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Elektrix · Apr 19, 2005, 05:06 PM

Hi,

I had asked this on the gaming forums, but it occurred to me this is more of a hardware question.

I have a brand new PB 12" with 1.5GHz G4 and 512MB RAM and the GeForce FX 5200. With World of WarCraft, I'm getting around 10-15fps in crowded areas (closer to 10) at 1024x728, and a slight performance boost when I switch to 800x600..... this is with pretty much all options set to lowest, etc.

I am curious about what sort of performance differences I'd see with the 15" PB with the 64 meg Radeon Mobility 9700.

And I'm wondering how much just upgrading the RAM on my current PB would help in terms of framerate..... would it be noticeably better with 1.25GB RAM, for example?

I'm thinking about the 15" PB for other reasons as well (to avoid the noisy fan of the 12" PB when doing anything CPU intensive, and to have more screen real estate to work with), but I wanted to try and get an idea of what to expect in this realm as well.

Thanks!

-Elektrix

webb3201 · Apr 19, 2005, 05:14 PM

Cannot give you specific numbers, but you should see a great deal of improvement by adding memory and moving to an ATI based GPU. WOW runs better with more ram, and the Nvidia drivers have never been fully baked in OSX. Im sure someone here will post FPS for you on the 15" machine.

Elektrix · Apr 19, 2005, 05:19 PM

Cool, thanks. I'm definitely curious if anyone can share..... I've found a sprinkling of pages and posts around where people talk about performance in general terms, but I'd love to get a better idea of what to expect. If I do return my 12", it's not going to be solely for some better performance in WoW (that would be kind of a silly thing to spend $400-500 extra on), but it would be a nice perk on top of the other reasons I'm considering it (larger screen real estate, quieter operation, etc.).

Simon · Apr 20, 2005, 04:10 AM

I can't give you a perfect comparison because I don't play WoW and I had only a 1GHz 32MB VRAM 12" PowerBook.

But I can tell you this: MoHAA or CoD on my new 1.67GHz 15" with the Radeon 9700 Mobility and 128MB VRAM flies compared to the 12" PowerBook. I don't know how much of this is due to the faster CPU, the increased VRAM or just the fact that the 9700 Mobility slaughters the 5200Go, but my gaming experience has improved by a huge amount. In MoHAA team death matches I now spank everybody's ass.

tobyg · May 11, 2005, 11:46 AM

I'm curious about this specific example too. I have a 1.33ghz 12" and with World of Warcraft, in the AH, I get like 8-10 FPS, depending on how crowded it is. Anyone have a 15" with the ATI 9700 Mobility that can answer what their FPS is? I think it's cnt-r to turn on the FPS monitor.

Thanks!

Keath Milligan · May 11, 2005, 12:10 PM

Originally Posted by Elektrix

Hi,

I had asked this on the gaming forums, but it occurred to me this is more of a hardware question.

I have a brand new PB 12" with 1.5GHz G4 and 512MB RAM and the GeForce FX 5200. With World of WarCraft, I'm getting around 10-15fps in crowded areas (closer to 10) at 1024x728, and a slight performance boost when I switch to 800x600..... this is with pretty much all options set to lowest, etc.

I am curious about what sort of performance differences I'd see with the 15" PB with the 64 meg Radeon Mobility 9700.

And I'm wondering how much just upgrading the RAM on my current PB would help in terms of framerate..... would it be noticeably better with 1.25GB RAM, for example?

I'm thinking about the 15" PB for other reasons as well (to avoid the noisy fan of the 12" PB when doing anything CPU intensive, and to have more screen real estate to work with), but I wanted to try and get an idea of what to expect in this realm as well.

Thanks!

-Elektrix

I have a 15" 1.25Mhz pbook with 2GB RAM and WoW performance is very poor. So I don't think adding RAM is going to magically fix it. I get about the same framerates you're seeing, but I also see a lot of pausing and choppiness in graphically-complex areas. There are also numerous rendering bugs inside some structures.

Elektrix · May 11, 2005, 12:20 PM

What's the video card in that model though? I assume not the Mobility Radeon 9700......

tobyg · May 11, 2005, 01:28 PM

I should clarify that my 1.33ghz 12" is the Nvidia 5200...

Actually, doing some quick checking of specs on 15" 1.25ghz models on eBay, it appears you may have the ATI 9600 Mobility in that machine... which SHOULD give you better performance than my Nvidia 5200...

Also, I have a dual G5 1.8 with WoW installed of course, and a Nvidia 6800 Ultra. WoW Performance on the 6800 compared to the stock 5200 is better, but not by a lot IMO. It's probably 2x the perfomance, but to be honest I was hoping for a lot better. My AMD 3400+ with a 6800 GT card SPANKS the Dual 1.8 with the 6800 Ultra. I think it has to do with the maturity of the drivers (I upgraded to Tiger, slight improvements but only slight) and also the port of WoW on the mac. It could probably be optimized quite a bit.

Does anyone in the Chicagoland area have a 15" newer model with the 9700 pro I can borrow? Or perhaps just load WoW on to see the performance?

worth a shot!

matpop · May 11, 2005, 06:57 PM

I have a 15" 1.25Ghz RADEON 9600 and 768Mb Ram with Hitachi 7200Rpm, the results are bad also with the video settings at the minimum :-(
I don't think that with the new Pb you can have 30-40FPS; today if you are a gamer and mac user swicth to G5 PowerMac, for the future we will see maybe a Radeon Mobility X800.