Team Fortress 2 Forum

Hi,

I have a first gen mac pro (2 gig ram, 2x2.66 dual core xeon's), with two 256mb nvidia GeForce 7300 GT cards. I just installed Leopard tonight, and also figured I'd give Codeweavers a try, since I god rid of my windows partitions.

I am experiencing a problem with Team Fortress 2. The game starts up fine in a window, and I am able to browse around the menu's. When I try and join a server, the game locks up, after giving a good attempt to connect to the game. This lock up also takes out the rest of my machine. I still have cursor movement, but there is no responsiveness from my Mac UI, what-so-ever. Cant focus another window, or even bring up the "Force Quit" dialog with Cmd+Opt+Escape. The only option I have is to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button for a few seconds.

The game seems to lock up in the same spot each time. It happens when "Sending client info..." appears in the progress meter that is shown, when the game is connecting to a server.

Any ideas? If we can get this to work and the game is playable, Codeweavers will absolutely have a new customer, immediately.

The sort of lockup you describe is usually a case where the WindowServer process has locked up. (If you have Remote Login enabled, and another computer, you can ssh into your Mac and see that it's still alive under the GUI.)

This lockup should never happen, obviously. More to the point, it should not be possible for a user-level program like CrossOver to cause such a lockup, no matter what it does. So, you should file a bug with Apple about it, if nothing else. If you do, it might be useful to collect a sample report to include with the bug report. You will have to ssh in as described above, use "ps" to identify the WindowServer process, and use the "sample" tool to collect the sample.

I have a similar Mac Pro (2x2 GHz, though) with only one Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT. I will double-check, but I'm pretty sure it works here. If you're willing, you might try removing the second card to see if things work better.

Thanks for the reply.

I went ahead and removed the second video card, I'm not really using it for anything right now anyways. I do eventually plan to hook up a 3rd monitor, but for now I only have two. Having two monitors on two different cards does provide noticible speed improvements on operations like expose`, but I can live without it. Not ideal, but if it gets me playing TF2 without bootcamp or virtualization I am happy:)

This seemed to help, but I now have a new issue. After playing for less than a minute, the game locks up, and I get a windows error dialog:

"Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library

This application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way

Please contact the application support team for more information"

Clicking OK causes the error dialog to pop up one more time. Clicking OK again pops me back out to OSX, with steam and crossover still running, but the frozen game is basically acting like my desktop background. Shutting down crossover brings me back to my usable desktop. Any ideas where to go from here?

Actually to add more to the above... I experienced the crash after changing the video settings while using the launch options below. I have played around some more and am getting somewhere, but still not where it needs to be for the gameplay to be satisfactory.

-fullscreen -novid -width 1920 -height 1200 -dxlevel 80

I did some further reading on these forums and put the dxlevel back to 81, and started in window mode with all the lowest video settings and default resolution. I took the dxlevel out of the launch options as instructed in other posts after setting it once.

The game is playable, but the framerate seems to get progressively worse as I play the game. It starts out extremely smooth (about 50-100 fps). The nice performance quickly fades and drops down to about 10-20 FPS. At first I thought it was the amount of players and action on my screen that caused the slow downs.. but I can join a full server, and watch the FPS stay at around 60-100, dropping down to about 40 at worst in large battles. Then after a couple of minutes it just drops down to 10-15 fps, usually right after I die, and view a couple areas in spectator mode. The framerate never recovers unless I quite the game, and restart it. But the same thing will happen again quickly.

Any tips to improve performance and make it playable? To recap, all settings are low, filtering is set to bilinear, sound quality is low, dxlevel is 81 and no other apps are running on the machine, with the exception of adium.

One suspect is the network connection with the server.

If you create your own server and play purely locally (not much fun, I know), does the framerate drop still happen?

Well, to show my FPS in game, I have been using the net_graph 1 option, which will also show latency and packet loss, and everything appears fine. I have found no shortage of servers where I can sport a ping under 20 and 0 packet loss. I'll give the local server a try and report back in a few minutes.

