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Is NVIDIA GeForce 9400M Good?

Y

yettimillan

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 28, 2009
185
0
With the Introduction of Civilization V for the Mac and its huge need for power.

Now i'm not gonna attempt to try to play this game. But I downloaded Ship Simulator Extreme on my windows partition. Now on Steam it has the system requirements.

OS: Windows XP (Min. service pack 2), Windows Vista or Windows 7. 32 and 64 bits OS supported
Processor: 3 Ghz P4 Intel or AMD equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB (Windows XP) or 3GB (Vista or Windows 7)
Hard Disk Space: 3.5 GB
Video Card: Geforce 8800GT or ATI Radeon 4850 with 256MB ram (At least Shader model 3.0)
Sound: DirectX compatible
DirectX®: 9.0c

I have a MacBook Aluminium, Intel Core 2 Due 2.0GHz with 2GB Ram and NVIDIA 9400M. The game plays incredibly slowly and keeps jumping, like the refresh rate is so slow. I have downloaded the latest driver from NVIDIA but still it plays slow. Is my problem here the lack of RAM and I have a dual core processor which is above the requirements? I thought the good video card and processor would be enough?

A lot of games seem to have minimum requirements much more than my mac, its not ever that old and seems outdated already....
 
Y

yettimillan

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 28, 2009
185
0
yeah its on the windows partition im trying to play it on. Does Windows on a mac take full advantage of the hardware installed?
 
C

captkirkmtl

macrumors newbie
Nov 27, 2010
22
0
yettimillan said:
yeah its on the windows partition im trying to play it on. Does Windows on a mac take full advantage of the hardware installed?
Click to expand...

Depends if you have the right Drivers installed with your windows OS. I'd assume that the windows Drivers are usually a bit more matured for gaming then the Apple Drivers are for gaming.

Make sure you have the most recent drivers for your windows OS. Otherwise, I'd say you should get the same performance on either.

But you can always download Civilization on both your windows and mac partitions and try it out, Since Steam allows multiple downloads of your game on different OS's.
 
Y

yettimillan

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 28, 2009
185
0
Well I downloaded the Civ 5 demo for pc on my mac. It seems to play totally fine, maybe a tat slow but nothing to stop me playing.


Im wondering why usually in games, after playing for a few hours it gets slower and slower until the refresh rate becomes unbearable.
 
C

captkirkmtl

macrumors newbie
Nov 27, 2010
22
0
yettimillan said:
Well I downloaded the Civ 5 demo for pc on my mac. It seems to play totally fine, maybe a tat slow but nothing to stop me playing.


Im wondering why usually in games, after playing for a few hours it gets slower and slower until the refresh rate becomes unbearable.
Click to expand...


Thats usually bad code by the developers. I'm in software engineer and its a known fact that some programmers create ADT's (data structures) or variables and do not destroy them or garbage collect them. Most games are written in C++, which means their no automatic garbage collection. This is why games become intolerable slow as times passes... The Memory(RAM) gets full with garbage that has not been cleaned up. This is one reason why i prefer Java or C# or any other language other then C++.
 
alust2013

alust2013

macrumors 601
Feb 6, 2010
4,779
2
On the fence
Your problem is that it wants a GPU that is significantly better than what you have. The 9400M is ok, but definitely not at all ideal for heavy games. Your processor is fine, although you may not have enough RAM if you're running vista or 7
 
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