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Civ 5 & MBA 11", 13", or no dice?

11.6 MacBook Pro and Civ 5

I have the base 11.6 inch MacBook Pro (2GB, 64GB SSD, 1.4 C2D) and run Civ5 in OSX via Steam. My experience so far is that the intro screen comes up black but I can hear the sound and then I hit esc (after say 10 seconds) and I am brought to the main menu. After that I play on a mix of low and medium settings and after about 15 to 20 minutes the fan is blowing. To be honest I am not impressed with Civ5 and I am a long time player. I too have a quad core gaming rig with 8GB RAM, GTX 460's and it's (Civ5) slow as hell on it too when further on in the game. In general I think you will find the 11.6 inch MBA more than sufficient for some gaming on the go but games that lag like Civ5 that have performance issues will remain on this platform.
 
a2applegirl said:
civ 5 is running fine on my macbook pro. It runs really slowly on the air though.
Click to expand...

What's your hardware (on the Pro)? I have a 2008 MacBook Pro with this hardware:

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
2 GB 1067 HHz Memory
166.9 GB free space
NVidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics
(also NVidia GeForce 9400M)

I know 9400M isn't supported, but i don't know if 9600M GT is.
will it work, and what do you have?
Thank you so much!
 
miniman1696 said:
What's your hardware (on the Pro)? I have a 2008 MacBook Pro with this hardware:

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
2 GB 1067 HHz Memory
166.9 GB free space
NVidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics
(also NVidia GeForce 9400M)

I know 9400M isn't supported, but i don't know if 9600M GT is.
will it work, and what do you have?
Thank you so much!
Click to expand...

Here are my specs:

15-inch: 2.66GHz
Intel Core i7
4GB Memory
500GB hard drive
SD card slot
Intel HD Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512MB

So I have the I7 chip and a dedicated graphics card with 512MB.

The 9600M GT is on my older backup macbook pro (2008) and Civ 5 is working on that as well. Again, that has 512MB of dedicated memory.:)
 
thank you so much!

on your old pro, can you run on medium graphics or are you on low? also does it crash?
(sorry I'm asking so many questions!! :rolleyes: )
 
old Mac Book Aluminum question

I got this mac book about two christmas's ago and was wondering if it would be able to handle Civ IV ... it has

2.4GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2GB 1067MHz DDR3
Graphics: Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

The game is an older one so I figured it would work but I was just wonering.. Any feedback is helpful! thank you!
 
kframpton9 said:
I got this mac book about two christmas's ago and was wondering if it would be able to handle Civ IV ... it has

2.4GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2GB 1067MHz DDR3
Graphics: Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

The game is an older one so I figured it would work but I was just wonering.. Any feedback is helpful! thank you!
Click to expand...

You will have to use the lowest settings for most items and turn shadowing and things like that off. It will run, but will run slowly.
 
Yep. Civ IV is actually a lot less resource heavy. That's the one that you may want to use lower settings if your Mac has only the Intel Integrated Graphics like the Intel 3100. I've run Civ IV with some features turned up a bit on the Nvidia 9400M. Though to be fair, I ran it in bootcamp. Not sure about the OSX version.
 
Here's a video of a guy playing Civ5 via Bootcamp on a 13" MBP, with the 320m: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYxgxup54r0

And in notebookreview's testing, the 11.6" MBA outperformed the 13" MBP as a gaming machine: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5915&p=3


Civ 5 *IS* CPU-intensive, but really only in the between-turn AI processing, so the slower C2D in the MBA should really only be affecting the time it takes to process the other Civs' turns. If the OSX port of the game is running poorly on the MBA, it sounds like it has less to do with the hardware limitations and more to do with shoddy optimization. Bootcamp looks like the way to go. Not terribly surprising, really.
 
Mac port is terrible

The mac port of Civ 5 is terrible. It's unplayable on my 1.8ghz Macbook Air. However it plays just fine in bootcamp, with everything set to low, which is fine with me. Macs are really just useless for playing games without putting Windows on them. Sometimes I wonder if I should just stay in Windows 7 on my mac.
 
