Leber, I play with a 32meg card. I'm fine for now, though I get an fps drop...

64mb shared VRAM here, and it looks good.

It's not really a fair comparison, unfortunately. See, earlier generation cards have much simpler feature-sets and are able to achieve them much faster. So, a GeForce3 Ti200 with 64MB is actually a lot better card than a GeForceFX 5200 with 128MB, even though it's 2+ (?) years older. The 5200 was the lowest end of the new "5-series" Nvidia chips that were able to do the new 2.0 Pixel Shaders, a far more complex feature-set, and unfortunately.. it did them rather slowly. This is why the 5200 is a lot better if you disable shaders, but it's still not great.. since they don't take a lot of the simpler shortcuts that the previous generation chips did. The 5600 and 5900 (and later, 5800) of the same series weren't nearly as bad, owing to wider memory buses and faster clock rates. It's kind of like the analogy of the camel.. the older chips (GeForce 3/4 Titanium variants especially) didn't do as much but did it pretty fast, the 5200 does everything and does it poorly.

Apple, however, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't really care that much about game performance, and only wanted an inexpensive chip that was able to handle their Quartz 3D-hardware-accelerated user interface (you know, the one that makes all the crazy window-swooshing stuff). The 5200 works fine with that, since Quartz and the drivers were optimized specifically for it and only use certain functionality that works reasonably well. We were all very unhappy when they opted to put that chip in the iMac.. but, I guess it's their "low end" machine, so you can't expect too much. We weren't terribly happy about them using the GMA950 now either, since that does Vertex Shaders and T&L in software, but it seems to be a lot better chip than the 5200 was (plus the CPUs are pretty fast).

Anyway, we still go pretty far out of our way to make things work on the lowest "reasonable" common denominator.. but it's always a tradeoff. Make things look cooler, or make them fast? Provide as many toggles and options and possible.. but sometimes it isn't that simple.

I would agree with naut that the plasdevs and gauss should probably go back to the way they were before. But swarms look great now!

great explanation incarnate. I did not know how much trouble it actually is to do graphics for all those different videocards and feature sets they support (or not).

For gaming then, if I were to upgrade from an old iBook G4 to a MacBook (at least a couple years away, gotta make more money and convince my wife I need it.... not for gaming....), they have an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 128 or 256 SDRAM. I hope I'm not taking this thread too far off-topic, but how would a card like this rate? I love Macs, but I don't know too much about the nitty gritty inner workings of computers, just how to use them.

Saw a lot of swarms doing BP tonight. We might have a problem here. I have a radeon x600 video card and 1.5GB of RAM, plenty of hard drive space. Seeing swarms tonight destroyed my framerate.

ouch i use a Fx 5200 its hurts to hear that

For some reason a lot of semi budget pc's out there use the 5200, also there are a fair number of macs that do aswell. My geforce4 128 mb stuggels to render the trails at a reasonable frame rate, though I went into the videocard utilitys that are a part of the driver and changed the image quality setting from quality to high performance so it might be able to do it without taking a nap. Also it helps to use 16 bit color, I can't see the difference in the color but it does bump the framerate. I'm not familiar with the mac os but if I remember right from 7 or 8 years ago their settings are thousands, millions, and billions. Some how I seriousley doubt you will see a color difference between millions and billions, but it should give the card less work to do.

Incarnate said: Actually Lebermac, the best way to make your particular game faster is to disable shaders. I think you can do that in the config menu now, but also if you edit your config.ini, I believe you can set shaders=0 in the "OpenGL" section. If you set it in the UI, make sure you exit and re-run. The biggest problem with the 5200 is extremely slow shader support.

Thanks, yeah I know Inc - we've discussed the crappiness of my graphics card in the 1st-gen iMac G5 before. I'm thankful that VO runs at ALL. When I fire up Neverwinter Nights 1 (not the new version 2, version 1 which is what, 5 years old?) - I can get about 5-10 minutes of playing time before the machine gets too hot and goes into sleep mode, so that's a mess.

I run with shaders OFF all the time. Matter of fact, I have *EVERYTHING* off or at its lowest settings.

It's most definitely my machine, I know. I've had people tell me that it runs fine under their 32MB cards, which I don't dispute. The funny thing is, when I started playing, I *used* to get better fps with the graphics settings turned up. Originally, I thought my fps degredation was due to more and more "cool stuff" being put into the game, but I'm pretty sure now that's it's my GPU which seems to be slowly dying.

Regardless, I'll report back in when I have the folks at the Genius Bar have a look-see inside my ailing machine.

(I really like the swarm trails. I do. I hope they can be kept.)

thanks for that detailed explanation, inc., I swear I learn more about macs and pcs from reading the VO forums

Happy to help, everyone. And we will be looking into ways to improve the performance of the new trails across the board, as well as different methods of doing trails that'll still look cool but be less intensive. Some of those are already on the burner.

Professor Chaos: The graphics difference between the current MacBook and MacBook Pro is the difference between an Intel GMA950 shared-memory video chip (and software vertex stuff) versus the Radeon X1600 with everything in hardware and dedicated ram. It's a very big difference, if you want to play games on your laptop, the X1600 (Pro) is the way to go. The GMA950 (basic MacBook) does run our game, and actually runs it fairly well, but the X1600 is faar superior.

As an absolute comparison, the X1600 with 256MB is "roughly" as good as laptop chips get these days. There are certain small-vendor specialized "gaming" laptops that use bigger hardware, but for the most part.. the X1600 is considered pretty damned fast right now. How things will be in two years, when you go to purchase your new machine, remains to be seen :).

Also, last I heard, on a given MacBook Pro, running a game in native windows with bootcamp was about twice as fast as running the same game in OS X. There was a lot of stink about this with WoW. We can hope the OS X drivers will be a bit better performers with 10.5, but I'm not holding my breath.

The next MacBooks will have Santa Rosa with an 800 MHz frontside bus and the new GMA X3000 integrated graphics chip. The X3000 is much better than the 950 because it has hardware T&L units, pixel shaders, vertex shaders 3.0, and WMV9 (VC-1) video acceleration. It can share up to 384 MB of RAM with the CPU and runs at 667 MHz. It'll be miles ahead of the current MacBook in terms of graphics and gaming performance. I think they are saying May for the release. They're even adding flash caching!

The new MacBooks will be a really good bang for your buck and definitely capable of running VO at fairly high settings. I'm saving my pennies.

Thanks incarnate and FatStrat85. I can't test the new stuff now, but last I tried VO does run fine on my 933MHz iBook G4 that's about 2 and a half years old. Eventually I'll need a Windows machine to run ArcGIS, and at that point I'm going for as top-of-the-line MacBook Pro as I can convince my wife I need (definately sticking with laptops, though). Hopefully by then I'll be somewhere other than where I am now, where every apartment building has a firewall and seems to block VO. FatStrat: Do you mean May of this year?

Aye, it is currently on track for a May 2007 release. The MacBook Pro and iMac will also get Santa Rosa and the Mac Mini will also get the GMA X3000. This should all happen by this summer. Max out the MacBook's RAM and you'll have a pretty mean little machine, especially for the price. That being said, the MacBook Pro with a real graphics card will always perform better for gaming, but VO doesn't really require a "gaming" computer. In my personal experience and from what I've heard around here, this game will run on almost anything. One of the machines I play VO on has the dreaded FX 5200, and VO runs perfectly fine.

Hooray, youtube'd.

LOL Yay.

It's been fun, but we have to catch up with the times:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/16074

[locked to stay current]