Macbook Quite A Capable Gaming Machine

[manhorse]

I recently purchased one of the new Macbooks. One aspect of this which I haven't seen a lot of people talk about is how it does in real world scenarios for us gamers. I installed Windows XP on the machine and installed some game demos for the newest games out as well as some I have which are within a year old. After doing some testing I've been quite surprised with how well the video card handles everything. I'm not going to sit here and post benchmarks and framerates (thats what the professional reviewers are for), but I wanted to see what other people thought.

I installed the new Tomb Raider Underworld Demo. I was expecting the video card to choke quickly, but to my surprise it handled everything really well. I ran the game at full settings and 2XX Anti-aliasing in the Macbook's native resolution. I did notice from frame rate drop when I played a scene that involved me floating in water, but it wasn't the to the point of being unplayable. Considering this is a brand new game with bleeding edge effects I think the shared video card proved quite capable. :)

[CoreyMac]

Tomb Raider demo runs like crap (to me) on my macbook pro with the 8600 GT......it cant possibly run good on the mac

[No1451]

Tried running Fallout 3 on this thing, terrible frames at low settings.

[DRIVAR]

Tomb Raider demo runs like crap (to me) on my macbook pro with the 8600 GT......it cant possibly run good on the mac

picky much?

[jav6454]

I run VMware Fusion and virtualize Vista Home Premium. Try to play Rise of Nations and the graphics card does quite well. Also performance wise its very very very smooth. The only problem is that Vista will randomly crash at any point during the game and I have to force quit Fusion. Once it even made me Hard Reboot the whole Mac.

[manhorse]

picky much?

LOL, Really. I don't know what to tell ya. I've been throwing some games at mine and it seems to be holding up well. Maybe I just have terrible standards for what I consider decent gameplay. (Shrug)

[CoreyMac]

picky much?

Picky? 30fps is acceptable on a console on a TELEVISION....but on a computer display 30fps is downright awful IMO. (Thats how slow it looked like it was when i was on the boat to start the demo, maybe even slower)

Picky? Maybe, if all I played was the occasional game....but when you've grown up playing Quake on the PC (1,2,3 & 4) multiplayer competitively....you can really start seeing where the differences in framerates lie.

[Chase817]

Picky? 30fps is acceptable on a console on a TELEVISION....but on a computer display 30fps is downright awful IMO. (Thats how slow it looked like it was when i was on the boat to start the demo, maybe even slower)

Picky? Maybe, if all I played was the occasional game....but when you've grown up playing Quake on the PC (1,2,3 & 4) multiplayer competitively....you can really start seeing where the differences in framerates lie.

how can you complain about 30 fps?? if i could even squeeze out 15 fps on a new game on my crappy gma 950, i'd be happy.

[pw1388]

Here is some games i played on my macbook
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4ABDCCA05FF04E38

I think i will make an updated videos of all the games + left 4 dead since it just came out today and i have been playing the demo on my mac. and take some request for other games.

[darienphoenix]

The Source engine runs quite happily, I played TF2 on my AlBook under Bootcamp, with decently high settings, without problems.

TF2 is no Crysis, to be sure, but it's a hell of a lot better than the piss-poor excuse for graphical ability my BlackBook had.