Depends on the game. Of course, there's lots of games that run well on OSX, but I'd stay away from the more resource hog ones. Ones that command higher-end hardware are usually best to go with Direct X. There are some teams a little better with OSX, though. The guys behind the Sims are usually half decent at getting decent performance specs, and of course Blizzard. Direct X might still be a bit faster, but those guys tend to get it closer than most.

For games in which they generally have low reqs, might as well run on OSX. You'll hardly notice the performance difference. Civilization seems to traditionally run better when bootcamped. Take note, the AI routines haven't exactly increased in that much CPU demand, so Civ 5 shouldn't be much worse for wear.
 
alexjohnson said:
Disappointing. Looks like I am buying the ultimate 11" and Boot Camp using XP for now.
Click to expand...

I have an ultimate 11" and have Civ 5 installed under OS X. It's been running fine so far. Just about all the graphics setting are on low. I do have it on 1366 x 768 resolution. No issues or slowdowns so far. I haven't had a chance to play a lot though, so I can't comment on how things will go later in the game.

Great little machine so far!

I've been playing Dragon Age, Starcraft II, Majesty 2, Red Alert 3, and Half-Life 2 on this little guy. All Mac OS X versions. Having a blast so far. Going to get Borderlands when it gets released and see how it performs.
 
Take note. You need Windows 7 for Bootcamp on the Airs. They don't support Windows XP, and there may be a chance that the XP workaround (posted somewhere) wont work for you.

Thing is, XP doesn't have proper drivers for SSD drives so it may be damaging (over time) for it. Windows 7 has the support.
 
I only touch my Mac partition for a single program (Qlab, probably the best of the theatrical cueing apps out there). For everything else, from browsing to gaming to Adobe CS5, Win7 works much better.

If I didn't game or rely on my computer for content creation professionally, I'm sure I'd be happy with OSX fulltime, though.

rsmith4321 said:
The mac port of Civ 5 is terrible. It's unplayable on my 1.8ghz Macbook Air. However it plays just fine in bootcamp, with everything set to low, which is fine with me. Macs are really just useless for playing games without putting Windows on them. Sometimes I wonder if I should just stay in Windows 7 on my mac.
Click to expand...
 
rsmith4321 said:
The mac port of Civ 5 is terrible. It's unplayable on my 1.8ghz Macbook Air. However it plays just fine in bootcamp, with everything set to low, which is fine with me. Macs are really just useless for playing games without putting Windows on them. Sometimes I wonder if I should just stay in Windows 7 on my mac.
Click to expand...

Not exactly. I play all this games on OS X with no issues: Left 4 Dead 2, Quake 3, World of Goo, Call of Duty 4 and Starcraft II (Blizzard did an excellent job on this one, runs on my 13'' MBA "ultimate" with high settings).
 
I have an I7 15" mbp with 4 gigs ram and civ5 runs very slow on it from mid game on. My mbp is pretty much a maxed out spec for apple so if civ 5 is not running well on my mbp, then it is not going to do better on any machines with slower cpus, etc. I can barely run it on my air.

The port of this game really is bad. If you are going to get the game, I would definitely run it in bootcamp.
 
Civ V rins fine on my MBA. It's the 13 inch with 4 gigs of RAM. Everything is set to low. I think it's worth saying the problem with this is a poor translation in the typical Aspyr wrapper, and not the Mac itself.

Bri
 
After trying it, no way, not playable with the 11.6" base. On my 15" I still had to lower setting to get it to 60fps, and that's at game start, imagine end-game. I'm sure it'd run better under Win7, but I'm not sure how much better in this case.
 
Hmm, running PC version of CivV on an MBA 13" ultimate under Win7 64 bootcamp, it crashes all the time. Closes and jumps back to the desktop. Can't really do anything with the GPU drivers either as getting them for the 320M seems v difficult, Apple have their own for bootcamp but I guess don't update them as often as Nvidia. Speed was OK under bootcamp though I can see it getting slow but not unusable towards the end of the game (haven't made it there yet due to the crashes).

Will try via Steam the Mac version now.
 
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