[paulpolios]

hi, i was just curious as to how games like unreal tournament would play on a 12 inch powerbook. supposedly the 12inch isnt optimal for games but are they at least playable.

thanks,

-paul

[Graymalkin]

With a little bit of tweaking UT2003 can be played very well on a 12" Powerbook. While not an über powerhouse the GF4 MX in the Powerbook can easily handle the poly count of UT2003. It can also push enough pixels to deliver decent framerates at 1024x768. The key to feeding the GF4 MX is to minimize the work done by the Powerbook's CPU, the main bottleneck of any system running UT2003.

Out of the box UT2003's settings are a little too optimistic for most Macs. Epic ships UT2003 with the graphics, sound, and physics settings going full blast. FP iMacs, eMacs, and Powerbooks don't really have the umph to run the game with the default settings. In the configuration console of the game lower the model and texture details as low as they will go. UT2003 has some very large textures and extremely detailed models, turning these settings down will not uglify the game too much but make it much more playable. Once that is done enable the low quality sound and turn the physics detail to the lowest setting. Audio and detailed physics just bog down your processor for a minimum of added gaming value. Take a moment to turn the gore setting to its lowest (I think it can be turned off entirely). The gore is needless and just adds more overhead to an already demanding game.

If the game still isn't playing to your satisfaction there's a couple trickier settings you can fiddle around with. Both of these require you edit the UT2003.ini file by hand in a text editor. The UT2003.ini file lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Unreal TOurnament 2003 Demo/.

Under ALAudio.AlAudioSubsystem find the Channels=32 setting. Change the 32 to an 8. This will reduce the number of stereo channels that need to be processed and save you a bit of overhead. Next scroll down to OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice and find the MaxTextureUnits=4 setting. Change the 4 to a 2. The GeForce4 MX only has two texture units per pixel pipeline, if the game engine thinks there are 4 texture pipelines it won't hesitate to map four textures to a single pixel requiring two passes through the pixel pipeline for render it. Setting the MaxTextureUnits value to 2 makes sure all pixel calculations only need a single pass to complete.

Those settings can make for a pretty enjoyable game of UT2003 on a 12" Powerbook. Games like Quake 3 and Jedi Knight 2 play pretty well without too much tweaking. UT2003 being a much more processor intensive game engine however needs a bit more fine tuning. I'm doubting however that Doom 3 and potentially Half-Life 2 will play very well on the current line of Powerbooks, the G4 at relatively low clock speeds simply does not have the get up and go to handle all the physics and positional audio calculations those games are going to pretty much require. UT2003's performance has improved a bit with system updates and as long as you can tweak the engine settings, games based off the UT2003 engine like America's Army ought to be as playable on a Powerbook as UT2003 is. If UT2003 is the biggest game you're likely to play on a Powerbook it is a nice portable gaming system.

[iMacfan]

Is this from personal experience?

I only ask because I am considering getting a PB12", and the UT 2003 specs specifically say NOT 12" PB manufactured in 2003.

David

[RooneyX]

If you have a 12 inch then it's more than enough for you and your girlfriend to play with.

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by iMacfan:
Is this from personal experience?

I only ask because I am considering getting a PB12", and the UT 2003 specs specifically say NOT 12" PB manufactured in 2003.

David

I can't imagine why they'd single out the 12" PB... the only thing structurally different about it is the lack of L3 cache. That WILL hurt gaming performance, but not too much.

I can give you some subjective opinions from playing on my friend's 12"...

Quake 3 based games (MOHAA, RTCW, Quake3, etc.) play pretty well. I'd definitely crank the rez down to 800x600 though, not the 1024 recommended above.

Having said that, I found UT 2k3 performance to be entirely AWFUL compared to my Ti. If you hope over to the gaming thread you'll find it's a common problem. Apparently the nVidia drivers for the 420 (and 440) Go chips aren't all that great, and they lack programmable pixel and vertex shaders (something the RADEON 9000 in the 15 HAS).

Also, warcraft 3 performance was pretty bad... again it seemed like the same type of problem because all the Quake3 based games were pretty playable (slower than my 15, but not by a huge amount... UT 2k3 the difference was frightening, like, my 15" was pulling DOUBLE the framerate ~28-30 as opposed to 12-15fps).

The 12" is NOT a gaming laptop, but if you're a casual gamer it should serve you just fine. If it wasn't for the screen size (I was upgrading from a 12" ibook, REALLY wanted something bigger) I would've had a little Al myself... can't beat that price/performance ratio.

[Graymalkin]

I speak from personal experience, I play UT2003 fairly regularly on my LAN. If you use the tweaks I mentioned you will end up with acceptable UT2003 performance. Epic's default settings are not going to get a playable framerate. No MX series GeForce chips have programmable pixel and vertex shaders, not ones on PowerMacs nor eMacs or iMacs. Go over to an Apple Store and download UT2003 to a 12" Powerbook and try out my tweaks to see if it is playable for you.

If you're interested in gaming go with a 15" TiBook, you'll get a much better gaming system. The L3 cache and Radeon 9000 make a big difference in high end games like UT2003. Quake 3 engine games like JK2, ST:VEF, MoH, and Quake 3 itself play very nicely on the 12" Powerbook but these are now yesteryear's games. If you're on a budget and games are a tertiary requirement grab a 12" Powerbook, mine has served me very well with my light gaming needs.

[DekuDekuplex]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
[stuff deleted]

If you're interested in gaming go with a 15" TiBook, you'll get a much better gaming system. The L3 cache and Radeon 9000 make a big difference in high end games like UT2003. Quake 3 engine games like JK2, ST:VEF, MoH, and Quake 3 itself play very nicely on the 12" Powerbook but these are now yesteryear's games. If you're on a budget and games are a tertiary requirement grab a 12" Powerbook, mine has served me very well with my light gaming needs.

How does the TiBook compare with Hammerhead (Apple's internal codename for the "17-inch PowerBook") in this regard?

DekuDekuplex

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by DekuDekuplex:
How does the TiBook compare with Hammerhead (Apple's internal codename for the "17-inch PowerBook") in this regard?

DekuDekuplex

My understanding is that for games in which the nVidia drivers are nice and optimized, the 17" does SLIGHTLY (VERY slightly) better than the 15" by virtue of its DDR and slightly higher system bus.

On anything that uses programmable pixel and vertex shaders (ut2k3 most notably) or anything that nVidia's drivers are particularly poorly suited to (Warcraft III comes to mind) the 15" CAN perform a good bit better than the Big Al. Seems UT is the most noteworthy at the moment, but as more games use pixel/vertex shaders this might change.

It's too bad ATI and Apple had a falling out... ATI is doing some kick ass things these days w/ mobile graphics.

[Pierre B.]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
In the configuration console of the game lower the model and texture details as low as they will go.

And how do you do that?