Portal Forum

Anyone managed to get Portal to load to the main menu under CrossOver Games 7.0.0? The game is freezing for me during the "Loading" screen.

If you are using an Aluminum Mac, you can get it working by passing "-dxlevel 80" to the game using Steam's startup options setting. There's a bug in the radeon HD driver which prevents it from starting in dxlevel 81. We are working with Apple on this, but the debugging is going very slowly.

If you're using Linux, please make sure to update your graphics drivers. We switched HL2 based games to dxlevel 90 or 95, this has much higher demands which old drivers cannot fullfill. If it does not work, you can try launching it in dxlevel 81 or 80 as well.

Thanks Stefan! I'm on a (first-gen) MBP and setting dxlevel to 80 did the trick. Wish there was some documentation somewhere listing such caveats though. 😊

I am on the latest MBP with Nvidia card but I am having the exactly same problem.

Does the workaround work for you as well? We haven't seen the problem on Nvidia cards yet.

Meanwhile I have isolated the issue. The problem was a combination of 3 opengl extensions, GL_APPLE_client_storage, GL_EXT_texture_sRGB and GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc. I have reported the issue to Apple so they can fix the driver, and we'll have a workaround included in the next build.

Half-Life 2 Episode Two is affected by the same issue and was solved by setting it to -dxlevel 80. Just a heads up!

I have experienced the same hang; MBP, Core2DUO and NVIDIA chipset. OSX 10.5.2

Moreover, the rest of the rendering bugs mentioned in the other postings are present.

I find it remarkable that Portal runs without this change in Crossover Mac, but requires a startup parameter in Crossover Games. Does Crossover Mac automatically change the dxlevel?

Yes, it sets dxlevel 80, but in cxmac 6.2 that is not even needed, because cxmac did not yet support sRGB textures which trigger the driver bug.

Portal dies for me in crossover games v7.0 whenever I launch two connecting portals. (i.e. everytime I should be able to view two connected portals on the screen) I've tried every graphic setting I can think of and I've passed -dxlevel 80 as a startup parameter, but no avail.

My system is:
Aluminum iMac
Mac OSX 10.5.2 Leopard
radeon 2600 HD pro
2GB ram
Crossover Games Mac 7.0

Game is installed in a win2k bottle, works just great in crossover 6.2.1, dies in 7.

Same here: can launch the game with -dxlevel 80, but cannot play it - it stucks.

You could try the unsupported build, it has a workaround for this issue.

The unsupported build worked for me, for Portal (and did not need the -dxlevel setting). I have an nVidia based MBP.

(FWIW, the unsupported build did also make it so that Alt and Ctrl stopped working in Guild Wars.)

Matthew wrote:

(FWIW, the unsupported build did also make it so that Alt and Ctrl
stopped working in Guild Wars.)

Yep, that's a known problem. We're working on a fix.