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World of Warcraft on MacBook Air (Rev A) - Any performance tweaks ?

L

leez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 19, 2008
173
6
UK
Hi,

Few days ago I've installed WoW on my Air, Rev A (1.6, 80GB - changed to 64SSD). About 5 years ago, when I bought the game, was running it on a Vaio laptop. Then switched to MacBook Air. I know, Air is not for gaming, but...

It runs. Low settings, as low as possible. It's playable for leveling, auctions etc. But the question is... are there any addons/tweaks for improving the game performance on OS X at all ? Did search, but no luck.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

If you didn't bother to read above - I'm planning to upgrade to MacBook Pro soon, but want to play now :) - so please no "Switch to Pro" comments. Thanks.
 
L

leez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 19, 2008
173
6
UK
Oh and I'm on Snow Leopard, 10.6.8. Using Coolbook and some fan controling app. Don't want to bootcamp it, as running low on hdd space.

I have everything closed while playing. First 3-5 mins it goes smooth, like 30-40 fps, then it slows down to about 10-15 and becomes playable, but choppy. I think all the textures are being allocated into RAM within this 3-5 mins and when it becomes full, it's starting to slow down.
 
M

mikeo007

macrumors 65816
Mar 18, 2010
1,373
122
leez said:
Oh and I'm on Snow Leopard, 10.6.8. Using Coolbook and some fan controling app. Don't want to bootcamp it, as running low on hdd space.

I have everything closed while playing. First 3-5 mins it goes smooth, like 30-40 fps, then it slows down to about 10-15 and becomes playable, but choppy. I think all the textures are being allocated into RAM within this 3-5 mins and when it becomes full, it's starting to slow down.
Click to expand...

You've found the problem, and unfortunately, there's no real way to solve it. The MBA does not have enough RAM to run WoW as it is now. Back when it first came out, i could run the game on a Compaq laptop with a 32 MB video card and 512MB of RAM, but it's since become very bloated.
 
eXan

eXan

macrumors 601
Jan 10, 2005
4,731
63
Russia
Unfortunately your graphics chip is below terrible.

Comparing Wow performance from 5 years ago to now is incorrect, as each expansion brings more advanced graphics, so if you can't run Cata now, you sure won't be able to run Panda, which comes out rather soon.
 
L

leez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 19, 2008
173
6
UK
Thanks for your comments. I'm still on Burning Legion expansion - so won't update for now. Have to sort this out with a Pro then.

BTW. It's nice how Blizzard keeps your character on the servers. Didn't play for about 5 years, installed two weeks ago, had to migrate wow account with battle.net, wow client download from their website and ready to play with old characters :). I like.
 
eXan

eXan

macrumors 601
Jan 10, 2005
4,731
63
Russia
leez said:
Thanks for your comments. I'm still on Burning Legion expansion - so won't update for now. Have to sort this out with a Pro then.

BTW. It's nice how Blizzard keeps your character on the servers. Didn't play for about 5 years, installed two weeks ago, had to migrate wow account with battle.net, wow client download from their website and ready to play with old characters :). I like.
Click to expand...

Whether you update your account to newer expansions or not is irrelevant, as the game version/engine is always the latest one. What updating does is only adding additional playable races and higher level content, as well as increasing your level cap.

So, despite your account still being BC, the actual game version is the current 4.3.x
 
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