Odd problem or just a limitation of the Go5200?

[rj-300zx]

I'm fairly happy with my PowerBook but I noticed some odd problems. The biggest being with shaders.

In Halo, Age of Empires 3, and several other games I can't enable high level shaders, and in KOTOR, anything but High textures are locked out. Doom 3 wont run on anything but low either, it just resets, and I can't enable shadows, same with Prey and Quake 4.

Any idea? I thought Mac's used OpenGL so there was no stupid shader version bs or any complications like that.

My OS is 10.5.7 so its the most recent.

 

[Cabbit]

The Gefroce FX(5XXX) series of cards were not fully DX9 shader capable and would usually have to run games in DX8 mode.
These are known to be dreadful cards for shader intensive games and when they do run them there was often artefacts and very poor performance.
And while Mac OS uses OpenGL, OpenGL does support shaders and these games use shaders for special effects. There is no magic way for OpenGL to make a bad GPU run better, and these games such as Doom 3 and Quake 4 were running in OpenGL on Windows.
Also the particular card you have is a very low end mobile edition, this card it not suitable for running games like Doom 3 at all.

 

[rj-300zx]

The Gefroce FX(5XXX) series of cards were not fully DX9 shader capable and would usually have to run games in DX8 mode.
These are known to be dreadful cards for shader intensive games and when they do run them there was often artefacts and very poor performance.
And while Mac OS uses OpenGL, OpenGL does support shaders and these games use shaders for special effects. There is no magic way for OpenGL to make a bad GPU run better, and these games such as Doom 3 and Quake 4 were running in OpenGL on Windows.
Also the particular card you have is a very low end mobile edition, this card it not suitable for running games like Doom 3 at all.

I get decent frames in Doom 3 though, just bad with shaders then I guess.

 

[Zortrium]

I'm genuinely impressed that you're still trying to play newish games on that machine. The 5200 was a crappy-ish card when it was current...now, well, you'd be far, far better off with any of the integrated GPUs in the current Mac lineup.

 

[rj-300zx]

I'm genuinely impressed that you're still trying to play newish games on that machine. The 5200 was a crappy-ish card when it was current...now, well, you'd be far, far better off with any of the integrated GPUs in the current Mac lineup.

It's not as bad as everybody thinks. I bought and am running Penumbra: Overture very well. Medium shaders and high textures. Dynamic shadows on all objects and items. Along with some bloom and depth of field. Very pretty game still. Besides, I never was one for motion blur.

Problem is Zortrium, I couldn't afford a Macbook if I wanted too. Then theres the question of do I really need it. Short answer no, the PowerBook is plenty fast in day to day tasks and music editing. As far as gaming, I still like to get the most out of any system, even if I am primarily for retro gaming.