I’m thinking about taking the dive and purchasing one of the new Core 2 Duo Macbook Pros. I know it would be sufficient to run all my Unity projects, but I want to use it as a gaming machine too. I haven’t been able to do any PC gaming for quite a few years and there are some titles I’d like to try, such as Half-Life 2 and The Movies
Does anyone know of some reliable benchmarks or other information for gaming performance on the new MBPs? I know the X1600 mobility is not the latest greatest card out there, but is it sufficient for new games like Neverwinter Nights 2 or Oblivion?
I have an early MacBook Pro (Core Duo 1.83) and have no problems running modern games. I even played half way through HL2 in a mac window using CrossOver. I don’t think you should have many problems with the more modern Pros.
Well, because it isn’t strong enough and only has 128MB.
Sure you can run both games on it but you will have to decrease some of the settings for the texture quality, resolution, quality settings, effects in order to get a decent framerate out of it.
I also remember a nice test on notebook gfx cards but i can’t remember the link anymore. I would google for it. If you can’t find anything then go after x1600 reviews. There are for sure a lot of them on the net but keep in mind that the mobility is slower than an ordinary x1600 and has only half of the RAM.
The mobility x1600 isn’t a bad chip. You can sure play a lot of games with it but if you are after such titles then i wouldn’t advise it unless you feel comfortable with reducing the quality settings right from scratch.
And also keep in mind that games in the future won’t need less gfx power, they need more. So if you already have to reduce the quality for the games now this doesn’t sound like a promising future.
I still love this pic it makes me feel good inside. That was first generation too. I think that Oblivion and HL2 will run just fine, the MBpro is well with in there system requirements. Don’t expect to be able to put all graphics on full though.
HL2 contrary to Oblivion is a wonderful scaling engine. Valve has invested millions to get this done right. And as for NWN2: Obsidian really isn’t famous for providing optimized gfx engines… :O)
Or could/should (I think) go for the 2.33ghz MBpro its has the 256mb x1600. Much better in the long run. Yeah its a pretty big step up in price but you do get twice the ram and vram as well as a better processor. If I was getting a MBpro I wouldn’t hesitate for the 2.33ghz one.
Yeah I think so. Also speaking of january I might hold off until after then, it would be a bummer to get one now and have them release new ones at the conference. Just a thought.
I would also wait if you can as you simply wouldn’t enjoy it.
Another option is that you could buy a cheaper notebook (now or next year) and go parallel for a console. At least oblivion is available for the xbox360. nwn2 is pc only at the moment, hl2 and the movies are both playable on the current hardware.
The 256 mb X1600 on the macbook pro(17 in for me) is fantastic. Quake 4’s only hitch is loading times, which isn’t graphics card related. it’s a nice card.
In the early MBPs the X1600 was downclocked (i.e. the “mobility” version) by almost 30% IIRC. In the new (Core2) MBPs the X1600 is equivalent in speeds to the desktop one it seems, so that should be a good speed improvement.
Barefeats did a review of the two flavors of MPB and verified that the GPU is not being choked:
“More good news. Using Graphiccelerator, we were able to display the core frequencies of the ATI Mobility Radeon 1600 GPU while running OpenGL 3D games on the new 15” MacBook Pro. To our delight, the core clock jumped from 311MHz to 423MHz. The memory clock jumped from 297MHz to 450MHz. In the previous series of 15" MacBook Pros the clock speed remained at lower levels (we assume) due to cooling issues."
I’m waiting until January to be on the safe side, and will definitely get the 2.33 GHz.
@deram_scholzara
Quake 4 is kind of not so performance hungry compared to the above games so it isn’t suprising that it’s running fine.
@Aras
Still the clock is lower than a compareable desktop version as a normal x1600 isn’t available anymore and both the pro and the xt version are clocked higher (500 and 590Mhz for the gpu, i don’t know the ram clock speeds, google?!). And wasn’t the 1650 (600Mhz) the real refresh chip?
I own a MacBook Pro since its release, and I didn’t have any problem with Gaming thrugh OS X or Windows. I first had the C1D 2 GHz 256MB X1600 Model, and it ran even Oblivion fine, while many of my PC using friends had problems running it on their not-so-new Hardware. Other than that I mostly played WoW (in OSX), and it ran quite fine.
When I had to send it in for Repair, it got stolen by the Delivery guy, and as the C1D models were no longer produced and my Mac dealer was out of stock I got a brand new shiny C2D 2,33 GHz MBP, and it rocks. Performance under OS X with WoW was around 5-10 FPS higher, and now since WoW supports Multithreaded OpenGL it even doubled, and is now on par with the Windows version.
So my point is: the MBP (well, the 256MB X1600 ones at least) are great mobile Gaming rigs, and the C2D Model is noticably faster than its predecessors.
BTW: Does Unity already support Multithreaded OpenGL?
I’ve tried enabling multithreaded OpenGL in Unity recently. When it works, it gives a really nice perf. boost; but quite often it produces crashes that look like crashes in completely random places. Somehow this depends on the scene objects, shaders used etc. I’ve heard from other people as well that in 10.4.8 the implementation is just too buggy for general use (i.e. it works for WoW but not much more). When it will be stable we will support it.