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hleewell

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 22, 2009
544
62
In the MBA official website, it is indicated that 11.6 incher can play Call of Duty 4 at twice the speed of a 9400M chip. The highest spec for the 11.6" MBA is 1.6Ghz. Is this possible?
 
The benchmarks here look promising. Looks like the scores are mostly from MBs and MBPs with 2.4GHz C2Ds and higher. The scores from that site however are likely from a Windows partition though. OSX scores might be a bit worse.
 
Until that footage materializes, here's a link to some videos of what to expect.

Technology marches on! That's a Macbook 13" they were using to play Crysis with nVidia 320 card. This looks very promising indeed :D
 
It may play the games but FPS will decrease significantly after a few minutes (once it gets warm). I'm barely able to play TF2 and SC2 on low specs on a MBP with 4GB RAM.
 
It may play the games but FPS will decrease significantly after a few minutes (once it gets warm). I'm barely able to play TF2 and SC2 on low specs on a MBP with 4GB RAM.

Issues with SC2? It plays great on my 13" MBP with 4GB of RAM.
 
The benchmarks here look promising. Looks like the scores are mostly from MBs and MBPs with 2.4GHz C2Ds and higher. The scores from that site however are likely from a Windows partition though. OSX scores might be a bit worse.

COD isn't as CPU intensive as other game. I've played all of the latest COD games on a 1.3ghz Pentium dual-core processor at 30+FPS although it did have a strong graphics card.
 
I play online with mine no lag full res. on my 1.4ghz 2gb 11" air. After the 1.7 patch for windows/mac cross platform online, it started to get a little laggy so i had to lower the settings. But it handles cod extremely well.
 
the 320m speed lies between a 9400m and 9600m in speed.

Is the 9600 GT w/512mb RAM significantly or just slightly better than the 9600m?

I tried Portal 2 on my MBA 11.6 inch, 1.4ghz, 2mb RAM. It was crawling... though I should have turned my Magic Mouse off in retrospect... anyway... deleted it and Steam immediately. That machine is just not meant for any gaming.
 
Lack of RAM probably.

COD6 runs smoothly at native/ultra settings on my ult. 11" Air.

Are you referring to black ops under windows? Now this I have to see....

Also, since there is no "Ultra" setting, are you using vsync, AA, ect?

If you are claiming that you can run this, or WAW with these settings, please provide the driver, overclocking clocks, and or any other tweaks you may be using to slim down the games footprint on the system.
 
That machine is just not meant for any gaming.

I've actually found it to be a rather potent little casual gaming computer, it just depends on the game. I have the same configuration as yours except with 4GB of RAM, and I've played through a few modern games on it without a problem. Right now I'm going through Mass Effect 2 on it and it plays perfectly at native resolution. So far the only game I tried that was unplayable was Assassin's Creed II.
 
Are you referring to black ops under windows? Now this I have to see....

Also, since there is no "Ultra" setting, are you using vsync, AA, ect?

If you are claiming that you can run this, or WAW with these settings, please provide the driver, overclocking clocks, and or any other tweaks you may be using to slim down the games footprint on the system.

COD6 = Call of Duty 6 = Modern Warfare 2.

Not Black Ops, not WAW (although I'm sure both will run as smoothly on the air).

And yes, under Windows 7 Ultimate SP1.

Using the latest nvidia drivers from laptopvideo2go not the default Boot Camp drivers.

Neither CPU nor GPU have been overclocked.

I have disabled the hiberfile, but done no tweaking which would dramatically affect system performance.

Options>Video>Advanced Video: aspect_ratio auto, AA off, sync_every_frame off, shadows yes, specular_map yes, depth_of_field yes, soften_smoke_edges yes, ragdoll yes, bullet_impacts yes, texture_quality extra.

Confused the word ultra with extra [high], sorry. Meant texture quality.

If you do a quick search on this subforum you'll find multiple people with similar performance from their Airs.
 
