M1 Macs
Hello!
Just wanted to toss some info into here since I'm not sure who all would be in a position to be giving this a shot. I haven't done too much investigative work on this but felt I could give some info in here if it does happen to be an issue for any other T2 players...
In using a 16 inch MBP M1 Max now for a month and running Windows 11 ARM in Parallels, I took some time outside of working on other things to play with Tribes 2 (pretty much vanilla 25034 install + TribesNEXT RC2a patch) I found that the rendering of static shapes, such as the bases in the game were going wild, vertices going everywhere they shouldn't be but found that swapping into D3D on the running instance of the game was able to (with sacrificing faster, smoother framerate) get the game to work without this wild-yet-interesting behavior.
I'll take a further in-depth look into the game at some point in the next week or so but figured that it wouldn't hurt to toss this info in here for anyone that might be looking for it.
Given that this is a game that was built for x86 32-bit architecture and in an era where consumer PCs ran single-core processors (and apparently built heavily around such)... compounded to the fact that the whole interesting D3D... "situation" that still slightly struggles today on a 5950X/RTX3090 config on bare metal hardware it was built in mind for (though partially removed from), I never expected it to run flawlessly on an 5 Core ARMv8 64-bit Windows 11 instance running through virtualization on Parallels on top of a 2021 big.LITTLE ARM MBP but am still rather surprised that it still has a way to do so and can do so, relatively successfully.
I didn't think it would be likely anyone else had investigated this but if there already is any research into this or any ideas to get around those issues with OpenGL then I'm all ears.
If you do manage to find yourself on Apple Silicon and have no problem with these wild static mesh issues on straight OpenGL, suggesting that Infernus LakRabbit buildings will liftoff for orbit... then you do get to enjoy the ~200 FPS at decent power draw if the framerate counter I pulled into the game is reliable enough to go by.