Gaming on the Santa Rosa MacBook X3100 (Not Pro)

can you run the FPS test that comes with CS:S, on the lowest visual settings, but at native resolution please?

Thanks.

Finding good game benches for the "Pathetic" integrated X3100 isnt easy,Ive looked. Reading through early literature about it though showed it was a slight incremental step up from 950.. Please anyone post some benchmarks so everyone can see. The fact of the matter is Integrated is just cheap and any real gpu made in the last few years will slaughter this thing. Its how Apple seperates the lines these days. Consumer machines get this thing and the pro machine get REAL GPU's. Its a shame Apple doesnt offer a $25- $50 option for a real gpu say a ATI 2400XT. It was either anandtech or toms hardware who did a comparison a while ago between the integrated and low end GPU's and it wasnt pretty. Whenever Apple doesnt beat its chest about a new machines graphics there is a reason.

Are you using the latest X3100 drivers? Intel recently released some beta drivers which enabled some HW acceleration (and apparently dramatically increased gaming performance).
This is for windoze btw. If your talking about mac osx your probably out of further luck.

Barefeats early 3D game results

It doesn't look pretty at 1280x800 HQ. However, I'd like to have an idea of what the results might look like at medium quality and lower rez. Halo and UT2004 might be acceptable then.


http://barefeats.com/mbook.html

fblack said:

It doesn't look pretty at 1280x800 HQ. However, I'd like to have an idea of what the results might look like at medium quality and lower rez. Halo and UT2004 might be acceptable then.


http://barefeats.com/mbook.html

Click to expand...

I read that too.
And to quote Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear): "it's all completely hopeless"

Red Sox said:

OK I just ran it, and I got 44 FPS.

EDIT: I just updated my Intel chipset drivers, and the FPS increased slightly to 47.5 FPS.

Is that any good?

Click to expand...

47.5fps is not too bad, but how did it look at lowest settings? Like mud or acceptable?

MacsRgr8 said:

I read that too.
And to quote Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear): "it's all completely hopeless"

Click to expand...

Ouch.

new benchmars at MQ settings

Barefeats posted new benchmarks for 3D games at medium quality settings. Still not very pretty for mac games:

WWC 1280x800 MQ 38fps
Quake4 800x600 MQ, no shadows 25fps
Prey 800x600 MQ, no shadows 11fps
Doom3 800x600 MQ, no shadows 17fps
Halo UB 800x600 MQ 33fps
UT2004 Inferno Bot 800x600 47fps

http://barefeats.com/mbook2.html

Has anyone tested "The Lord of the Rings: Battle for middle earth 2 " ??this is my favorite game and when i go all mac i would like to know if i can still play it with parallels..

Getting Macbook for Christmas =D PC goes out the window... not really just gonna put it in storage.. =d

Thru boot camp, win xp pro:
MacBook santa rosa, 2GB ram, 2.2ghz

All games run at 1200x800

Half Life 2, runs quite well at 'high' graphics settings except texture detail set to 'medium'

Day of Defeat:Source, a little slower than HL2, fine with somewhat lower graphics settings

Call of Duty 2, won't run under DX9 but I haven't tried to remedy this yet, runs great under DX7

Wolfenstein Enemy Territory: Runs great at max
True Combat:Elite: ET mod, also runs great maxed

Counter Strike:Condition Zero (and 1.6) max it out and it runs fine, of course

Enemy Territory:Quake Wars Demo, won't run because of an 'unsupported chipset', I have a suspicion that the full version would run

Half Life 2 runs quite good for me at Max Detail, apart from when you get long distance views the frame-rate just drops big time.

Setting the textures to medium remedies this though.

I might need more ram to solve that problem as the game has a tendency to stutter quite a lot.

The CS:S Stress Test gives me a result of 29fps with all settings at high.

I'm not sure how Red Sox got such a high frame-rate on the Stress Test as I lowered everything and it only took me up to 34fps which says to me there is a bottleneck in place.

2.2ghz/1GB/X3100 Boot Camp Windows XP

X3100 Driver Ver:14.31.1

DirectX 7 ?

have you guys tried out playing with DirectX 7 instead of 8? Maybe it improves fps a bit at the expense of visual goodness.

PS: Has anyone tried World of Warcraft? I've been searching some forums but found very little information about it.