COD4 plays fine. The MBA is good in that it doesnt overheat because of the ULV processor.
 
Is the 9600 GT w/512mb RAM significantly or just slightly better than the 9600m?

I tried Portal 2 on my MBA 11.6 inch, 1.4ghz, 2mb RAM. It was crawling... though I should have turned my Magic Mouse off in retrospect... anyway... deleted it and Steam immediately. That machine is just not meant for any gaming.

Unless you're running bootcamp, I wouldn't agree with you. Even more so if you happen to be running 10.6.7 on OSX, as it's already been reported to be a known issue with decreased graphic performance. And again, I'll disagree even more if you have your Air plugged into an external display.

Don't underestimate the Air for gaming, especially at native resolution. The proof of it's pretty exceptional gaming capabilities are well documented all over these forums.
 
COD6 = Call of Duty 6 = Modern Warfare 2.

Not Black Ops, not WAW (although I'm sure both will run as smoothly on the air).

And yes, under Windows 7 Ultimate SP1.

Using the latest nvidia drivers from laptopvideo2go not the default Boot Camp drivers.

Neither CPU nor GPU have been overclocked.

I have disabled the hiberfile, but done no tweaking which would dramatically affect system performance.

Options>Video>Advanced Video: aspect_ratio auto, AA off, sync_every_frame off, shadows yes, specular_map yes, depth_of_field yes, soften_smoke_edges yes, ragdoll yes, bullet_impacts yes, texture_quality extra.

Confused the word ultra with extra [high], sorry. Meant texture quality.

If you do a quick search on this subforum you'll find multiple people with similar performance from their Airs.

Black Ops will absolutely not run smoothly on the air by any stretch of the imagination. One would have to have a VERY good imagination AND VERY low gaming standards AND be a MBA fanboy to even consider the performance playable.
 
1280 x 800 with mostly medium settings. played the whole single player campaign with the same settings and everything played great.

I find that somewhat hard to believe. My (MBP wannabe) HP notebook with Win7, an i7 720, 4GB of RAM and ATI 5650 (w/1GB dedicated video memory) can only run it smoothly (45+ fps all the time) with most everything set to low. Levels like Tosh's mining mission on the lava planet would bring my system to a crawl if I had the shaders set to anything higher than low. 0_o
 
Black Ops will absolutely not run smoothly on the air by any stretch of the imagination. One would have to have a VERY good imagination AND VERY low gaming standards AND be a MBA fanboy to even consider the performance playable.

ive seen some one play it on youtube, but then of course he had a macbook air 13". they still have the same graphics cards though.
 
ive seen some one play it on youtube, but then of course he had a macbook air 13". they still have the same graphics cards though.

And I've tried it for myself on various configurations including the MBA. It runs like crap.
 
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2IS said:
COD6 = Call of Duty 6 = Modern Warfare 2.

Not Black Ops, not WAW (although I'm sure both will run as smoothly on the air).

And yes, under Windows 7 Ultimate SP1.

Using the latest nvidia drivers from laptopvideo2go not the default Boot Camp drivers.

Neither CPU nor GPU have been overclocked.

I have disabled the hiberfile, but done no tweaking which would dramatically affect system performance.

Options>Video>Advanced Video: aspect_ratio auto, AA off, sync_every_frame off, shadows yes, specular_map yes, depth_of_field yes, soften_smoke_edges yes, ragdoll yes, bullet_impacts yes, texture_quality extra.

Confused the word ultra with extra [high], sorry. Meant texture quality.

If you do a quick search on this subforum you'll find multiple people with similar performance from their Airs.

Black Ops will absolutely not run smoothly on the air by any stretch of the imagination. One would have to have a VERY good imagination AND VERY low gaming standards AND be a MBA fanboy to even consider the performance playable.

All i said was mw2 runs smoothly.

I'm going to get a copy of black ops and test it on my own Air. I'll update this thread if necessary.

Out of curiosity, OS? Drivers?
 
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