OS X Mavericks and Halo problems. [Edit... patch found!!!]

[A§H»Kelly]

I know that Macs are not common in forums such as this one however there are a few among us that know how much better OS X is as compared to Windows. There is plenty of characteristics Mac users can brag about... though gaming has traditionally never been one of them. OSX's gaming problems were never ideal however with the release of Mavericks they just got worse. If you're contemplating an upgrade... WAIT.

It would seem that for many people, an upgrade to Mavericks is causing frame rates in games to drop to unplayable levels. I'd personally compare it to a slow moving flip book.

I was hoping to get improved gaming frame rates with OSX Mavericks, or at least to have performance stay the same. Unfortunately, the settings I used with Mountain Lion to achieve 60 fps in COD4 and Starcraft 2 (playing natively in OSX), now get me 30 fps or worse in Mavericks. Hopefully there will be updates to these games to improve performance.

These are all with vsync enabled, since I do not like screen tearing.

Outside of games, Mavericks seems to work well and be even snappier than Mountain Lion, and I am in general happy.

However my OpenGL bencher is claiming that certain OpenGL versions (4 and later) are NOT compatible in Mavericks.

If it is a compatibility issue with Mavericks' OpenGL 4.1 then developers will have to update their own apps individually. What sucks about this is that OpenGL 4.1 was current technology in 2010. This is Apple’s typical “barely there” support for OpenGL. While I would not expect Apple to have full OpenGL 4.4 support in Mavericks, I am a bit surprised that they are still, just now, supporting an OpenGL version that was issued back in July of 2010! Hell there are even three year old video cards (that Apple sells) that support OpenGL 4.3!

If different games were developed using the same/similar engines (e.g. Doom 3 & Quake 4... or COD titles), then it may be easier for developers to release an update to related games once they have figured out how to optimize one of them. (Thankfully, Macsoft... (the company that has created updates for Halo to keep it current) has been good about keeping Halo CE for OSX updated and current so hopefully they will continue.)

A potential fix for you?

There is a new feature for external displays in Mavericks that allows the menu bar appear at the top of the second display (Before it was only shown in the parent screen). This feature is in Mission Control called "Displays have separate spaces" and is turned on by default at install. Some people are reporting that disabling this has fixed the problem for them. It didn't fix my situation as I don't use multiple monitors however it might work for you.

To resolve the low fps, simply uncheck this in Mission Control. You will loose the menu bar on the secondary display but gaming fps is said to return to normal. There is something about running video in a separate space (as opposed to the same space but extended) that kills the system.

If you're a Mac user and haven't upgraded to Mavericks yet... I would wait a couple more months in hopes that developers will make updates to the games you play.

[A§H»Kelly]

I've been doing a bunch of research and found a patch that fixes the aforementioned problem.

http://halomd.macgamingmods.com/Halo%20UB%20Patch.zip

The download provides instructions in the read me file for dropping the patch in.

After applying the patch it worked like a charm.

[A§H»Stealth]

Very helpful information. I'm one of the few other OSX users in the clan, and I was heavily contemplating switching to Mavericks, since it was a free upgrade and I had heard good things about it.

Also notable for OSX users who aren't in Kelly's situation, but rather gaming off of a VM:
If you are running Parallels (any version other than the latest, Parallels 9), Parallels will not be compatible with Mavericks unless you buy the $50 upgrade to get Parallels 9. This means you'll be unable to run any Windows VM using an earlier version of Parallels if you upgrade to Mavericks.

Stealth's suggestion:
Wait a few months to let Apple work the bugs out of Mavericks and let the price of Parallels 9 drop some before upgrading.

[A§H»JÓÒK]

Wow, Thanks Kelly!

I've only just tried this. I haven't played Halo on my Mac (aside from seeding servers) since last April. I thought i was going to have to downgrade. I really dislike Mavericks, but i guess you get
what you pay for.

Side note, when I had to update to the Universal Binary years ago I found that you could use either key when you were prompted. They charged $5 for the UB not the key.

Good thing this patch didn't have a price tag...

This thread should be sticky and/or the download link should be included here:
http://armoredsaintsofhalo.com/media.html