diablo 2 beta 1.10

N

naodx

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Ok, for all you d2 fans out there who have been waiting for 1.10, there is a beta of it out now for the mac.

http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/beta/

From my experience (just recently tried it) it fixed all the performance issues that I had with my machine. Finally I can play this game with hardware acceleration turned on.

I haven't played it long enough to see what changes/updates they have done to the monsters and players spells, just long enough to fill up the screen with several monsters. Before this would result in choppy play, but no more.

My setup: MDD dual 1Ghz, GeForce4 Ti, 1.25 GB ram
 
Don't hate me for saying this, but I've played D2 on crappier PCs than your Mac's specs and it's smooth.

Just goes to show that the developers gotta make a better effort in porting games to Mac.
 
true, and though it is an old game, it is still fun to break out and do a little hack n' slash. And yes, it did/does play better on PCs with lesser specs.

I'm just happy that they are still trying to improve the game.

Yes, they do need to make a better effort in porting.
 
Well, feature-wise, they added a new "Hardcore" option when creating a character whereby if you die, you're dead, and you can't resurrect yourself.
 
But this is Blizzard we're talking about. They have the resources to do a decent Mac port, look at Warcraft 3!
 
Originally posted by Lycander
But this is Blizzard we're talking about. They have the resources to do a decent Mac port, look at Warcraft 3!
Click to expand...
Good port to OS 9.
Bad port to OS X.

I ran D2 on a 800Mhz Duron (yes Duron) with an 8mb ATI and it ran smoothly..wish it would be better for u.
 
Excellent port on Starcraft... a long time ago.

Of course, that needs practically no graphics acceleration.
 
Starcraft doesn't have as large of maps as D2 though. I was blown away by the way D2 is just one big continous map that probably loads parts of itself in the background as your moving along. And enter new areas is no load time at all. So it's doing a lot of work in the background in addition to stuff you actually see.
 
Much better! Not perfect, but then again this is just a beta. But nontheless, the game runs much better in Mac OS X now.
 
As long as you run Diablo II in software mode (and don't have a ton of apps running in the background) OS X performance should be pretty good.
Even in OS 9 they only decent API to use for hardware acceleration is Glide. OpenGL performance isn't too hot and RAVE, while better than OGL, still has troubles when things get busy. Software mode won't get as high framerates, but the fps remain much more consistent.
They did do some performance tuning with OpenGL in OS X but it still has some major performance issues. The changes they made will only kick in if you have Quartz Extreme enabled hardware. So a Rage 128 won't see any benefits. I'd still recommend SW mode though. But this is one of the reasons they released the beta so hopefully they can get even better OGL performance in OS X.
 
For those of you who don't know, there's a new Mac version of the 1.10 beta (1.10v2). It has much improved performance over the old versions (1.09 and 1.10 beta) in both OS 9 and OS X OpenGL rendering. I noticed performance increases in RAVE as well (OS 9 of course). You can grab the new beta from the same link listed in the first post.


I've posted some feedback regarding the different renderers with the latest 1.10v2 beta at battle.net. It might be interesting to those who haven't tried the latest beta but are curious about performance.

Linkage

Rather than pasting all of it here I figured I'd just post a link to encourage people to use the mac bugs forum so Blizzard can get more feedback without having to scour a bunch of 3rd party forums. Not that we don't want them here, but it would be easier for them to just look in their own forums.
 
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