OSX does not use standard ATI drivers as far as I've been able to tell - and consistently has issues with Ubi products that support OSX - but do not necessarily properly support ATI video -- as the ATI video card is assumed to have functionality not present on the Mac (for I'm not sure what reason).

quote:

Also, the Mobility Radeon 9600 (M10 in System Profiler), Radeon 9600 Pro (RV350), and Radeon 9600 XT (RV360) chipsets are not all the same in terms of performance. -- Heimdall

My System Profiler reads: "Chipset Model: ATY,RV350M10", so... what have I got?

Anyone?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: monsieurdavid,

Regarding System Profiler and "ATY", see Apple System Profiler: Identifies Video Card as ATY Instead of ATI.

"RV350" is an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, and "M10" is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. So RV350M10 should mean that you have a Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro.

Is the chipset on a separate card? If so, it's probably not a Mobility chipset, since ATI Mobility chipsets are usually integrated on the motherboard. (But who knows. Very often, to paraphrase that old saying, "Strange things are afoot at the Circle A.") One way or another, however, I'd say it's at least a Radeon 9600 Pro.

Heimdall

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Heimdall G,

quote:

One way or another, however, I'd say it's at least a Radeon 9600 Pro.

Makes sense! Guess I was thinking: one or the other, "M10" or "RV350", not both.
ANYway, the demo froze up on my Powerbook with the settings set too high, and the cooling fan spins all the time with the demo. All this amounts to a heads-up for the full game -- I'm setting up a small desk fan aimed at the laptop for gameplay. Couldn't hurt.

Same problem here. We've got a 2GHz iMac G5 w/ ATI Radeon 9600 w/ 128MB VRAM, and the images freezes about 5-10 minutes into the game, followed by the sound a minute later.

I'm sorry, but I didn't pay $10 more than PC users just to get a game that crashes on my computer with no word from Ubi. It's their problem if their game doesn't support Apple's ATI drivers, not mine. I'm gonna want answers (as in a patch) to this problem very, very soon.

Gonna want a patch, eh?

Since Cyan has been forced to cut its staff down to President Tony Fryman and CEO Rand Miller, any patches will most likely be released by Ubisoft. (See More Details on Cyan.) This may make patches problematic.

Plus, these forums are only sponsored by Ubisoft, not run by them - all of us Moderators are unpaid volunteers. I'm not at all certain that the Ubi tech support folks ever read anything that's posted in any of the Ubi-sponsored forums. Reading about problems in order to help solve them would seem to be a no-brainer, but....

Be all of that as it may, watch this forum for posts about patches. We may get lucky!

Well, I guess this is the result of cyan trusting Ghen to do their mac port...
/lameAttemptToLightenTheAtmosphereHere

Anyways, more seriously:
1) Opening your journal seems to reset the counter and hold Myst V together. I know, its not a great solution, but... its better than nothing.

2) I think this might be Apple's fault. Anyone having problems on an OS less than 10.4.0 (no upgrades?) I think I might just try installing 10.4.0 and seeing if that works.

I have same problem of hard freeze of video, mouse, keyboard with audio continuing for a minute or so, then really hard freeze. In the full game after about an hour of play. I had done the demo with no problems but I did raise the resolution up high for the full game - and that may have caused the freeze. Going to start again with default resolution. It was scary for a bit there -- after power shut down to clear the freeze, the monitor (20"apple cinema) came up black. I pulled the cable out and put it back and rebooted and it came up fine, but I really thought I'd lost the video card there for a minute.

Card is
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro:

Chipset Model: ATY,R350
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
Slot: SLOT-1
VRAM (Total): 128 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x4e48
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-A07525-114

System is G5 single proc 1.8 GHz, 1.5 Gig RAM.

Hmmm... It seems it's a common problem. Let's see what happens in the next couple of days.
Has anyone posted this issue at Ubi's Support page? Any answers?

Hello !
I'm having the same hangs as described, right at the beginning of the game, after entering the first world, where this guy with google is speaking. The sound continues, but the image is frozen.
I have a dual 2.5ghz G5 with an x800XT and 2.5gb of RAM.
Tiger 10.4.2, latest drivers, updates etc.
I haven't modified the speed of my card, which works fine on other games (ie no temperature problem).
I'm a developer, so if someone out there in a development team wants me to try some tests, don't hesitate to contact me through the email I entered here.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to exit from the game once hung, so I can't do any sampling etc...

