Several IMG reader reviews, as well as the IMG review itself, have listed as a con that FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) is broken in Mac Halo. However, a quick turn around the forums at Gearbox that ported Halo from the Xbox to the PC will turn up the fact that Halo does not support FSAA. The Halo PC Performance FAQ at HBO covers this under point 1.3.1. The IMG review claims that MacSoft said this was due to a "bug in ATI's drivers", however, Halo on the PC doesn't support FSAA on Nvidia cards, either, so I doubt this is caused by a bug in ATI's drivers. And I don't see how Mac Halo would support FSAA if PC Halo doesn't, unless something about DX9 compared to OpenGL is responsible. So while the lack of FSAA support might still be considered a strike against the game for those who are used to it, this isn't a bug in the game or in anybody's drivers-- it's just not there, and turning it on will reduce your framerate.
Comments
Anonymous (not verified)
FSAA on Macs.
FSAA on Macs does indeed work but there's some graphical glitches, mainly with the motion detector. But FSAA DOES actually work on Macs.
a2daj
FSAA does indeed work on Mac
FSAA does indeed work on Mac Halo but has some glitches. The FSAA problems are a known issue. Comments by the Mac Halo developers at IMG's forums have mentioned the issues (supposedly in ATI's drivers)
The retail Mac Radeon 9800 Pro includes an app for overriding some 3D settings for OpenGL apps at a per app basis (available before PCs got that ability). I can use it to enable and disable FSAA (Super and Multi), Anisotropic Filtering, Texture quality, and Vsync. I can enable FSAA in Halo without using Halo's built in settings.
With multisample FSAA I occasionally get a screen full of the white squares. It might have something to do with Lens Flare because it only happens at certain angles when the lighting is just right. Also, there's an extra motion detector box in the upper left that's black and displays just the pulse. Sometimes there's a bigger square underneath that looks like a filled in chalk outline
With supersampling FSAA, I get the same motion detector box but don't get the screen ful of white squares. However, the performance drop at 1024x768 is huge when I'm playing at full graphics detail.
I'll try and remember to take some screenshots some time, but I've been too busy having fun playing the game (without FSAA enabled).