Posting

As you really should, could you post information:
CPU speed
RAM
Method of playing ~ bootcamp/parallels/vmware/crossover
DX level (7-10)

Will be getting 4gb ram over xmas and hopefully games will run v. crisply

triobot said:

Will be getting 4gb ram over xmas and hopefully games will run v. crisply

Click to expand...

Dont expect much. I know 0 games where more than 2 GBs of RAM makes any difference in performance.

And games that need 2 GB (new-gen games like UT3, Crysis) will not even run on a MacBook, until it gets a decent GPU.

For a laugh, I tried Battlefield 2142 today with (predictably) not great results.

I only have 1GB RAM but I don't think that's the main problem - even on the lowest settings. That is, you are in the 'world' and can see what looks like sky, plus a few other HUD objects, but that's it

No teammates, no enemies , no buildings, no vehicles = no chance.

EDIT: This is OSX BF2142 on 10.5.1

spriter said:

For a laugh, I tried Battlefield 2142 today with (predictably) not great results.

I only have 1GB RAM but I don't think that's the main problem - even on the lowest settings. That is, you are in the 'world' and can see what looks like sky, plus a few other HUD objects, but that's it

No teammates, no enemies , no buildings, no vehicles = no chance.

EDIT: This is OSX BF2142 on 10.5.1

Click to expand...

i guess that's because the x3100 doesn't support the shaders ... battlefield 2 and 2142 demos looked the same on my ti4400 ...

Don't Hurt Me,
I've watched you post for ages. You've been quite the Custom PC Rig advocate. I've a Dual Processor, Dual Core G4 Freescale 2.0 GHz from a hacked up X-Serve running in a NeXT Step Cube Case. It's basically my cube. It has twin AGP nVidia GeForce4 4800Ti's cut to fit the case. They run in tandem like a rigged SLi or Crossfire. 256 MB RAM. PixleShader 2.0 I get 24 FPS in WoWC. 4 GB RAM at 133 MHz. I would love Apple to allow custom Macs to be built. Or allow OS-X to run on AMD chips with SLi or Crossfire for gaming.

For the price... My BlackBook kicks the arse end off my Cube. I get 38 FPS With most of the things turned on in WoWC. That is insane. It also supports Pixelshader 4.0 and DirectX 10 (When M$ decides to ratify the bloody DirectX 10 issues). I spent $1499.00. I can go to four GB of RAM for true 64-Bit computing (My Mark II MacBook Pro cannot do this), custom install my 320 GB 7200 Seagate Drive and it will still blow the arse end off my Cube.

For the money, it preforms very very well and is a much better laptop than the GMA 950. It utilizes it's 144 MB of RAM and looks very peachy on a 23" Monitor with the lid closed at whatever the 23" res is natively.

With everything maxed out in WoWC I got 17 FPS in city and 21 outside. This is still awesome. My Cube, my Mini and my Quicksilver cannot pull this off and have dedicated GPUs. They're just old and don't even support Pixilshader 2.0. There is no help for the 9200 of the mini... 32 MB and a underpowered GPU and it's dedicated. My Duo Mini kills it. It got 2.2 FPS in Iornforge, the Duo gets 15. The Quicksilver 18... nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4800 with 128 MB RAM and it gets 18...

Now, a Mac Pro with an X1900 overclocked to the X1950Pro speeds is quite cool if you get the copper liquid cooled heatsinc. But this is a MacBook... it's about an inch thick. The heatsink on the X1950Pro is thicker. What do you want?

A MacBook that's 1/2" thick with an nVidia 8800m GTX with 1GB RAM? The card alone costs more than the MacBook.

X2400 Mobility... Sure. It would drive a 30" display. Apple doesn't want the MacBook to be capable of this as it would eat into the sales of the MacBook Pro which is the line which supports the HD 30" display. That is the reason they don't have a dedicated GPU in the MacBook.

Still, I find gaming on the BlackBook awesome. It's fun. I enjoy it. I can Raid now (couldn't on the GMA 950) and it looks preaty (It wasn't before on the Mini Duo).

Anyone play Nintendo 8-Bit? Anyone think Mario looks wicked cool in colour with 8-bit graphics? I do.

