Fallout 4 Portability

[AroundTheFur922]

Haven't been involved in the computer gaming scene in awhile as I do most of my gaming on console/handheld. I have an unusual situation where I actually have the most free time during the day at work versus very little time when at home (parenthood will do that it seems). I've put 100+ hours into previous Bethesda games (Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim) and am very eager to get into Fallout 4 but just won't have the time that I used to. My question is, would a early 2013 15" rMBP running bootcamp Windows 10 be significantly more capable of running Fallout 4 than a well-spec'd Surface Pro 3 (or SP4 assuming it gets a slight bump next month)? I have a very small amount of physical space where I work so the smaller the device the better. I would prefer to just use my MacBook but I'm having an issue where when it's disconnected from power, the screen just goes black in Windows 10 and I'm not sure I'll always have an outlet available. Any advice is appreciated.

 

[Cougarcat]

Your MBP will be better. For your Windows 10 problem, have you downloaded Apple's latest bootcamp drivers for W10? sounds like a driver issue.

 

[AroundTheFur922]

That sounds like good advice. How/where do you install updated bootcamp drivers? I looked in the bootcamp tray icon in windows and didn't see an option to look for updates.

 

[Cougarcat]

Run Apple Software Update in Windows.

 

[panjandrum]

Just as a counterpoint; I ran my games through a Win-XP and Win-7 based Bootcamp for years on a MacPro 1,1 (upgraded video cards over time of course). I run a 15" MBP with a Win 8 (with Win7 GUI shell of course), also just for games. I have setup a Win XP bootcamp partition for gaming on my daughter's Mini, and now a Win7 bootcamp partition on her 13" Retina MBP. In ALL cases I found that the best solution was to completely ignore Apple's video drivers and install full drivers from AMD/nVidia for the graphics cards. The Apple video-drivers always seems to muck things up incredibly badly. The websites will try to direct you away from downloading their drivers; just do it anyway. It's always worked well for me. Make a restore point before uninstalling the Apple drivers and installing the full drivers, just in case you need to revert.

As for the rMBPro: My daughter's 13" MPB runs slightly-older games extremely well (DAO, Fallout 3, FNV, DA2, etc.) The retina display somehow magically makes AA unnecessary, which is nice. However, playing very modern games on my MBP with the non-retina display and the 650m is quickly becoming impossible. Absolutely NOTHING will get the Witcher 3 or DAI (don't buy that, it's the single worst game I've every played) to run well on it, for example. Luckily I now have a dedicated PC gaming-rig on which I do stereoscopic gaming, so while it would be really nice to be able to run the Witcher 3 on my MBP, it's not a crushing blow). Unfortunately, I think (this is a guess) that there is a fairly good chance that Fallout 4 is not going to run well on anything except the very latest mobile GPUs, leaving most MBP bootcamp users out in the cold.

 

[asaggynoodle]

Yes, as others have said your MBP will destroy the surface in terms of performance.
Your Iris Pro 5200 is roughly the same performance as a GT 650, which is in the range of 3-4x faster than what the Surface is expected to be packing in terms of graphics performance.