PDA

View Full Version : How to make Doom 3 and other graphics-driven games run smooth?



BurtonCCC
May 1, 2006, 01:40 PM
I'm going to be getting a MBP soon and I wanted to know, just in general, what makes beautiful games like Doom 3 run clean with high settings? Is it the processor and RAM or something like video card?

Daniel.


greatdevourer
May 1, 2006, 02:19 PM
You can't change the graphics card, and you can't upgrade the proc yourself, so I'd recommend going for the better proc, then save up and upgrade the RAM yourself (for a lot less than getting Apple to do it)
Eric5h5
May 1, 2006, 02:47 PM
Is it the processor and RAM or something like video card?

D. All of the above. :) You need a fast processor, and a reasonable amount of RAM, and a fast video card. There's a lot of stuff to compute, and a lot of data, and a lot of graphical effects.

--Eric
BurtonCCC
May 1, 2006, 02:50 PM
Well I'm planning on 2.16GHz and 2GB of RAM. Will that run it pretty clean? I'm guessing that if I play the game at a lower resolution, it will give the video card a little bit of a break?

Daniel.
AppleMatt
May 1, 2006, 03:07 PM
At the moment things working against you are the fact that there's not many universal binaries around and all the games ports have been done with the PowerPC in mind. Additionally, OS X on Intel has only been shipping a short amount of time and therefore has more bugs/less performance than it should have (look at the difference between the 10.4.x updates).

Looking ahead though, many companies are releasing free universal binary updates to their games. New games that are ported over will retain their x86 coding tricks, and Apple will keep improving OS X on Intel.

As for now, RAM is good. You're getting 2GB, which should be plenty. Don't buy it from Apple though - it's overpriced.

AppleMatt
MacsRgr8
May 1, 2006, 03:16 PM
I'm going to be getting a MBP soon and I wanted to know, just in general, what makes beautiful games like Doom 3 run clean with high settings? Is it the processor and RAM or something like video card?

Daniel.

All you mentioned + Boot Camp + Windows XP + Doom 3 for Windows ;)
BurtonCCC
May 1, 2006, 04:13 PM
All you mentioned + Boot Camp + Windows XP + Doom 3 for Windows ;)
Download the Whoopee! Cushion for your Dashboard, click on it, and there you have what I think of your post.

Daniel.
MacsRgr8
May 1, 2006, 04:16 PM
Thought it was fun, eh? :D
Mojo67821
May 1, 2006, 06:27 PM
All you mentioned + Boot Camp + Windows XP + Doom 3 for Windows ;)

It's a good idea to me. I'm playing FEAR right now on the windows side of my MacBookPro with 1.8 core duo and 1.5 gigs of ram. It runs very smoothly. although occasionally when I first engage an enemy it hangs up for a nano-second... other than that it runs great.
Lord Blackadder
May 1, 2006, 08:46 PM
Besides the CPU, games tend to stress all of a computer's major subsystems - memory, disk, and GPU. The FSB needs to be as fast as possible to move all the data back and forth.

Any one of these can become a bottleneck and hurt game performance. Sometimes a balanced system with low-mid level components will run as well or better than a system that has some fast components and a bottleneck negating their benefits.