This is a reminder that with the hardware above the shaders yield FPS below 1 (yes, below 1 frame per second). I know that this is nVIDIA and Apple not being able to produce a working driver, but buyers will still be mad at Guild and not at Apple/nVIDIA. Either ship the game with doshaders=0 or maybe detect FPS < 5 and then disable shaders. I remember it took me quite a while to figure out how to get the game to run. Having to edit some text file in some folder is not going to fly with Mac users ...

agreed, i nearly canned the whole thing on my old system (eMac) till somone mentioned turning off 'doshaders'
C'mon devs 'doshaders0' by default please on the mac version...

I've had the same problem with the same exact system since shader support was added to OpenGL. It's simply unplayable on most Macs when shaders are turned on. I suspect this is a limitation of the hardware or drivers somehow, since other games that have shaders run like crap as well (Halo is a perfect example). Anyway, I'd much rather see the station framerate blackhole bug fixed. I can live without uber flashy graphics.

Yes, the 5200 on the mac is very very slow.

It's not just that card, it's doshaders on the Mac, with any kind of card. When I turn shaders on, with my 64MB ATI R9k Pro, it's all the same. And it was the same on a R7k, which is a really crappy card though.
And if it's a driver issue, I still never had a game where shaders have such a dramatic effect. I usually play games with the best graphics settings I can get and only turn them down if it get's really unplayable. But never had such a performance decrease and regular crashes even with the highest settings in any other game.

If there is not a fix, please turn shaders off by default for the Mac version.

I second that, Laika. I don't think it's just the hardware itself. Apple is to be blamed partially for making crappy drivers to begin with. If you check out the feedback G5 owners have been giving about Halo, for example, you'll see that they too have performance issues with pixel shaders turned on. Obviously the CPU is more than enough to run all of these games on a G5, but for whatever the reason the GPU doesn't seem to work too well with its own drivers or OpenGL.

I don't want to blindly point the finger at something randomly for being at fault, but having poor pixel shader support for a wide range of Apple systems just can't simply be a coincidence. Something is obviously wrong and very little has been done. If it is in fact hardware related, than Apple needs to stop advertising all the latest games on their website and start actually focusing on making those very same games be playable on their systems. It's such an embarassment.

odd, I never had trub' on my g4 12' lab top 800mzh

Maybe because nobody has had a 12-inch "lab" top that runs at 800 "mzh" (Moose Lake Carlton County Airport, according to the online acronym finder). But seriously, your 867MHz 12" PowerBook (not 800) doesn't support pixel shaders. Only the FX series of nVidia graphics cards do.

Definatly the 'doshaders' command that causes the framerate hit, my 5200 got binned in favour of the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro SE G5 edition with 256mb on board and it STILL takes about a 25% hit with the shaders turned on.
Runs at an acceptable rate though, unlike the 5200 which barely managed to get into double figures with the shaders on.