[nayr x]

I got a MBP at the beginning of the summer, and have since been a little bummed with it's gaming capability. It might be that my g5 desktop had me spoiled, but I haven't found any fps that truly run smoothly on the MBP. (just to clarify, i have a 2.16 duo with 2gigs and the RadeonX1600)

To be honest i have only run a couple games, but have been more or less let down. Here are the two I have been playing most:

Halo---
Halo might just be suffering because it has not been made universal... but I have found that no combination of resolutions, geometric detail etc has produced true fluid gameplay. The fps seems nearly the same whether the settings are at their lowest or maxed out. Something which i have found perplexing. Has anybody found some combo of settings which produces good frame rates?

Wolfenstein ET---
A great and highly addictive game, but I am getting sick of being gunned-down by those really good players who MUST be running on much faster systems judging by how quick they can move and target, something which is very difficult for me on my MBP due to the slow framerates. I am getting tired of playing as an engineer only because I can contribute without having to do a lot of close combat and delicate manuvers (like medics need to do). Again, I have played with settings a LOT and have found none which produce smooth gameplay. Does anyone have insights to share?

I am a little bumbed, because I was not planning on buying another machine for a long time, and I was hoping the new macs could hold their own in 3D gaming. Also, there are a number of games, like Quake Wars, which I am excited to play, but fear that the gameplay will never be what I want it to be. Maybe its just the laptop curse. I sure wish they'd start building notebooks with upgradable graphics cards. sigh.

anyway, if anyone would like to comment I would love to hear it.

thats my rant for the month.

[mduell]

The poorer than expected performance may be the result of the video card (GPU and VRAM) being underclocked by about 40%. The nominal speeds from ATi are 475MHz core / 470MHz memory, but Apple runs them at just 310MHz core / 278MHz memory in the 15" MacBook Pro.

If you don't mind the heat, fan noise, and battery life reduction, you can use apps on either Windows or OSX to increase the clockrate; I'm not sure what this will do to your warranty.

[goMac]

Both those games are not universal. That could be the problem.

[Thinine]

No, that is the problem. The MBP can handle both of those games in Windows just fine.