Gaming and programming rMBP

[Drask]

Hello there,

I currently do some gaming on my iMac 2011 27" base model (Diablo and LoL mostly) I get 30 fps on diablo at 1920x1080 (playable) and 60 fps at League of Legends(max resolution), how ever whenever I get some spell animations fps drop down to high 30s low 40s (pretty unplayable in LoL), this is all on bootcamp, and my thoughts are its because of the resolution with 512 vram (lowering the resolution makes the game look awful on that 27" display).

I currently need another laptop for school, so I thought I could use a rMPB and plug in into my iMac using it as a display, with the 650m 1gb ram and get the stable 60 fps at LoL (not a very demanding game). Can I achieve this with the rMBP base model? is there any difference going with the legacy MBP high end?

I thought I could just plug the rMBP whenever I'm at home, but then, would that shorten its life? I mean the laptop just plugged to a 27" running games for too long?.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Xcallibur]

You should be looking at an increase of at least 30% over the 6770M in your iMac, so the framerates in the lower 30s should increase to fps in the lower 40s at least. As for the differences between the rMBP and the high-end cMBP, your looking at the obvious difference in the display, with the rMBP being an IPS display at 2880x1800 whereas the cMBP is a highly glossy TN display at a resolution of 1440x900 with 1680x1050 an optional upgrade.

The differences in hardware are the obvious changes namely the lack of DVD drive, ethernet and firewire port in the rMBP, the rMBP does have 2 thunderbolt ports in contrast to the 1 thunderbolt port found on the cMBP. Another difference is the lack of a dedicated line-in jack, you will only have one 3.5mm jack on the rMBP, but the cMBP will have two.

Being on all the time probably won't harm the computer, however do give it time to cool down after long periods of intense workload, the best way to make sure the battery lasts as long as possible is to leave the laptop plugged in whilst once a month ensuring you unplug the laptop and use it until the battery goes to below 10%.

You will probably find the high-end cMBP to be slightly snappier than the rMBP, namely due to the slightly better CPU and the lower resolution used.

 

[Drask]

You will probably find the high-end cMBP to be slightly snappier than the rMBP, namely due to the slightly better CPU and the lower resolution used.

Thanks for the reply!

I won't game in the laptop's display, will always be using the iMac display at 2560x1440, is it still considerable better the classic? I mean to give up the retina display (I don't mind much about this but is a nice to have feature).

 

[Xcallibur]

Thanks for the reply!

I won't game in the laptop's display, will always be using the iMac display at 2560x1440, is it still considerable better the classic? I mean to give up the retina display (I don't mind much about this but is a nice to have feature).

No problem at that kind of resolution you won't notice much of a difference if anything between the rMBP and the cMBP in terms of frames per second. One thing to consider though is the SSD in the rMBP, if the games you play take a while to load the SSD will dramatically reduce the loading time compared to the 5400RPM HDD in the cMBP.