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It's important to know that the game uses pixel and vertex shaders for pretty much everything; pixel and vertex shaders which aren't supported on the Radeon 8500/9000.  Thus, it's very graphically intensive.  So much so, that it chokes the Radeon 9600 in my G5, even.  You're being hit with a double whammy of performance pain by running it on a Radeon 9000, because since most of the pixel and vertex programs are not supported by the card, your system has to run all of the necessary pixel and vertex programs in software mode, which further chokes your already near the minimum 1.25 GHz G4.  Part of the problem is driver issues with Apple/ATI/nVidia, but part of it is that you're running a modern game with modern graphics features on what is essentially an obsolete video card.

I imagine the code itself could use a bit more optimization and tweaking, though, as there seem to be some overdraw issues (as in, it's trying to render things that aren't even on the screen, thus slowing the framerate considerably), and some bugs/glitches in the FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering (namely, artifacts in the text), but it's fairly solid for the most part.

That makes no sense.. there is something else going on..

Yeah, don't believe a word that shady Glenda character says... Not like she'd know anything, right?


(In case you didn't really know, Glenda is the nice lady who happens to be Director of PC and Mac Development at Aspyr - You know, the one untimately responsible for bringing us the port.)

And as I said.. Minimum requirements are 1 ghz g4 and a 32 meg card.

As pointed out, it's not the VRAM that's the problem - it's that our 9000s (Yeah, I have one too) are older and lack the features (vertex shaders and other big words) which are utilized by the game. As such, our machines have to do all that cool shading stuff in software rendering. That is what slows it down.

Again that doesn't add up. This isn't a slow down like normally happens when a video card is choked or a CPU is. There are many parts of the game that play fine and if I turn on my knight speed and start running I can see evertyhign slow down and get choppier. I excect that and there is nothin you can do about that except get faster hardware.
But my point is there is some other cause that isnt' hardware. I can walk through the same area's time and time and time again and they are always problematic. Take when you land on manaan. As soon as you leave the ship and head own the long hallway, its fine, no major issues. As soon as you go down the next long hallway and you gotta talk to the guy and pay your docking fee, The second you get near where he is the game slows to a crawl and will freak out, and your charachter winds up spinning in circles and is stuck. There is nothing going on in that room, its smaller and less graphically intense than the room that was right before it. And yet the game freaks out. I can watch my CPU meter and it will hover around 50% or less as I try to walk around in that room, which mean s my CPU isn't choked. Dropping video card settings doesn't help so the video card isn't being choked either.

Glenda may be a perfectly nice person. But 'im not going to let them try to pawn the problem off on me, making it sound like my hardware is so crappy and outdated that its my fault the game wont play well. My computer is not even two years old yet.

Fact of the matter it doesnt' even matter at this point, least not for me. I've beat the game like 4 times now. I"m about done playing it. My wife on teh other hand will be headidn to manaan in another few hours of gameplay. Thus far I've had her avoid it. KOTOR is the FIRST game she has really played and she loves it to death and she is not a gamer by any means. But I know shes gonna be so pissed off and irritated trying to do anythign on manaan that i'm gonna have to takeove rand walk her aroudn the place. Its taken me forever to get my wife into any game at all and I dont want her swearing them off cuz a stupid bug.

If glenda has information then all I want to know is.. Are they making any progress on a patch to help with this problem in the not to distant future? Or is it going to be months before we see any kind of update that might help this issue. If its going to be months then we'll jsut keep going and we'll see how my wife does with the rest of the game. If something should be released to help the issue in a somewhat short time frame then i'll just make sure she avoids manaan a little longer in the hopes that a patch will make it more playable.

The reception area in Manaan has water.  The reflection, refraction, specular, environment, and bump maps of the water are very complex, advanced shaders, and I imagine at least one of those is far beyond the 128 instruction length the Radeon 9000 is capable of handling.

Characters in the game, while high poly, only have some simple bump maps, environment maps, and specular highlights.  Nothing too complex.

The Cantinas, based on what I've been told by Brad Oliver, who programmed the game, have a ton of dynamic lights and shaders, despite their simple appearance.

Reducing the texture detail, resolution, etc. won't make a difference at all in how well the game runs on most machines because the most limiting factor will consistently be the video card's ability to handle and render those pixel and vertex shaders.

I'd like to drop in a 9800..but alas you cannot get one with a FRIGGIN ADC port..
Least none that i've been able to find. Just stuff for the G5. yea i could get the converter but thats another 100 bucks on top of hte 350 for the card.. I dont want a 9800 that bad.

But the problem only goes away once I complete that quest.

That's because the number of vertex shader programs being run drops when you complete the quest as well. Every person being drawn uses a bunch of vertex programs, and the ones in the underworld, cantina and a few other places use the largest vertex programs in the app.

They do bone transformations for most models in the vertex program, which is a fantastic win when it runs on the video card (e.g. all cards but the r200s), and a terrible nightmare when it runs in the software emulator (the r200s).

It probably isn't needful, and if so you'd lose the win mentioned. Are you having issues?

IIRC Brad said a few months ago this wasn't an issue with the GF4s. I'd have to go looking up references, but I think the instruction length limit of the R200s is pretty near a non-issue with the GF4s.

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later
CPU Processor: PowerPC G4 or later
CPU Speed: 1GHz or faster
Memory: 256 MB or higher
Hard Disk Space: 4.2GB free disk space
Video Card (ATI): Radeon 8500 or better
Video Card (NVidia): GeForce2 MX or better
Video Memory (VRam): 32 MB or higher
Media Required: DVD Drive

You're baseline for CPU, but might be overall OK, altho without pixel shaders you won't all get teh pretty. (Is there a demo? I don't remember one. Reviews might help).

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't getting that it's a particular problem unique to that card. The heck with it, I'll just buy the blasted thing and see for myself. Everything I've heard makes me think there'll be plenty to enjoy even with un-amazing performance.

Just a quick question: Is it possible to look up and down on the mac version of KOTOR ? I tried looking around on a PC with the mouse, and it dident get me anywhere...

There's a free-look (or mouse-look) mode in the game. I hardly ever use it, so I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how you activate it. I think it had something to do with Caps Lock.

It's not going to happen.  Most games are single-threaded apps that are next to, if not completely, impossible to split into multi-threaded apps that can be split across two processors.  By default, OS X offloads sound to the second CPU under most circumstances, but that's the best you'll get.

If the R200 problem basically means that graphics gets offloaded to the CPU for software rendering. Wouldn't making the game MP aware help with the problem for all the people without top of the line cards but stiill have DP?

In this specific case, no. The offload to the software vertex program emulator happens behind KOTOR's back inside of OpenGL. Any MP optimization for this problem would have to come from Apple. For all I know, the software vertex program emulator is already MP-aware (it seems like a good candidate).