 2 and 3 support disabled on Macs by default. Those who want to play with the features will be able to do so on Leopard, but all sort of breakage may occur. (Tiger is missing GL_EXT_texture_sRGB support, so dxlevel 90 support in HL2 will never be possible on Tiger).

Appart of that we did some general driver bug debugging, so we understand the Geforce 8 and Radeon HD cards a bit better, even though we're still not happy with them. Also we have a proper fix for the broken menu text now, so the unreliable registry hack isn't needed any longer.

Beyond the HL2 horizon I've spent a lot of time on improving our D3D support in general, without special focus on any game. This may help your favorite unsupported games.

Thanks for the update.

I know nothing is never set in stone, just nice to know some progress is made.

Stefan, now that 10.5.2 is out, and there's an updated video driver for nearly all video cards now by way of "Leopard Graphics Update 1.0" Has Apple listened to your bug reports allowing us access to dxlevel 90/95? There's also OpenGL updates in the Graphics Update as well.

I know that these updates are a few hours old, but I figured I'd ask now.

Thanks for any input you can provide.

--Travis

We have to test that yet. I will see if Apple replies to any of my bug reports, and we will retest the problems, but currently it is a bit too early to say if anything has changed.

That said, we're highly interested in your experiences. For starters it is good enough if the patches do not break anything, and next they might improve some performance problems.

If you're highly interested, you can activate 6.2's directx9 code, it is good enough to get something visible from Team Fortress 2, and it should run Half Life 2, CSS, and all the other older games quite well. You can enable it with this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/UseGLSL = "enabled"

If the games start up, enter the game and draw something it is a quite good sign. If this drawing mimiks an animation in some way(~10 fps), then things are looking promissing.

EDIT: You'll have to edit the game's startup options in Steam and pass -dxlevel 90 to the game at least once to make it start in dxlevel 90

I haven't yet started the game in DX9 Mode, I did replay the last part in portal, where you kill the thing and get sucked up through the thing (I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't yet played) and I have to say, on 10.4.2 that scene would run at 10-15fps under low graphics settings (Although higher screen settings. I use 1024x640 in Windowed mode on my C2D 2.2GHz MBP with 2GB Ram and the 128mb GeForce 8600M GT Card.) I saw 30-40 fps in this scene alone after the update in higher graphic settings!

I'll try the registry key and dxlevel 90 now.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

If you're highly interested, you can activate 6.2's directx9 code,
it is good enough to get something visible from Team Fortress 2, and
it should run Half Life 2, CSS, and all the other older games quite
well. You can enable it with this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/UseGLSL = "enabled"

If the games start up, enter the game and draw something it is a
quite good sign. If this drawing mimiks an animation in some way(~10
fps), then things are looking promissing.

EDIT: You'll have to edit the game's startup options in Steam and
pass -dxlevel 90 to the game at least once to make it start in
dxlevel 90

I can't get past the Loading... screen on TF2 and it locks up. In portal I just get a black screen and it locks up Crossover (I have to force quit the bottle)

Travis La Marr wrote:

I can't get past the Loading... screen on TF2 and it locks up. In
portal I just get a black screen and it locks up Crossover (I have
to force quit the bottle)

This is in dxlevel 90, right? That's not too unexpected because CrossOver 6.2 is based on a rather old version of the D3D code which has a few known bugs with TF2 and dxlevel 90/95, so it might be CrossOver's fault after all.

The performance improvement in dxlevel 81 sounds really promising on the other hand.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Travis La Marr wrote:

I can't get past the Loading... screen on TF2 and it locks up. In
portal I just get a black screen and it locks up Crossover (I have
to force quit the bottle)

This is in dxlevel 90, right? That's not too unexpected because
CrossOver 6.2 is based on a rather old version of the D3D code which
has a few known bugs with TF2 and dxlevel 90/95, so it might be
CrossOver's fault after all.

The performance improvement in dxlevel 81 sounds really promising on
the other hand.

I get the same behavior after enabling the registry hack.

It seems there is improved performance all around with 10.5.2 + the Updated Video Drivers.

I've noticed improvement as well.
Although Team Fortress 2 is garbage on my mac. Lets say Episode Two is a dream and TF 2 is a nightmare! Although overall improvement in video performance. Although my problems are not related to video drivers but some program problems itself. Advanced multiplayer games are my issue especially Team Fortress 2 and the mod Insurgency.
Anyone tested the directX 9 with the nightly builds. Also release date for Crossover 7.0? I find it stupid to buy new support for 6.0 only for a new version of crossover to come.

improvements here as well

the huge issue with multiplayer games w/crossover still exists though, esp. tf2.

100+fps when joining a game, a couple minutes later it never goes above 20fps :-\ (lowest settings)

whereas games like hl2 and ep1/2 run quite consistently

We have isolated this issue to drawing the semi-transparent cloaked spies(of the own team, the others are invisible). The framebuffer readback is too slow, we need GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit for this. We've filed a feature request at Apple, so far only radeon cards on Leopard support it. Crossover 6.2 doesn't use it yet, but if frame buffer objects are stable enough we'll make use of it in the future.

sounds good.

(radeon 2600 HD) :D

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

We have isolated this issue to drawing the semi-transparent cloaked
spies(of the own team, the others are invisible). The framebuffer
readback is too slow, we need GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit for this.
We've filed a feature request at Apple, so far only radeon cards on
Leopard support it. Crossover 6.2 doesn't use it yet, but if frame
buffer objects are stable enough we'll make use of it in the future.

actually, forgot to mention.

are you sure the spies are the only cause? happens even when there are no spies on either team. for example, i'm on 2fort alone, and i shoot a drink can prop. fps drop from 100+ to twenties/thirties. and thats just an example i can reproduce

(imac 2.4 ghz core2duo; radeon 2600 HD 256mb; 4Gb ram)

John Torque wrote:

actually, forgot to mention.

are you sure the spies are the only cause? happens even when there
are no spies on either team. for example, i'm on 2fort alone, and i
shoot a drink can prop. fps drop from 100+ to twenties/thirties. and
thats just an example i can reproduce

Ken tested bullet holes because they were mentioned here in the forums, but we could not see problems with them(he shot around like mad with the machine gun). Probably bullet holes on props or metal surfaces are different though.

No issues with the latest os update on my side... although their new map badlands runs very choppy :( .

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

John Torque wrote:

actually, forgot to mention.

are you sure the spies are the only cause? happens even when there
are no spies on either team. for example, i'm on 2fort alone, and
i
shoot a drink can prop. fps drop from 100+ to twenties/thirties.
and
thats just an example i can reproduce

Ken tested bullet holes because they were mentioned here in the
forums, but we could not see problems with them(he shot around like
mad with the machine gun). Probably bullet holes on props or metal
surfaces are different though.

well yes, seems like the console/autoexec commands i used didn't turn off bulletholes/decals in metal.

can you tell me which setting's used to disable them? (i tried mp_decals 0, r_drawdecals 0, etc. or something along those lines)

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

John Torque wrote:

actually, forgot to mention.

are you sure the spies are the only cause? happens even when there
are no spies on either team. for example, i'm on 2fort alone, and
i
shoot a drink can prop. fps drop from 100+ to twenties/thirties.
and
thats just an example i can reproduce

Ken tested bullet holes because they were mentioned here in the
forums, but we could not see problems with them(he shot around like
mad with the machine gun). Probably bullet holes on props or metal
surfaces are different though.

well yes, seems like the console/autoexec commands i used didn't turn off bulletholes/decals in metal.

can you tell me which setting's used to disable them? (i tried mp_decals 0, r_drawdecals 0, etc. or something along those lines)