I just got a few new games (all open source) including URT and TC:E. TC:E has always lagged only slightly worse than Wolfenstien ET. I was thinking why W:ET lagged so bad, and then realized: QUAKE 3 ISN'T A UNIVERSAL BINARY! Neither is Nexuiz. Why haven't the devs converted Nex yet? Becasue it still runs extremely slow on my computer, which is a Macbook, and runs much more powerful games without lagging.

Speaking of lagging, I was just wondering at the moment about mirror surfaces. I saw someone using them in augenkrebs on Youtube... but the SVN doesn't allow them as far as I can tell.

Ummm, yes it is...

r_water 1 to enable them.

And the bad performance is mostly a result of GLSL not working on OS X, so you can't enable the good graphics effects (not sure if reflection is GLSL-only too) and you actually run a slower renderer. These are bugs in the drivers of OS X...

well, and how do other games solve that problem? They don't use GLSL but ARB shaders instead, but these are much more work to develop and maintain. Apple should simply fix their drivers to support GLSL right, and then it should be all fine.

Ok, I'll try the r_water cmd. And yes, Apple has been very stuck up about that, haven't they. I read their remarks on the Mac GL system, and the whole thing was a lie. Shaders just don't work, no matter what they say.

BTW, to verify that Nexuiz is an universal binary, you can use:

lipo -info Nexuiz.app/Contents/MacOS/nexuiz-osx-agl-bin

2.3 has still "ppc" in the name of the binary, but is an universal one. 2.4 will "fix" this naming issue.

And I don't think Apple is really stuck up regarding OpenGL... it's that they make the drivers, and not the GPU vendors, and Apple only cares if stuff works for contracted companies. We don't have a contract with Apple, so they have no reason to get it fixed - and as all GPUs suck the same way on OS X, the GPU vendors don't have a reason to apply pressure to Apple for this.

I bet - if Apple would not make the drivers but the GPU vendors did, we'd have a much better driver situation now. I do not know WHY the GPU vendors don't release their own drivers for OS X - either Apple doesn't allow that, or the GPU vendors don't care, but I suspect it's the former because they DO make drivers for Linux.