Also, I did have Windows running on my 1st gen macbook pro, with bootcamp, and join many of the same servers without any performance issues. But of course, ideally, I would love to give my money to you guys and not have to run Windows at all;)

Ok, seems to play very smoothly on my own local server, never really dropping below 40 FPS.

Then when I join a network game with a decent ping, it goes back to the chop routine the second other players are on the screen in a big open area (like the bridge area in 2forts).

Then oddly enough, if I disconnect from the game server and start my own again, without exiting team fortress 2 completely, I still have the same bad framerates (10-20 but mostly towards the low end) on my local server.

Edit: I did another local server test, and just ran around for a good 5 minutes, and saw the framerates just decide to magically drop in the way I've been describing, it just took several minutes.

Opened up the activity monitor, and theres nothing eating at the CPU in any significant way, except wineloader of course, hovering around 110, 465MB of memory and 3.86 virtual

The problem with FPS progressively getting worse was a bug on Team Fortress 2 itself. Valve has since released an update for this.

solgae wrote:

The problem with FPS progressively getting worse was a bug on Team
Fortress 2 itself. Valve has since released an update for this.

I wish that were the case, but the game is still unplayable on my Mac Pro. Any other ideas from the Codeweavers staff?

Dr Jones wrote:

solgae wrote:

The problem with FPS progressively getting worse was a
bug on Team Fortress 2 itself. Valve has since released an update
for this.

I wish that were the case, but the game is still unplayable on my
Mac Pro. Any other ideas from the Codeweavers staff?

The FPS-getting-low problem was (hopefully) fixed on Valve's side, but I'll be honest to you: the 7300GT is a budget card and is nowhere near powerful enough to run the game with decent resolution, although I don't really know why you had decent FPS at start. Maybe you were just looking at the area with less intensive graphics, but don't take my word for it. Try 800x600 or dxlevel 70 and see what happens. If it still gets worse after awhile, then I'm running out of ideas......I'd file a ticket on the support page.

solgae wrote:

The FPS-getting-low problem was (hopefully) fixed on Valve's side,
but I'll be honest to you: the 7300GT is a budget card and is
nowhere near powerful enough to run the game with decent resolution,
although I don't really know why you had decent FPS at start. Maybe
you were just looking at the area with less intensive graphics, but
don't take my word for it. Try 800x600 or dxlevel 70 and see what
happens. If it still gets worse after awhile, then I'm running out
of ideas......I'd file a ticket on the support page.

It may be a "budget" card, but tf2 nor any of the Source engine games take serious horsepower to run well. We're talking about an engine thats several years old at this point. Incidentally, Counter-Strike: Source runs fairly well at 1600x1200 with almost all the advanced settings on high (Too bad I hate that game). I dont expect to get the same out of tf2, but I've tried running at 800x600 and there is no change. Keep in mind, EVERY setting is set as low as it will go. :(.

Also, FYI, dxlevel 70 wont work on tf2. It has to be 80 or higher.

Back up the gcf files inside the <steam directory>\steamapps except the winui.gcf somewhere else, delete the bottle and recreate preferably a win2000 bottle. Reinstall steam, run steam once and let steam fully update itself, then exit and copy the gcf files back to <steam directory>\steamapps directory. See if it works better.

Additionally, if you have save files for your single-player games, you will want to back up the save directory inside <steam directory>\steamapps\<your account name>\<game name>\<abbreviated game name>\SAVE directory.

Also, you might want to check the integrity of the gcf files by going into my games tab -> right click team fortress 2 -> properties -> local files tab -> 'verify integrity of game cache...'

You can also try the defragment option, but I'm not sure if it'll work under CrossOver.

I had the same problem with a secondary video card. It froze on Sending client info and never came up. Removed it, and poof, it works. So there is some minor bug, and it does send the system into a freeze. Thanks for posting this so now I can really try it out!
-Kc