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jon_hh_68 · Jan 28, 2003, 04:55 PM

Has anyone used the new 12 inch PB with games? Specifically, I am interested in the performance of Warcraft III, MOHAA, RTCW, and X-plane. Are these games very playable, somewhat playable, or not playable at all? I don't really care that much about FPS. Also, what about the performance of the games when playing on a second monitor using dual display, mirroring, or closed-lid operation?

Can someone give me an idea of how big a performance jump I will get moving to the 12 inch from a G4 450 tower with a radeon 8500 card with 64M of RAM. I am planning on getting the 12 inch with the maximum ram.

Thanks in advance. I'm not getting an iMac or tower because I need portability.

redJag · Jan 28, 2003, 10:53 PM

Originally posted by jon_hh_68:
Has anyone used the new 12 inch PB with games?

No, they don't start shipping for 2-4 weeks. The few that might have used them on some type of demo probably didn't get to test them all that much.

The performance gain should definitely be noticeable, but the Radeon mobility chip in the 15" would be better. All those games are playable on my tower (733mhz) so they would theoretically but at least as playable on a 12" powerbook.

OwlBoy · Jan 28, 2003, 11:02 PM

why did you post this in multiple forum?

-Owl

xyber233 · Jan 29, 2003, 06:10 PM

WC3 is the one I am very curious about. Since the AlBoob can't boot into 9, WC3 better run fine in X. Now that people are getting their beautiful new Powerbooks, can anybody comment

?

Rickster · Jan 29, 2003, 06:47 PM

I'd imagine the 12" powerbook should be just fine for WC3. I played through much of the single-player campaign on a 15" iMac 800 (same bus, slightly slower G4, slightly cheaper GPU) and it was more than playable. Even though I was also running a several-thousand-page inkjet print job out of InDesign in the background.

Scarpa · Jan 30, 2003, 12:10 PM

I played through the entire War3 single player campaign on my 500MB/800Mhz TiBook. It ran great. You'll be fine.

xyber233 · Jan 30, 2003, 05:11 PM

Heh, I have a 700mHz LCD iMac and I cannot play in X. Thats why I was wondering.

bborofka · Jan 30, 2003, 07:20 PM

Unfortunately, Apple crippled the 12" Powerbook's processor by omitting the L3 cache, which appears to take a big performance hit in games. You'll notice that most people with iMacs and eMacs complain about WC3 peformance, due to the lack of L3 cache on the chip and probably the slow nVidia drivers as well.

I've got an eMac 700MHz with 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX and WC3 runs crappy on it.

kentuckyfried · Jan 31, 2003, 01:57 AM

^ does it really make that big of a difference?

the more important question is though....could Apple have fit that L3 in there 12" in the first place? If it's just b/c they wanted to keep the baseline price down, that's too bad.

CheesePuff · Jan 31, 2003, 12:54 PM

Originally posted by redJag:
No, they don't start shipping for 2-4 weeks. The few that might have used them on some type of demo probably didn't get to test them all that much.

The performance gain should definitely be noticeable, but the Radeon mobility chip in the 15" would be better. All those games are playable on my tower (733mhz) so they would theoretically but at least as playable on a 12" powerbook.

A lot of people have the 12" PowerBook G4. Also, CompUSA and the Apple Stores have a lot in stock too.

CheesePuff · Jan 31, 2003, 12:56 PM

Originally posted by Rickster:
I'd imagine the 12" powerbook should be just fine for WC3. I played through much of the single-player campaign on a 15" iMac 800 (same bus, slightly slower G4, slightly cheaper GPU) and it was more than playable. Even though I was also running a several-thousand-page inkjet print job out of InDesign in the background.

Actually, the iMac G4 system bus is at 100 MHz and the 12" PowerBook's system bus at 133 MHz.

proux · Jan 31, 2003, 05:36 PM

All things considered it should run better than on an iMac. You will be alright.

kentuckyfried · 07:03 PM

I've never played this game before...I loaded it up onto my ibook, booted up OS 9.2.2, but diablo II says that the ibook "can't run in 800x600 with 256 colors"

I can't change any settings in OS 9.0, so I tried setting it back down to 800x600 in OS X with 256 colors. It works but...

Umm...does this thing actually work on an ibook using 9.2.2?
It looks like it's running now on X, but I've seen it before
and I know it runs kind of crappy. On my old 400 mhz g3 it did at least.

I just went back to 9.2.2 and I still can't get it to run b/c the resolution is set at 800x600 but I cannot choose 256 colors, it's set to "millions" instead.