[pbook28]

Hi,

I know the Macbooks have the dedicated graphics 950. And people have been saying the performance is not good for 3D gaming. I currently have a 1.25ghz powerbook G4 with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64MB. My question is, will I be able to play games like warcraft III without noticing that big of a difference? This is the only game I really play on my computer, so any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[harrisjamieh]

Originally Posted by pbook28

Hi,

I know the Macbooks have the integrated graphics 950.

Fixed

[donovan]

Yes, you will be able to run games like Warcraft III fine on the Macbook.

Here's a short list of the titles you'll be able to play, if it's not on the list and is older, you'll probably be able to play it.

http://support.intel.com/support/gra.../CS-021400.htm

[JAR]

Talked to a guy at the genius bar in my local Apple store and he said he tried WoW on a demo MB, and he got 25-30 fps on moderate settings.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by puffarthur

Talked to a guy at the genius bar in my local Apple store and he said he tried WoW on a demo MB, and he got 25-30 fps on moderate settings.

That I doubt very much. Everything I've heard has said that the MacBook gets 15-20fps max at the lowest settings.

Warcraft 3, on the other hand, is a lot less demanding and I imagine it should play pretty well.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by puffarthur

Talked to a guy at the genius bar in my local Apple store and he said he tried WoW on a demo MB, and he got 25-30 fps on moderate settings.

Here are some comments made by someone about WoW the Intel Mac mini (Core Duo 1.66 with 1 GB):

I have a Mac mini Core Duo (1GB RAM) which I purchased as a system to do everything BUT gaming, I have a PC that I use solely for gaming but prefer to to everything else on alternate OSes due to the lack of maintenance required and in this case a more enjoyable user experience delivered by Mac OSX.

I play quite a bit of World of Warcraft on the PC but I saw a post like this one recently and it made me wonder how well the core duo would handle it.

My Core Duo usually uses a 17inch LG panel running at 1280x1024 and the PC uses a Dell 2005FPW (20inch widescreen) running at 1680x1050 for games.

To start with I installed wow on the core duo, with the 1.9.3 patch WoW became a universal binary by the way, and ran the game. With low detail settings the framerates I experienced were fairly low in any kind of open area with many people in it. Inside or in areas with few people the framerate was decent (up to 30fps) however in highly populated areas it would drop to around 10. I don't think there was anything else I could do to improve the performance by way of lowering/changing detail settings, however I'll be happy to hear if I've missed a trick somewhere.

Out of curiosity I hooked the mini up to my 2005FPW, and appart from making me want to buy another one so that I could have the mini running on a screen that size all the time, I noticed that it made little difference in framerates.

Now personally I found these framerates just about playable, if you really want to play WoW and just have a Mac mini the good news is it is do-able. However it wasn't what I would call decent performance."

[jamil5454]

The GMA's low fill-rate and lack of hardware T&L certainly don't help things, but the main bottleneck is the lack of dedicated memory. You can always turn down the number of pixels and get a fast CPU to do the vertices, but with shared memory, you're looking at maybe 500 Mb/s instead of 10000 - 20000 Mb/s which is common on modern mainstream cards.

Any game that makes use of high-res textures (such as every newer one) will suffer greatly from this. A GMA950 with 64Mb of dedicated VRAM wouldn't be so bad for gaming on a machine like the MB, but then there'd be hardly any reason to get the MBP.

I say get a MacBook and then use the ~$800 you save to build a decent gaming PC or buy a console and decent TV.

$800 goes a very long way in PC land

[pbook28]

Thanks for all the help everyone! This should help me make my decision.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by jamil5454

The GMA's low fill-rate and lack of hardware T&L certainly don't help things, but the main bottleneck is the lack of dedicated memory. You can always turn down the number of pixels and get a fast CPU to do the vertices, but with shared memory, you're looking at maybe 500 Mb/s instead of 10000 - 20000 Mb/s which is common on modern mainstream cards.

Are you talking GPU memory bandwidth? Cuz that's (up to) 10667 MB/s for the MacBook.