Left 4 Dead Forum

So I found a Left 4 Dead Cider port I believe using a spore creator or something (not sure what that means) and it works on my Aluminum MacBook!! Frame rates are good too! I tried using Crossover Games for my steam version of L4D and even did the registry edit to get it running but frame rates were soo bad ~5-7.

What I'm curious is, the complaint was there was an issue with apple's drivers and GLSL(?) but if I can get L4D running at playable framerates ~20+ via Cider then what is crossover's problem? I would prefer to use Crossover Games b/c the steam support and multiplayer b/c the Cider port does not need steam and thus cannot get achievements/multiplayer. So I'm forced to boot into windows or play L4D single player. What's the deal? What's the fix?

Honestly I am a bit surprised by this.

If your Mac has a Geforce 8 or radeon HD 2000 or better card(Read: a dx10 card), the better hardware features can overcome the GLSL limitations. Some people had success with CrossOver as well. Also the Nvidia drivers have a better GLSL compiler, and an assembler interface that allows apps to avoid using GLSL. Maybe Cider is using that; I'm certainly considering to extend our ARB shader backend to make use of the NV specific extensions.

Note that on Cxgames 7.1 you have to set a registry key(the SRGB hack one) to get reasonable performance. On cxgames 7.2 the feature this hack enables is on by default. Unfortunately there seem to be some instabilities in cxgames 7.2, so it may not work for you. I'm working on that.

Henri worked on improving L4D and the Source engine performance in general, and I think he got about 40-50 fps in average in timedemos on his Geforce 7950-something on Linux(not sure about the CPU, and I could remember the framerates incorrectly). Still it was slower than it should be, and this framerate means that in big fights you still can get down to 10-15 fps.

Yeah my MacBook has an nVidia 9400m, not sure if that's better than what you listed. Enabling GLSL on 7.1 allowed my game to start and load but very unplayable, like I said 5-7FPS.. With the cider port, all settings low it is very playable ~20... I do appreciate your feedback, I'm just curious as to why CXG couldn't run it like Cider, although I know they're different programs, they're based off Wine right? anyway, L4D has my vote b/c I want steam support w/ L4D.

edit re-reading your post.. what is this SRGB hack? I wouldn't mind trying it.. I did the following the first time on CXG to get the 5-7FPS

Install Left 4 Dead in Steam, then use " run command" in crossover games to run " regedit" to open registry, set HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/useGLSL = " enabled" and HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/offscreenRenderingMode = " fbo" . then reboot bottle. Note: make sure this is a separate bottle from your other games since it'll most likely break them.

Is this what hack you speak of? If not I will try to reinstall L4D w/ 7.2 and see what performance I get

Those two keys are needed(still needed in 7.2), but there is a third one. I don't know it off my head(I think it was srgb_hack = "enable"), but you can lok at AppDefault/hl2.exe/Direct3D, it is set in there. Left4Dead uses a different .exe name, and the hack was enabled for "hl2.exe" only, that's why it doesn't work with L4D.

I recommend to try 7.2. It has a number of performance improvements for L4D, and the srgb hack works properly now(it used to cause incorrect colors in e.g. Portal in dxlevel 95 in cxgames 7.1).

Cider is based on Wine, but it is a branch that was made I think 6 years ago, when Wine was under the X11 license. Cider merged a considerable amount of Wine code under the terms of the LGPL, but the Direct3D implementations are different. Transgaming submitted very little code back to Wine(a handful of patches in the last years)