Warlords running extremely slow on mac

[Macemillion]

Hey there, I just installed warlords on my mac and find that it's extremely slow and choppy.  Homeworld doesn't run like a charm but it's not close to this bad.  I just recently installed Leopard, could that be the problem or is warlords just a lot more graphics intensive than regular homeworld?  I have a terrible, terrible graphics card but bear with me:

 

G5 dual 1.8 ghz

3 GB ram

nvidia 64mb

 

Any other mac users out there that can run warlords well?  Thanks to yall for making a wonderful mod, keep up the good work!

[EvilleJedi]

it is probably the graphics card, one of the big things with warlords is it really pushes the engine, for example a frigate in HW2 at full detail is 1600 triangles, warlords they may be up to 7000

 

one of the biggest factors would be to disable anti aliasing in your video card options and to turn off shadows

 

also set it on small unit caps and only one AI player helps to cut down on processor overhead in battles.

[Macemillion]

Thanks!  Just ordered a new graphics card (256  mb) so we'll see how that helps things.

[Macemillion]

On a side note, I tried installing warlords on my G4 dual 1.25 ghz running tiger (10.4.11) and it won't work.  Specificially, when I run the warlords launcher for the first time and it asks me to locate the homeworld 2 application, I locate and select it but it says that it's an invalid path.  I used the same exact method on my G5 running leopard and it worked successfully.

[shadowlegion421]

i dont know much about the mac os's, but i do know that as a rule mac hardware is not as good as pc hardware, the software however, is far superior and efficient. homeworld 2 was designed primarily for pc, and so it was made to make use of the best hardware available at the time. i remember installing warlords on the comp i had when hw2 came out, and i had to turn stuff way down. mac's perform beautifully with mac software, but not so much with infficient pc software. if i were you, id recommend just spending a few hundred on a decent gaming pc if you play games much, and use the macs for everything else.

[Macemillion]

Hmm, well I don't know where you get your ideas about mac hardware, but mac and pc graphics cards are made by the same companies and usually the same card will work in both a pc and a mac.  As far as the processors go, intel is giving all of their fastest chips to apple before the pc companies now.  So what exactly do you mean when you say that mac hardware is not as good?  Honestly, I love macs but when you look at the numbers, macs and pc's are about on par.  If one surpasses the other it is usually only for a few months or less.  If anyone has a strong preference one way or the other it's probably just preference based on what they do more of.  Games are developed in higher numbers for pc's not because their hardware is better but because a lot more people own them.  On the other hand, if you do audio production stuff like myself, you're stupid not to use a mac because most of the best audio software is made for macs.  If anything you could argue that apple's hardware is on average superior because their systems are tested longer before being released to ensure compatibility of all internal components and those components are often made specially for the machine they're going in, not generic parts that go in every pc.  Also I was not aware that mac software was so much better, but I'll take your word for it. 

[EvilleJedi]

the biggest issue with macs is that because no hardware that is not certified to run is available you have to go through the vertical retail channel which jacks the price up, though for video cards I believe it's just standard PCIX now so there isn't a compatibility problem. not to mention the biggest issue that plagued mac hardware was reverse endian notation on all memory locations (powerPC I hate you) now you can run OSX on a PC if you are willing to do a lot of nasty things to get it to work. (I still don't understand why apple won't just sell OSX for everyone and force microsoft to a duel, even if driver support is shoddy it is still competition to M$ and should drive prices down in both areas)

 

in short you basically pay the apple tax to make sure it 'just works'

[Evaders99]

Because Apple makes more selling the 'Apple' hardware... even if it is now the same as your average PC.

PCIe or PCI-X?

 

It's funny that while Apple moved from the PowerPC, all the major consoles run on the PowerPC now. So IBM still wins.

Edited November 28, 2007 by Evaders99

[EvilleJedi]

IBM wins so much, they got all three consoles in some shape or form

[shadowlegion421]

not being a real technical hardware guru, i was just goin on the macs that i have used, which arent many. as far as specs went, the hardware in them was less capable than the pcs in the same room. however, running mac os, and mac software, they often completed whatever task was given to them before the pc's. again, i dont know a truckload about hardware or software, just a little more than the average bear. as far as the software went, especially mac os, it was apparent that there was much less background bullshit running on macs. also, as you stated, i would assume that the extra testing macs go through before production carries over in to the software area, further streamlining their operation. i dont argue that in every sense a mac is a better product. it is not, unfortunately, the more useful of the two as far as the average computer user goes. gaming is woefully pc dominated, and most games just arent engineered for macs, even if they are released for them.

[Macemillion]

Well said, but as for the problem of the invalid path error on the G4... any ideas?  It seems odd to me it would work on leopard and not tiger, usually things are the other way around if they're pre-leopard release.

[EvilleJedi]

could it simply be a bug that was fixed in leopard?