AVP2 needs a better graphic card. WHAT ?

[cerealkiller]

i just bought this little magnificent macbook, 2.4 gh, 2g ram and the 3100 graphic card that comes with it. Well, the alien vs predator 2 game refuses to start because either I have to upgrade mac os x or the graphic card. AVP2 is 5 years old, come on. Games like ut2004 or heroes V (2006) run like they had the devil chasing them. Here is the message :

The currently installed OpenGL drivers (Intel GMA X3100 OpenGL Engine 1.2 APPLE-1.5.26) do not support the 'GL_ATI_texture_env_combine3' extension. This is a required extension for this game. Please make sure you have the latest version of Mac OS X and the latest drivers from your video card manufacturer.

anything i could do ? or is it just that the game developpers for mac were on crack ?

 

[dukebound85]

sorry out of luck

 

[cerealkiller]

mhuh ... too bad

 

[MazaGRANDEman]

Well, I noticed just now when I tried to play the game that it didn't work with Leopard, so I had to install Tiger to be able to play it. As far I know, there aren't any upgrades available for it to work with Leopard. I don't know how it works throught Rosetta, and I doubt that the newest version available supports x86/ Intel.

I'm running it with PB G4 1GHz, 1GB Ram and it runs fine.

 

[cerealkiller]

ok i doubt they release an update and downgrading is not an option. If it wasn t for these kind of problems they wouldn t sell as many new games anyway.

 

[redsteven]

many many many many many games don't support the integrated graphics cards in the macbooks. Whereas the macbook PROS have their own graphics card with it's OWN memory, the macbook has an integrated graphics card, which, simply put... sort of... sucks.

In addition to having to share the systems memory (integrated cards don't come with their own VRAM), there are a host of other reasons (which i can't actually name) as to why they... suck.

I'm really very sorry, but if your getting a message like that, it's likely due to hardware limitation with your graphics card, and there's most likely nothing that you can do about it

(however, do see if you can get a pc demo of the game and try it in bootcamp, because i've heard that sometimes the pc versions work with the integrated graphics cards when the mac versions won't... or maybe it was just that they sometimes had better performance on those same cards, assuming it runs in the first place)

 

[Vegabondsx]

Your problem is that AVP2 (for Mac) is a PowerPC only game and runs through Rosetta. Because of that it will run much slower than as if it were an Intel or Dual-Binary application. I have a Macbook Pro 2.16ghz Core Duo and No One Lives Forever 2 runs somewhat sluggishly in OS X while in XP it runs beautifully.

You're pretty much out of luck. You can use Bootcamp or try the PC version with Crossover, but the Mac version is PPC only unless there's an update out there that makes it dual binary.

 

[Kosh66]

So really it's not that the Macbook can't run it because of an outdated graphics, it can't run it because the game is too old and hasn't been updated for the newest MacOS X or hardware. This is common on the Mac side. Once a game gets too old, it doesn't get updated by the developer.

This is also the downside of Apple changing OSes (MacOS 9 to MacOS X) and/or hardware architectures. Not everyone wants to update their old software to the new OS or architecture.

 

[cerealkiller]

yeah but with classic we still had a chance, i could ply very old games on my other mac

 

[Locke357]

Sorry to necropost but I'm trying right now to get AvP2 to run on my MacBook 10.5.4, with a GMA X3100. I assume no solution has been found?

 

[Huntn]

Install Boot Camp and find the PC version of the game, which is very possible you can find one.

This is one of the major drawbacks of Mac ports. On the PC side it's common to see these types of games updated. Once the Mac port is published, you see little long term support for future OS updates. I remember of hearing of individual people from a development team doing updates on their own time for free, cause there is no money officially.

I realize MacBook support for Shaders 2 came out about a year ago. I don't think this is an issue with this game, but it is worthwhile if the owners of older MacBooks check their installed chipset for Shader 2 support when looking at new games.