Nexuiz on MacPro quad 2,66

[ikir]

Hi guys! I have an high end Mac, it usually run everything at max in term of games,, even some PPC games under emulation

It has 4 core at 2,66Ghz with 4MB of cache for cpu. I have 2GB ram and a Radeon x1900XT 512MB. Anyway Nexuiz isn't that fast, naturally with all settings on/max. If i activate all options i got around 20-30 fps in action.


Maybe Mac version isn't optimized?

Do you plan to support multithread OpenGL? It could be double or more performance.


PS: i donated, i apprecciate your work and the fact you support both Mac and Linux too.

[tChr]

Hi.. If you enable abseloutly everything, I'm not sure that any existing hardware would cope. iirc someone once said "its never ment to be used" or somehing. However to go to that extremeties i think you have to enable lots of stuff not even in the menus.

However its earlier been complained about the 3D suport with mac, dont rememeber weither it was the HW or drivers that was problematic, and Nexuiz dont really run on more than one CPU iirc, unless something has changed lately.

However nexuiz is a project always being worked on so things might very well change, and might very well have changd in these regards withiut me knowing, so wait for a post by someone more enlightened than me.

cool that you like the game btw, and welcome to the forums

[ikir]

Thanks so much for your reply.

Imho multithread support would be fantastic (some games really double/quad fps).

[KadaverJack]

Imho multithread support would be fantastic (some games really double/quad fps).

Multithreading wouldn't give you any performance boost with Nexuiz. On any modern multi-core system, Nexuiz doesn't even use 100% of a single core, the bottleneck is usually the GPU. So multithreading would probably just create additional overhead and slow things down on single-core systems.

[ikir]

I don't know i'm not a coder, but World Of Warcraft and Quake 4 double their perfomance on Mac OS X (multithread OpenGL).

[SavageX]

I don't know i'm not a coder, but World Of Warcraft and Quake 4 double their perfomance on Mac OS X (multithread OpenGL).

Well, I have no idea how that multithreaded thingie is supposed to boost performance - perhaps it just hides the drivers slowness away (the app can continue although the driver is still pondering on the last frame).

Actually after reading http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2006/tn2085.html that seems to be sorta the case.

Our main problem on the Mac platform isn't speed (well, that too) but the horrible driver quality. On a Mac Nexuiz will look worse than on a normal PC thanks to the drivers forcing us to disable eye candy (otherwise it'll just crash or draw stuff wrong). If things work they're usually slower than on Windows or Linux.

Another problem is that not one Nexuiz developer has a recent Mac (only one old Mac mini IIRC). Currently we just compile Nexuiz for Macs and hope it'll run. That's far from optimizing performance.

[ikir]

I understand. As far i know new games, written with OSX in mind are fast as on XP, so much more faster than same game in Vista. Since OSX has a very good multicore/cpu support, games written for more cores or using multithread OpenGL gains a lot. indeed WOW gained double fps with last Blizzard update on low end machines like Macmini e MacBook.

If you need a tester i can help a little. And i'll make my friends donate, so you can buy a new Mac
Could you ask to an Mac developers to join your team? maybe you can find someone posting on some Mac big portals or developmente website.

If you want i could ask for a developer on some italian website (telling that the coder must know english)

Anyway, thanks for your fantastric work.

PS: with this machine i can play WOW with all to max setting at 1680x1050, Quake 4 with high quality setting and all effect/option to max at 1600x1200 (with 1680x1050 runs very good but on some area i get a slow down to 20-25 fps) and HL2 mods (Source engine) like dark Messiah to 1680x1050 here again max setting. So i think Nexuiz/Darkplaces could be optimized a little.

[Flory-Wan Kenoby]

Hi,
i am a mac user, i have played at your wonderfoul game.
But, i have see that i have slow performance too on my MaBookPro

So i will ask if mac palyers in the future could have an optmized version which runs as fast as Win version

I would donate if it become more playable

Searh an OS X developer,

thanks

[divVerent]

Actually, the main problem is that the engine developers don't have Macs. I am not one of the main engine developers, but I do have a Mac - a Mac mini, with a Radeon 9200. That is too slow for Nexuiz anyway (on Linux too). Also, it is a PPC Mac.

[SavageX]

Actually now there's code to use the multithreaded OpenGL thingie in the engine (thanks LordHavoc!). Of course this is untested.

New versions of Nexuiz will ship with that support, although it may be you have to enable it manually - we have no idea if it is safe to enable it by default. This needs testing.