Gaming on 15" MBP i5 or i7 with GT 330M good enough?

[JasonH42]

I think its also important to point out that an SSD will never, ever do anything to boost a games FPS...

Not really, because nobody would suggest it could. I was just saying that money otherwise spent on i7/512MB/hi-res might better be allocated to a SSD if budget was a limitation, since it'll make your overall experience so much better.

 

[Quad 2.5 G5 =)]

I think I read somewhere that memory is constantly processed in the VRAM through the bus. It goes in and out. So if it's not fast enough, it doesn't really matter how much you have of it. I believe an analogy was made somewhere on this forum, where the VRAM resembled a parking space with, for example, a two lane way in and out. Cars go in and out at a particular speed (128 bit e.g.) so no matter how much parking space you add, they still couldn't enter or leave any faster. But maybe I'm missing some vital part of how a GPU works. Is the memory processed constantly (i.e. enters and leaves), or can it load entire data into its VRAM and then address it at will (i.e. "park" data in advance). If a GPU can indeed load alot of data beforehand and then address it at will, I can see how more memory could help, even with a slower card.

I was pointing it out as a desktop class card just because of the bigger bus width. That's the idea. Indeed, a 9600M GT with 1GB makes almost no difference to the 512 model. There are small differences with the 256 model, but not like it would be half the performance of the 512 model.

A 128 bus CAN address the 512 mb I presume, but not as good as a 256 bit bus. Of course it's a marketing technique. One of my friends bought a "good" laptop once because it had an nvidia with 1GB memory! Too bad it was some ****** integrated card. You can't seriously say 512 VRAM makes that card (I believe it was a 9300 or something) any better. GPUs are about speed.

I believe the one advantage of having more video memory is that the texture swapping into and out of the frame buffer will be less, and the advantage is better when using a higher resolution screen.

 

[green86]

Not really, because nobody would suggest it could. I was just saying that money otherwise spent on i7/512MB/hi-res might better be allocated to a SSD if budget was a limitation, since it'll make your overall experience so much better.

Um yes it is, because the OP wants to get the maximum gaming performance out of his computer, and your suggestion is irrelevant to this end. Where as money spent on i7/512MB/hi-res will help him get the max performance. I was just pointing out that an SSD will not help him reach his goal. Thanks.

 

[green86]

I think I read somewhere that memory is constantly processed in the VRAM through the bus. It goes in and out. So if it's not fast enough, it doesn't really matter how much you have of it. I believe an analogy was made somewhere on this forum, where the VRAM resembled a parking space with, for example, a two lane way in and out. Cars go in and out at a particular speed (128 bit e.g.) so no matter how much parking space you add, they still couldn't enter or leave any faster. But maybe I'm missing some vital part of how a GPU works. Is the memory processed constantly (i.e. enters and leaves), or can it load entire data into its VRAM and then address it at will (i.e. "park" data in advance). If a GPU can indeed load alot of data beforehand and then address it at will, I can see how more memory could help, even with a slower card.

I was pointing it out as a desktop class card just because of the bigger bus width. That's the idea. Indeed, a 9600M GT with 1GB makes almost no difference to the 512 model. There are small differences with the 256 model, but not like it would be half the performance of the 512 model.

A 128 bus CAN address the 512 mb I presume, but not as good as a 256 bit bus. Of course it's a marketing technique. One of my friends bought a "good" laptop once because it had an nvidia with 1GB memory! Too bad it was some ****** integrated card. You can't seriously say 512 VRAM makes that card (I believe it was a 9300 or something) any better. GPUs are about speed.

I don't know where to start. Your right 256 bit is faster but it's not a huge limitation, and the memory bus width really has nothing to do with the amount of VRAM. It's like saying someone with only DDR RAM wont benefit from upgrading his 1GB of RAM because he doesn't have DDR2 or DDR3. It's a limitation in speed but has nothing to do not needing or using more ram. I can't explain it anymore clearly. If you can actually find an article or benchmark to prove what your recalling from "memory" I'd love to see it.

Quad G5 hits the nail on the head perfectly: "I believe the one advantage of having more video memory is that the texture swapping into and out of the frame buffer will be less, and the advantage is better when using a higher resolution screen."

 

[cluthz]

I play Starcraft 2 on high on my MBP13 so Im sure the i5 or i7 is plenty.

In OSX or windows? With High settings I get occasionally FPS drops in huge battle on my i5, mostly is fine, but not when games get long with huge amounts of units. This is in OSX tho. Med/high is working very well in OSX tho.

 

[Solid Raven]

I don't know where to start. Your right 256 bit is faster but it's not a huge limitation, and the memory bus width really has nothing to do with the amount of VRAM. It's like saying someone with only DDR RAM wont benefit from upgrading his 1GB of RAM because he doesn't have DDR2 or DDR3. It's a limitation in speed but has nothing to do not needing or using more ram. I can't explain it anymore clearly. If you can actually find an article or benchmark to prove what your recalling from "memory" I'd love to see it.

Quad G5 hits the nail on the head perfectly: "I believe the one advantage of having more video memory is that the texture swapping into and out of the frame buffer will be less, and the advantage is better when using a higher resolution screen."

I didn't say the bus limits the amount of VRAM, only the efficiency in which it's addressed (i.e. speed, logically).

This is the topic, and post, in question: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6997797/

Here is a comparison of the 256 and 512 model of the 9600M GT:
http://www.macworld.com/article/136251/2008/10/macbookgraphics.html?t=204

There doesn't seem to be any reasonable difference between the 256 and 512 model according to these tests. However, what Quad G5 said does indeed sound logical, I agree. But only in high resolutions presumably. However, wouldn't the same be true for, say, a 1GB 9600M GT, in that it outperforms the 512 model, since more data can be loaded into the VRAM without too much swapping. Couldn't the GPU, by that logic, load even more data into the VRAM when even more memory is used (for example 2GB, or 4GB), and hence benefit from it, which would result in performance boosts? Certainly, there must be a point where speed (128 bit, not considering the DDR type which is the speed of the RAM itself) limits the efficiency of the VRAM. Maybe it's not precisely at 256 MB, but it can't be much higher I think.

The difference between VRAM and the regular RAM (in your example) is the speed in which it needs to be addressed, I believe. Your GPU needs fast memory. One would benefit from upgrading to 1GB DDR RAM because speed isn't the bottleneck for regular RAM. You don't need that kind of speed for regular computing. If speed wasn't an issue, than why would a GPU need its own VRAM?

Anyway, I don't really know much about these things, but intriguing nonetheless

 

[Bumflake]

I have a 15" Hi-Res i7 and can play WoW natively and Anarchy Online in Bootcamp just fine on high settings.

While an SSD may not improve fps on normal games, MMORPGs do benefit from them in crowded areas where a lot of I/O will happen (like mass PvP and raids and such). My previous notebook (Alienware M15x) had an SSD and it really ran smoother in those kind of areas.

However, like stated in some of the posts above I'd upgrade cpu and screen before the hard drive or memory as they can be replaced later.