Help with Halo and Mac Pro Settings (demo)

well, i don't know what to tell you. I have it for both pc (through bootcamp) and for osx. And they both work great, with all settins maxed out.

Perhaps when you were setting up the Mac Pro, something got in there that is affecting performance.

Also, OS X is closer to Vista/Aero than XP and it could be that the 7.1 Catalyst driver from AMD drives has better Halo optimizations.

I think Barefeats looked at video and games on Mac Pro last fall.

Guys... the answer is simple... it's the demo... a PPC only app, and as such is being emulated under Rosetta on the Mac Pro.

Considering this the Halo demo runs pretty awesomely ^_^

Using the Apple Migration Assistant to bring over PPC programs, rather than reinstall, is what I was referring to which will affect a Mac Pro.

Running a PPC demo with 2GB RAM is actually on the "lean" side. 2GB runs most things fine, but PPC emulation, as good as it is, can require add'l memory.

Try running with Universal Binary apps that are designed for Intel and 10.4.8.

Incontrovertible is right. I didn't know that the demo was ppc only.

Buy the UB game, and i promise you, it will run fine.

I doubt there is any other solution you will find. Your mac is fine. Buy the UB version, its only 30 bucks.

Macs used to use PowerPC processor's (eg G3, G4 and G5's). Apple has switched to Intel processors which are x86 (Core Duo) and x64 (Core 2 Duo). Because the two processor architectures are totally alien to each other Apple created an emulation layer for Intel Macs that will allow programs created for PPC Macs to run, albeit at reduced performance.

New programs are now made as Universal Binary's or UB's which means that it will run at native (read full) speed on both PPC and Intel-based Macs. Some existing programs have patches or updates to make them into a UB. Halo was created when Apple used PPC chips only, and as such the demo is a PPC app. The UB update for Halo only exists for the full retail version, which will run it at full native speeds.

On a side note, I have XP on a partition and I have far more graphical options on the Halo Demo for OS X... Anti-aliasing 4tw!!!1!

how do you get to the anti-aliasing in xp? I haven't been able to find it.

I haven't been able to locate Anti-alias settings inside of the Windows XP app either. Best you can do is use Catalyst to force AA for it. Where-as for OS X it allows you to do that on start-up of the game ^^