CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I bought Crossover Games and I had a question. I can run left 4 dead 2, but its laggy. im running snow leopard 10.6.2 with an imac that has a 3.06 ghz core 2 duo proccesor, an nvidia geforce 8800 gs 512mb and 2gb of 800 mhz ram. i dont think that with my specs, i should have to run the game on low to get it to not lag. is something wrong here? i get about 40 fps with everything on low. can someone help me out and tell me how to fix this. crossover games is great btw its really good and the people who made it are awesome for thinking about mac users that want to play windows games.

well.. your system is well above the recommended requirements of L4D2... (though perhaps a couple more gigs of ram would be helpful)

What's your games settings> (Specifically: resolution? fullscreen or not? low or high violence mode? texture settings? shader settings? etc.

Okay so this is how it runs:

All settings maxed out on single player- 20 fps
All setting maxed out on multiplayer - 10 fps
All settings on medium - 30 fps
All settings on low - 40 fps

Theres defintaley something wrong there, and ram would only make my loading times faster. I noticed something too, when i look at a wall say on left 4 dead i can get 80 fps then wen i turn around it will go down to 20 fps. Idk wats up with that lol but thats weird. anyway, like i said i dont want to complain becuase crossover games is awesome and i thank codeweavers for making an awesome product :).

Windows games like Left 4 Dead 2 use Direct3D for rendering 3D scenes. Mac OS X has no native support for Direct3D, of course, so CrossOver has to translate to OpenGL which is the 3D rendering API supported by Mac OS X.

There are places where this translation is less than optimal, currently. We're actively working to improve those when we find them.

There are also problems where OpenGL just isn't a good match for what Direct3D games do. Both rendering APIs are fundamentally capable of doing the same thing, but you might have to do things very differently in one than in the other to get the same result. We can only do a fairly direct translation. We can't redesign the whole approach the game takes. That can result in non-optimal performance that isn't avoidable with the current state of technology.

And, of course, there are some places where our translation is just incomplete or wrong. Usually, that results in failure to render rather than a performance problem, though.

The upshot of all this is that you may not get performance comparable to Windows on the same hardware. You may need to turn video settings down to get playable frame rates. It should improve with future releases.

Oh okay, what if i upgraded my ram from 2gb to 6gb of ram bcz my loading times are bad. would that help?

Anthony Worcester wrote:

Oh okay, what if i upgraded my ram from 2gb to 6gb of ram bcz my
loading times are bad. would that help?

Steam is a 32bit application and will not utilize more than 2gb of RAM on your system.

That being said, Steam/Steam applications should not need more than 2gb of RAM.

Regards,
~Jeff

Yeah thats the thing though, they do. Games like Left 4 dead 2 take up a lot of ram and when i check in activity montior to see how my computers doing, it shows that i have like 16mb of ram left and i heard that putting more ram in will make my loading times faster.

The short answer is that more RAM might make things faster, depending on the cause of the slowness. So might a faster hard drive or CPU, again depending.

On the other hand, the slowness might be due to Left 4 Dead 2 and/or Steam checking in with Valve servers, or the like. It might also be due to bugs in CrossOver, L4D2, Steam, or whatever. In that case, upgrading your hardware might not help.

The long answer:

There are two types of memory to consider: virtual memory and real memory. You have 2GB of real memory installed. Nevertheless, programs and the OS, individually or collectively, can use more than 2GB of virtual memory. When that happens, the OS uses the hard drive to store what can't fit in real memory, which can introduce slowness. Adding more RAM can speed things up if this is the cause of the slowness.

If you see that you have very little free memory in Activity Monitor, that is not necessarily an indication of a problem. Mac OS X will use free real memory for cache. It is still available for programs to take, but while it is idle, the OS puts it to good use by keeping stuff that is frequently accessed from the hard drive in memory. To see how tight you are for real memory, it is usually more informative if you combine free memory and inactive memory. If those two together get really low, then more RAM could help.

Note that Windows programs running under CrossOver often reserve part of their address space even though they aren't using it. This is necessary to get the Windows programs to work properly. This reservation contributes to the VSIZE listed in Activity Monitor but is not really consuming either real memory or even virtual memory. It's just preventing a range of addresses from being used.

It's like building a 10 story building, but insisting on numbering the floors 51-60 because you've reserved numbers 1-50 for other purposes. You have a "60th" floor, but not a 60 story building.

So, the listing in Activity Monitor can make these processes look like real pigs, but that's just an artifact.

I would not personally add more ram at this time. I have an 8 core system now with 12 gigs of ram and mine is still slow. Personally until codeweavers can come out with version 9.x which we all are hoping will improve this I finally gave up and am running bootcamp and windows. I would prefer to run it under crossover but the performance is just unacceptable to me. I am not blaming codeweavers just giving my opinions. I do agree with the comments about D3D to OpenGL. I personally think OpenGL performance on snowy is slower than it is on leopard. Lets hope that Apple fixes that on 10.6.3 like the rumors are saying. I have spent way to many hours trying to make it feasible. There are other apps in steam that run much better than lfd2.

Just my 2 cents