Forgot to say above that I am on Tiger - 10.4.2, all latest everything.

Funny this freezes up the input devices -- so here's mine: Apple USB wired keyboard, Logitech "cordless click!" USB optical mouse.

No non-standard peripherals, and no other cards in my G5 except the Radeon 9800.

What would be the best way to escalate this problem ? I just spent around 60â"š¬ on it and I wouldn't like them to simply go down the drain... :-(

Hi all,
though I'd throw my hat into the ring and say exactly the same thing is happening to me just to stress that it's a very common problem! My computer's specs are:

iMac G5
ATI Radeon 9600
1GHz RAM
250 GB HD

So there definatley shouldn't be a problem with "pushing" the computer too far. As said before I'm sure it's a problem with the ATI card. What I find absolutely amazing is that Ubisoft and friends would release a game with such an obvious bug. How long did they test the game on macs, 2 minutes and 30 seconds?!

Such a big let down but let's hope the people at Ubisoft (/Apple if you feel that way inclined) realise that they've made a terrible mistake and get on to fxing it asap!

ps Anybody else had any luck with installing those ATI drives Heimdall was talking about?

I don't know if this is any use but I gather that there are no problems on 10.3 (Panther). I personally don't know anything about Macs so this may be a stupid question. Can you roll back / replace the OS?

Thanks for the info but even though reverting to Panther may work, personally I don't want to be scrapping my new system (Tiger) due to someone elses mistake/lack of Mac support in making the game. As desperate as I am to play on the game, changing my system does seem like an extreme measure.
One thing I have done is installed ATI displays 4.5.5 (but I didn't see any ROM update for ATI 9600) and so I'll keep you all posted regarding whether that fixes the issue or not (as it seemed to have fixed it for some others).

******* WORKAROUND FOUND ***********

Yeeeeehaaaa, I found a workaround. At least on my machine. I'll start with the solution, then I'll tell you what I tried.
- Before you hit 'continue' in the Main menu, go in the options, and set all your video prefs (on the right-hand side) to their lowest values.
- The scene now plays to its end. Save the game then put your settings back to what they were (mine were set at max for everything besides video sync).

Now, what I tried : (minimal spoiler, happens after 5 minutes of linear game)
I was crashing during the 'Escher' sceen, always at the same place, when escher said "do not give her the tablet", right after "She and I agree on one thing ...".
I had ATI Displays v 4.5.0, so I updated to 4.5.5.
I also had the June flash update, so I installed the august universal update.
That didn't change anything.
Then I tried with the lower settings, and it worked.

I hope it'll help others...

Mounty, don't blame you one bit.

I suspect that the game was developed during Panther's phase - without respect to Panther. They probably looked at the upcoming dev changes to Tiger and saw nothing that should have caused an immediate problem. As usual Mac probably changed something significantly breaking some amount of backwords compatibility -- aka Cyan made the mistake of basing some functionality on something proprietary, possibly a mistake, to Panther. In reality, pester Mac to fix what they've broken - and on our end we'll attempt to pass bug information on to Cyan to see if they'll fix it whenever they possibly release a patch some day in the far away future when.. err..

Anyway, other option might be to find out if there's a way to hack the ATI drivers between the two mac versions and roll back just the drivers. Since it sounds like it's a driver issue.

Bad news, The solution I gave above worked a little, but I crashed simply walking around the stones where esher was...

Please don't be too fast at blaming the drivers. There are many ways to write bugs when handling OpenGL code (believe me, I wrote some myself ).

Anyway, we still need a fix !

Mahaps, true But driver version changes can hook things that should or shouldn't be there and cause these issues. I'm suggesting some driver play around be good.

I forgot to mention that I'd strongly advise against installing panther openGL/ATI drivers on top of tiger. Many Tiger's features rely on the latest versions (corevideo, quartz extreme, ...).
You might as well dip your video card in clearasilâ®â© ^_^

(people actually DO try advises seen on forums, so please be careful)