[Urban Broccoli]

Hey everyone, I obviously didn't buy a 12 inch powerbook(1.5 GHZ) just to play games on, but I'm curious as to how it runs some games? Fill me in if you play any games on your 12-incher, and how they run. Thanks.

[mad cow disease]

What games specifically are we talking about here?

[SpaceRockness]

I have a 1.33Ghz 12" PB and gaming is decent enough. Considering you have a slightly faster PB, you should have a slightly better experience with some of the games I had some lag issues with.

Battlefield 1942(demo): Its ok for some things but generally laggy as hell with lots o' action going on.

Call Of Duty: Very smooth with minimal loading lag but this game does perform better with ATI Radeon 9600 based machines(ex: like my older 1.25Ghz 15" PB)

Medal of Honor series: Very smooth but can lag a bit during online play.

Simcity 4: Stick to small cities and ~200,000 sim population, anything more than that will result in dog slow performance... lowering the eye candy only squeezes some speed at the cost of lack of realistic shadows, less detailed and varied buildings. SC4 is very processor+gpu intensive, and I doubt it would be any different since the Mobile Nvidia 5200 generally sucks for this type of gpu demanding games.

The Sims: Snappy considering its been out for so long

The Sims 2: I haven't tried it yet but I've heard the 12" PBs barely run this game and like SC4, the GPU cripples gameplay... since the new iBooks have a better gpu than the 12" PB, the Radeon 9550 will kick arse in gaming

[I was David B.]

Originally Posted by Urban Broccoli

Hey everyone, I obviously didn't buy a 12 inch powerbook(1.5 GHZ) just to play games on, but I'm curious as to how it runs some games? Fill me in if you play any games on your 12-incher, and how they run. Thanks.

Whatever you play, the fan will run full blast.

I have Halo, runs fine, Return to castle Wolfenstein, fine, Tomb Raider last revelation, fine.

My favorites: Myst, Riven, Exile: great, no fan

[Urban Broccoli]

Thanks, that helps alot yall. Wow, even Halo runs well? I wont be doing a lot of online play on any of these games, just curious about offline play.

[junebug630]

Tomb Raider last revelation, fine.

If Last Revalation is the one that came out recently , that would be an oxymoron.

[Urban Broccoli]

Anybody play Home World 2 on their 12 incher? How does that run? On what kind of settings?

[OmniShinzui]

im curious also, since im getting a 12" by the end of the year. How does World of Warcraft play? I know about the fan already. Thanks

(sorry if I hijacked the thread a bit)

[Urban Broccoli]

No prob Omni, we're both lookin for the same thing

[treebark7182]

I'm running wow on 1.33ghz 12'' with 768mb ram (by tomorrow itll be 1.25gb)
Wow plays fantastic on my little guy. Just dont turn your terrain distance up and you'll be fine i leave it on at about 1/3 the way up and its great. If you experience lag in major cities dont be supprised. Most people do no matter what their rig is.

[junebug630]

Power book 12", 1.5GHz, 80GB hd - Quake III running fine with the timedemo running about 81 fps (which surprised the heck out of me) i will have to check what resolution it was set to , but I did have blood left on by default, which I normally don't . I connected it to my Dell 1905 monitor and saw more ghosting than when the monitor was connected to my PC. I don't know if that will be a problem, I haven't tested other games yet.
Of course if Quake 3 works well any game using the Quake 3 game engine should work well too. (Call of Duty (mentioned earlier) and Return To Castle Wolfenstein)
I also noticed while playing the game on the 12" screen that if I moved my head much, the screen would get darker in some places that I didn't want it to. Quake III is a dark game to begin with so I would have to adjust the settings.
I then ran a test for heat by putting the game into a death match in spectator mode,(on top of my Icurve) pulling up one of the bot's views (8 bots total), and let it run for a 50 frag limit on Hardcore. According to the Widget that I use for temp controls, the machine only got up to about 52-53.5c after the match was over. (took about 22-25 minutes) I am a little confused because I have had my machine go up to about 60c with just Firefox(2 windows) and Opera (4 windows) open with Terminal and maybe a bit torrent client. I closed it and let it sleep and it went back down to about 41-42.5 that it usually sits at in about 20 minutes.

update - for some reason Halo does not run that well. I will have to check out the settings, but it ran very choppy. I can't understand how this would happen as the game was originally planned for the Mac.

[stefls]

I can only say from my experience that Starcraft works like a charm. Haven't seen a single game since worthwhile enough to install