Forums | MacLife

i'm not sure, but i'm very dissapointed with the performance of my geforce 4 ti. my buddy has the pc version, and has things like, say, the green overcharge on the plasma pistol; i don't. i haven't played it on "extreme" lens flare, but if it's such a performance hit it wouldn't make sense... it sucks that my 128 mb card looks as good (at best) as a pc 64 mb card, and it's entirely due to the drivers.

I can't figure out exactly what the lens flare settings in Halo do. With lens flare set to the lowest setting I get about 25 fps. With it set to the "extreme" setting I get 8 fps. I can't see any difference in quality between the two, except that anything less than "extreme" causes the plasma pistol's green charging flare to disappear.

With the higher settings, where is all of the processing power going?

Shaders and related effects take time to run- they're little programs within the graphics that create neat effects; hences the term "programmable shaders". A more powerful videocard could run them faster.

Lens flare... look at the sun in Halo. Look at the pretty, movie-like rings centered on a line between screen center and the sun's position...

Lens flare. It's an artificial, cinematic effect (our eyes don't have it, but cameras do). Pretty and fun, but you have to make the performance call- Halo's effects are cutting edge. If, say, the P-Pistol's flare were round, it'd probably not require so much power.

In this context, it might be a term for a class of effects. OTOH...

i'm not sure, but i'm very dissapointed with the performance of my geforce 4 ti. my buddy has the pc version, and has things like, say, the green overcharge on the plasma pistol; i don't. i haven't played it on "extreme" lens flare, but if it's such a performance hit it wouldn't make sense... it sucks that my 128 mb card looks as good (at best) as a pc 64 mb card, and it's entirely due to the drivers.

Your buddy is running Halo under Windows and DirectX, where shaders were born and better handled these days on current hardware. He's running the PS 1.4 path, not available in the Mac version. (Incidentally, neither speed nor effects prowess are proportional to memory; large amounts on a card allow running at very high resolution/ color depth, triple buffering and, mostly, locally storing huge texture loads).

Pixel shaders 1.4 (DirectX 8.1)
When running in PS1.4, you are compromising only a subset of effects. Specifically:
-     No bumped mirrored surfaces
-     Some video effects are two-pass

Mac Halo under OGL has only the FF and PP (much like, possibly not identical to the PC's PS 2.0) rendering paths. You're running FF:

Cards that support Hardware T&L (fixed function - DirectX 7.0)
This is the most basic rendering code path for Halo. When running in that mode, you have to accept many visual compromises but are still getting a compelling Halo visual experience. The compromises are:
-     No shadows
-     Simple active camouflage effect
-     No glows or flares
-     Very basic fog, water and lighting

It sounds like the Mac Nvidia cards do have some pretty bad drivers. I have a Radeon 9600 in my Powerbook, and it runs Halo fairly well. I was running it with just vertex shaders for a long time because every time I'd run it with pixel shaders my framerate would drop below double digits. I then realized that if I reduced the lens flare setting that I could play the game with pixel shaders and have it stay above 20 fps. Crazy stuff... Halo's a nice game... but it seems like the graphics engine needs a lot of work.

Westlake apparently couldn't get equivalents to the PC's intermediate (PS 1.1 and 1.4) rendering paths- a shame, as it takes powerful hardware to do the top (Per-Pixel) level, and FF doesn't really do justice to Halo's graphics. So it isn't really the drivers so much as the API/ hardware combo in your case. Tracks is getting speed, Mr. Binary's getting effects at the cost of speed, and neither of you has the top-level vidcards Halo needs to yield both. It doesn't help that this effects cost is on top of a slow-running game engine; only the heaviest hardware can get Halo running and looking sweet at the same time.

This game'll drive upgrades for years. (Tracks, is 'extreme' even available, or greyed out?)

Lens flare... look at the sun in Halo. Look at the pretty, movie-like rings centered on a line between screen center and the sun's position...

Lens flare. It's an artificial, cinematic effect (our eyes don't have it, but cameras do). Pretty and fun, but you have to make the performance call- Halo's effects are cutting edge. If, say, the P-Pistol's flare were round, it'd probably not require so much power.

At first I thought that the effect was solely the quality setting for the sun lens flare; I remembered seeing a movie about the production of Halo where they were showing off this nifty effect where the sun would cast a volumetric flare when it moved behind trees and things. I figured that this was probably only calculated on the "extreme" setting, though it appears that this effect didn't make it into the Mac version of the game at all, even with all the graphics maxed out. So scratch that off the list.

Interestingly enough, the outdoor levels run at nearly the same framerate with low/extreme lens flare. The indoor levels, however, slow down tremendously - and there's no sun flare to worry about there. On the Pillar of Autumn, for instance, I get about 20fps with max settings when running around the corridors, but as soon as I enter the mess hall (without any firefight, after every covenant has been killed), it drops to about 5 fps. I'm not sure what's so special about the mess hall in terms of lens flare which is apparently not present in the rest of the map, but it sucks all processing power away for these "lens flare effects," and for the life of me I can't tell where the heck these effects are. There's not so much as a volumetric light in this area. Hmmmm.......

And for goodness sake, why is the pistol flare not a sprite like the other weapons? Oh well, I'll learn to live without it.

Its going to be crap on my PowerBook 17" Rev A. isn't it? 

the game runs on my TiBook, 667mhz, and an ATI Radeon 7500. So blah!

New screens are up, including some with flare effects and a Warthog in full minigun cry in the dark, for anyone wanting to see what smoke effects, barrel rotation etc. should look like. More coming, requests for shots (type, subject, whatever) welcome.