Enemy Territory OS X is SLOW?

(austinshea) #1

I have a dual 1ghz G4 powermac with 2 gigs of ram a 9800 pro video card. As far as I can tell, this should be far more than what is nessicary to play enemy territory (given my experience with pc version.) I can run quake 3 on this set up at 1280x1024 all the settings up, etc etc. and it never drops below 90 fps. In big maps in ET in 640x480 with all the settings on low and the detail at 16 bit, etc etc. It drops to 30 and below in wide open areas. Is there anything I’m missing? Is my cpu really not powerful enough? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

–
-Austin Shea

P.S. Is the G4 compiled binary?

(B0rsuk) #2

I use Linux and not OS X, but it seems W:ET is quite CPU intensive. Your CPU may be a bottleneck.
Athlon XP 2800+ Barton
512 RAM DDR400
GeForce2 MX

when I mimimise details, it displays up to 80 fps.
800x600; 16 bit; texture compression on; geometric detail low; bilinear; no dynamic lights;
low quality sky: on (in View menu - added 10-15 fps for me)

Oh, one more thing
Don’t test performance on Wurzburg Radar map. It’s infamous for bad performance, especially in grass area. I get 30 or less fps there.

(eq-Shrike) #3

You are right that ET is more CPU intensive but tbh you are using a very outdated gfx card. The Geforce 2 MX performs similarly to the Geforce 1 which is now 6-7 years old. It’s not surprising you get poor performance with that. With the CPU you have you should be getting better performance so I’d say in your rig it’s the GPU that’s holding you back …

(ParanoiD) #4

Yes it is. I have an Athlon XP 1800+, 1 GB DDR, ATI Radeon 9600Pro EZ 256 MB. 1024x768 high = 76 FPS constant, Before I had only 512 MB with GeForce 2 MX400 64 MB and got on medium 800x600 around 40 FPS.

(B0rsuk) #5

No, no now you’re confused. The hardware I posted was MINE.

Original (OS X) poster uses
9800 pro and 1ghz G4 + 2 gigs of ram.

But yes, I know. The sole reason I didn’t buy better gfx card is because I’m waiting for prices to fall… and for release of ET:QW.
The best card for AGP I can afford is GeForce6800. I though about 6800LE a bit - good performance/price and people had a lot of luck with unclocking pipes.Fully unlocked 6800LE is nearly as fast as Ultra; this happens about 25% of the time. On the other hand, it is rare to find a 6800LE where you can’t unlock at least 12/5 pipelines without suffering from artifacts.

I decided in favor of ‘full’ GeForce6800 because this way I’m 100% sure I’ll get 12 working pipelines; and I still can try to unlock 4 + 1.
It has only 128 memory, but 256 bandwidth; and benchmarks show more card memory doesn’t matter until you try 1280x1024. I’ll be playing 1024x768 instead.

I’ll also buy +512 RAM DDR400. Dual channel mode benefits aren’t spectacular for Doom3 - but you still get +5 fps or so.