2006 MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with games from the era

[retta283]

Some of you may remember a thread I made about looking for a Leopard MBP, trying to find the best option. I went with the cheap and reliable option of the late 2006. I would get a 2007 or 08 but I'm afraid it will fail quick.

For anybody that owns one of these, preferably with the 128MB video card, I have a few questions. I want to run a few games from the era on it, but not sure of performance.
Games I want to run:
Star Wars Battlefront (PPC)
Rainbow Six 3 (PPC)
Half-Life 2 (if my Steam for SL/Lion works still)
Call of Duty 4

CoD 4 is the main one I want to see. If anybody has a late 2006 and CoD4 that could give me their performance and what settings are optimal, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm not expecting a whole lot, but interested in seeing it. I still play it on my iMac with a bot mod.

 

[AphoticD]

From my experience more than a decade ago when I bought a brand new 13” MacBook Unibody Late 2008, which had the Nvidia GeForce 9400m GPU, CoD4 for Mac was barely playable even at low graphics settings under Leopard. I found running Win XP under BootCamp on the same hardware was the optimal experience and for the most part the game was very playable. Same goes for games like Doom3, Half Life 2 and Portal.

Star Wars Battlefront should be fine on the X1600 and maybe HL2, but I wouldn’t expect much of CoD4.

 

[retta283]

From my experience more than a decade ago when I bought a brand new 13” MacBook Unibody Late 2008, which had the Nvidia GeForce 9400m GPU, CoD4 for Mac was barely playable even at low graphics settings under Leopard. I found running Win XP under BootCamp on the same hardware was the optimal experience and for the most part the game was very playable. Same goes for games like Doom3, Half Life 2 and Portal.

Star Wars Battlefront should be fine on the X1600 and maybe HL2, but I wouldn’t expect much of CoD4.

That's strange. I can play it on my 2008 unibody fine. I have all the settings and resolution maxed, but I turned AA off and shadows. (Shadows don't seem to work correctly on any Mac I try this game with)
I was using the Steam version on Sierra, if it matters.

How does the 9400m compare to the x1600 in performance?

 

[AphoticD]

That's strange. I can play it on my 2008 unibody fine. I have all the settings and resolution maxed, but I turned AA off and shadows. (Shadows don't seem to work correctly on any Mac I try this game with)
I was using the Steam version on Sierra, if it matters.

Good to know. I had it on disc waybackwhen and it was running under Leopard, so maybe the Steam/Sierra combo has made a number of performance improvements.

Unfortunately I rarely find time for gaming now. 11 years ago I had this thing called “free time”. Now nothing comes for free and time’s not even up for sale!

 

[tevion5]

That's strange. I can play it on my 2008 unibody fine.

My 2011 MBP with an Intel HD3000 always ran COD4 surprisingly smooth at full resolution. Granted it's 3 years more modern but it struggles with most 3D games overall.