No Mario game has ever come close to "Super Mario Brothers" on the NES. Why? It's classic fun. It was solid. Paper Mario is cool, just not the same. Make "Super Mario Brothers" from the NES with say Playstation 3 Graphics and it might work. 2d and billions of pixels on 32 pipelines... With 7.1 suround for all the Beep beep boop ba be de boop do dee dee blip boo beep boop doot doot doot! It will rock. But it will cost you 399.00 for the cheap arse version and 599.00 for the good one. NES base system 99.00. NES with a gun 129.00 NES with a Robot and a gun 179.00.

So, NES=Fun. MacBook GMAx3100=Fun. For the price. If you want to game with Playstation 3 Graphics get a MacBook Pro. But for me, I use my Wii more often than my Playstation 3. Why? It's fun. And it didn't cost me 599.00, it was 249.00 Much like my BlackBook 1499.00 rather than 3700.00 to get the same features that come with the BlackBook.

Sorry for the long post, but people, the new MacBooks blow the old ones arse ends off!

Dont Hurt Me said:

Finding good game benches for the "Pathetic" integrated X3100 isnt easy,Ive looked. Reading through early literature about it though showed it was a slight incremental step up from 950.. Please anyone post some benchmarks so everyone can see. The fact of the matter is Integrated is just cheap and any real gpu made in the last few years will slaughter this thing. Its how Apple seperates the lines these days. Consumer machines get this thing and the pro machine get REAL GPU's. Its a shame Apple doesnt offer a $25- $50 option for a real gpu say a ATI 2400XT. It was either anandtech or toms hardware who did a comparison a while ago between the integrated and low end GPU's and it wasnt pretty. Whenever Apple doesnt beat its chest about a new machines graphics there is a reason.

Click to expand...

The Red Wolf said:

Don't Hurt Me,
I've watched you post for ages. You've been quite the Custom PC Rig advocate. I've a Dual Processor, Dual Core G4 Freescale 2.0 GHz from a hacked up X-Serve running in a NeXT Step Cube Case. It's basically my cube. It has twin AGP nVidia GeForce4 4800Ti's cut to fit the case. They run in tandem like a rigged SLi or Crossfire. 256 MB RAM. PixleShader 2.0 I get 24 FPS in WoWC. 4 GB RAM at 133 MHz. I would love Apple to allow custom Macs to be built. Or allow OS-X to run on AMD chips with SLi or Crossfire for gaming.

For the price... My BlackBook kicks the arse end off my Cube. I get 38 FPS With most of the things turned on in WoWC. That is insane. It also supports Pixelshader 4.0 and DirectX 10 (When M$ decides to ratify the bloody DirectX 10 issues). I spent $1499.00. I can go to four GB of RAM for true 64-Bit computing (My Mark II MacBook Pro cannot do this), custom install my 320 GB 7200 Seagate Drive and it will still blow the arse end off my Cube.

For the money, it preforms very very well and is a much better laptop than the GMA 950. It utilizes it's 144 MB of RAM and looks very peachy on a 23" Monitor with the lid closed at whatever the 23" res is natively.

With everything maxed out in WoWC I got 17 FPS in city and 21 outside. This is still awesome. My Cube, my Mini and my Quicksilver cannot pull this off and have dedicated GPUs. They're just old and don't even support Pixilshader 2.0. There is no help for the 9200 of the mini... 32 MB and a underpowered GPU and it's dedicated. My Duo Mini kills it. It got 2.2 FPS in Iornforge, the Duo gets 15. The Quicksilver 18... nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4800 with 128 MB RAM and it gets 18...

Now, a Mac Pro with an X1900 overclocked to the X1950Pro speeds is quite cool if you get the copper liquid cooled heatsinc. But this is a MacBook... it's about an inch thick. The heatsink on the X1950Pro is thicker. What do you want?

A MacBook that's 1/2" thick with an nVidia 8800m GTX with 1GB RAM? The card alone costs more than the MacBook.

X2400 Mobility... Sure. It would drive a 30" display. Apple doesn't want the MacBook to be capable of this as it would eat into the sales of the MacBook Pro which is the line which supports the HD 30" display. That is the reason they don't have a dedicated GPU in the MacBook.

Still, I find gaming on the BlackBook awesome. It's fun. I enjoy it. I can Raid now (couldn't on the GMA 950) and it looks preaty (It wasn't before on the Mini Duo).

Anyone play Nintendo 8-Bit? Anyone think Mario looks wicked cool in colour with 8-bit graphics? I do.

