# halo on dual g5



## Lt Major Burns (Feb 5, 2005)

i just got halo.  look at my specs - this is a two grand computer... why is it barely playable (still choppy) even on the lowest settings? are there any tips? i thought i had a super computer? (according to apple...)


----------



## The Memory Hole (Feb 5, 2005)

Hmm... which version of Halo are you playing?
I have a Single 1.8 GHz G5 (768 MB RAM), and I feel it runs just fine (high settings, 1280x1024, no specular and no shadows)... but of course, I suppose that is objective.


----------



## Pengu (Feb 5, 2005)

Well games always depend on the graphics card a lot. what have you got? have you got anything else running in the background? is your OS and the game up to date?


----------



## ex2bot (Feb 6, 2005)

Halo runs VERY well on my DP1.8 G5 with 1.25 GB RAM. I did spend a little extra and get the ATI 9600XT gfx card.

IIRC, I set the graphics detail to max at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (can't remember offhand) and had pixel and vertex shading enabled for the best gfx.

Doug


----------



## Viro (Feb 6, 2005)

If you stayed with the standard fx5200, you need to upgrade. That video card isn't able to run games well at all.


----------



## Lt Major Burns (Feb 6, 2005)

no, i'm running with the radeon 9600XT. i have a gig of ram. i eventually turned everything off and ran at 640x480. still choppy - i closed all other apps before starting it as well.... i'm running halo 1.0.2 and MacOS 10.3.7


----------



## Decado (Feb 6, 2005)

with everything of it was quite playable (even smooth) on my humble computer, so it must be something wrong somewhere.
what if you play with everything on? is it still as slow or is it worse?
have you benchmarked your computer?


----------



## ex2bot (Feb 6, 2005)

Have you run Activity Monitor? It's in /Applications/Utilities. Click on the CPU column title to sort by cpu hogs. Make sure there isn't some errant program stealing a lot of processor time.

Are you running it full screen or in a window?

Doug


----------



## Lt Major Burns (Feb 6, 2005)

oh wai i just figured it! it was the settings box that comes up as a launcher - i'd maxed everything. still - it should be a little bit better optimized as a game - the xbox is a 733mhz with a geforce 3..... and i realize that consoles are diffrent - but not THAT much anymore, surely....


----------



## ex2bot (Feb 6, 2005)

The Mac version of Halo was derived from the PC version, which was developed for 2.5+GHz Pentiums/Athlons. Higher resolutions, fancier graphics.

Doug


----------



## HoZ (Mar 8, 2005)

it works fine on my imac g5.... no problems.... at all...


----------



## HoZ (Mar 8, 2005)

your graphics card is your prob.... just get a GeForce... say 64mb...


----------



## Zammy-Sam (Mar 8, 2005)

The XT9600 is most probably not the problem. And I don't think a "GeForce ... 64mb" is enough. That could mean you are talking about a GeForce2 MX card, anno 1999, as well.


----------



## Lt Major Burns (Mar 8, 2005)

it was just FSAA 9x that did it... geez.  switch that off and it works like a dream.  bit choppy towards the end of the game for some reson though - the bit where you're escaping on the warthog was choppy as hell i seem to remember.

and my radeon will kick everything out of all except the very high end geforces. commiserations to those who lumped for the £30-cheaper fx5200....


----------



## ex2bot (Mar 8, 2005)

Also, if you haven't already, go to System Preferences>Energy Saver>Options and set Processor Performance to "Highest".

Doug

P.S. I'll be buying Doom 3 as soon as it is available (Mar. 14). Unfortunately, it will humble our 9600s. It's supposed to be playable at ~20+ fps depending on options. I'll be waiting until a generation or two _after_ the X800 / 6800 to buy a new graphics card.


----------



## padishahemperor (Mar 8, 2005)

I'm playing it fine on my PowerMac 5500 225MHz..




..sorry, couldn't resist...


----------



## Qion (Mar 8, 2005)

I figure that you have got this taken care of already, but make sure that your pixel shaders are turned to the right setting.(check on the internet for this) On higher-end Macs running Halo, if you don't get this setting just-right, your computer will lag like crazy. Also, turn Lens Flare to medium(not high or extreme) I run this game on my 1Ghz eMac and I'm fine on highest settings(well at least as high as my piece of s*** Radeon 7500 will let me). Hope this helps someone somewhere.......... ::alien::


----------



## Pengu (Mar 8, 2005)

Re: the xbox thing.. Don't forget, an XBOX puts out a picture that is 640x480, and very crappy in comparison to a PC/Mac version. consoles don't need to put out high resolution/quality images, as most TV's can't display the high quality picture anyway.


----------



## HoZ (Mar 9, 2005)

ahhh... crap


----------



## Qion (Mar 10, 2005)

HoZ said:
			
		

> ahhh... crap


?


----------



## HoZ (Mar 11, 2005)

i was worng...


----------



## Tyaedalis (May 18, 2005)

I have an iMac G5 single 1.8 Ghz and I could run it on full settings without any problems.  I played it with only the hardware it came with, too. (256 RAM, 1440x900 res, etc.)


----------



## Lt Major Burns (May 18, 2005)

yeah, the problems i ws having stemmed from the fact i had FSAA et to 9x....  turns out my radeon can barely manage 2x...


----------



## a2daj (May 19, 2005)

Maybe I missed it, but have you tried the latest version, 1.05?  When Halo was first released High and Extreme Lens Flares caused performance hits due to the method used by the developers.  Coupled with FSAA it made a huge performance hit.  With Mac OS X 10.3.5, the necessary feature to support hardware accelerated Lens Flares was added to Apple's OpenGL implementation.  The latest version of Halo has the code in place to take advantage of the new feature so you should see almost no performance hit with High and Extreme Lens Flares and significantly less of a performance hit when coupled with FSAA.

Also, Radeons, even the X800, can only do 2, 4, and 6x FSAA.  The other numbers are for NVIDIA cards.  I'm not sure which sample rate ATI cards fall back to when you set it to a number the chipset doesn't support.

I've had a Mac Halo Performance page setup for a long time:

http://homepage.mac.com/a2daj/HaloPerfInfo.html

but it only includes information up to Mac Halo 1.05.3.  I still need to update it with the Mac Halo 1.5.1(IMO, should have been named 1.06 to cut down on versin number mistakes.  Too easy to confuse with a 1.05 version) updater information as that version includes the Lens Flares fix.

Also, any version newer than Mac Halo 1.02 requires the CD in to play.


----------