No Mario game has ever come close to "Super Mario Brothers" on the NES. Why? It's classic fun. It was solid. Paper Mario is cool, just not the same. Make "Super Mario Brothers" from the NES with say Playstation 3 Graphics and it might work. 2d and billions of pixels on 32 pipelines... With 7.1 suround for all the Beep beep boop ba be de boop do dee dee blip boo beep boop doot doot doot! It will rock. But it will cost you 399.00 for the cheap arse version and 599.00 for the good one. NES base system 99.00. NES with a gun 129.00 NES with a Robot and a gun 179.00.

So, NES=Fun. MacBook GMAx3100=Fun. For the price. If you want to game with Playstation 3 Graphics get a MacBook Pro. But for me, I use my Wii more often than my Playstation 3. Why? It's fun. And it didn't cost me 599.00, it was 249.00 Much like my BlackBook 1499.00 rather than 3700.00 to get the same features that come with the BlackBook.

Sorry for the long post, but people, the new MacBooks blow the old ones arse ends off!

Click to expand...

Your comparison with consoles isn't appropriate. Wii has different controls/games than PS/Xbox, while MacBook has those the same with MBP, but with 674810824 times slower graphics.

That's why games aren't more fun on MacBook, than on iMac/MBP/MP.

I also get an impression that you are comparing GPUs power by the amount of VRAM they have. Not true. Its all about the speed of the card (core & memory clock, number of pipes, etc) that makes a difference. Give GeForce 4 Ti 2 GBs of VRAM and it would still be much, MUCH slower than Radeon X1900 with 128 MB (if there was one) or 256 MB. VRAM is just a bonus - a rather small one.

The Red Wolf said:

Now, a Mac Pro with an X1900 overclocked to the X1950Pro speeds is quite cool if you get the copper liquid cooled heatsinc. But this is a MacBook... it's about an inch thick. The heatsink on the X1950Pro is thicker. What do you want?

A MacBook that's 1/2" thick with an nVidia 8800m GTX with 1GB RAM?

Click to expand...

Well, since you brough up the thickness point... Do you know that MBP is 0.07 inches thinner than a MB? Yet is has a video card that is light years ahead of X3100 >.>

What is really sad is how a four year old iBook G4 1Ghz with a Mobility Radeon 9200 32mb has no problem getting similar FPS in games that the Macbook does... and the 9200 was scraping the bottom of the barrel back in the day, let alone now.

socamx said:

What is really sad is how a four year old iBook G4 1Ghz with a Mobility Radeon 9200 32mb has no problem getting similar FPS in games that the Macbook does... and the 9200 was scraping the bottom of the barrel back in the day, let alone now.

Click to expand...

Well, its very game-specific. If the game is much more CPU-bound, it runs faster on MacBook (for example my MacBook (GAM950) runs KOTOR noticably faster than my iMac G5 2 GHz with Radeon 9600 - on maximum graphics settings, however some graphical features are unsupported/buggy like grass or frame buffer effects)

eXan said:

Your comparison with consoles isn't appropriate. Wii has different controls/games than PS/Xbox, while MacBook has those the same with MBP, but with 674810824 times slower graphics.

That's why games aren't more fun on MacBook, than on iMac/MBP/MP.

Well, since you brough up the thickness point... Do you know that MBP is 0.07 inches thinner than a MB? Yet is has a video card that is light years ahead of X3100 >.>

Click to expand...

I have a MacBook Pro and a BlackBook. I wasn't comparing RAM. My Custom Cube has a custom SLi GeForce4 Ti 4800 from two MMD machines. It works in twin AGP slots at 8X each. 16 Pipelines. Pixelshader 2.0. It gets kicked in the arse by my X3100.

Games aren't more fun on a MacBook?

Ever burn yourself with an AlBook?

Games are certainly cooler with a MacBook.

If cooler is less hot and I don't burn my thighs (Yes, I wear skirts and play with my MacBook but not with my MacBook Pro, aluminum is hot) it's more fun. Better design... We need Carbon Fiber now!

Jayzyz...

Wii is fun because it's cool.

PS3 is fun because it's cool.

Wii is cheap and PS3 is not cheep.

Read my post, then criticize me. It wasn't about RAM. And the X3100 blows the 9200 GPU out of the water. Period. It's clocked like an old X550 or X600 ATI card or an nVidia GeFoece 5700. ::just sighs::