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Gaming on a Retina Macbook Pro

Cypther said:
Great three replies and no one have answered my question

"Does the game look blurry/fuzzy at 1440x900, 1650x1050 or 1920x1200 when playing games on Retina Macbook pro? For most monitors it looks like crap when it's not on the native resolution. "
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Truth is, if games look fine in that resolution on an older gen MBP they will look just as good on the new one. A higher density screen doesn't mean that downressing will make it automatically look like crap. It just means you have more leverage. In OSX you are always at 2880x1800.....there is no resolution adjustment because all it does is render the gui bigger to make things more readable....it doesn't change the base resolution tho.

In windows however (where you will be gaming) you will be adjusting the base resolution.

Also, with a screen that size and quality, you should be able to run at the lower res, turn off AA and crank everything to the highest settings and get some really good frame rates! Never use AA on any screen smaller than 19"....it's just wasteful.
 
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topocalypse said:
I have read that. I forgot to mention what I meant was GTX that are like GTX 675m 680m. GTX 660m wouldn't be enough for Retina display to run smoothly in demanding applications like games either. GTX 680m would be my dream rMBP, but I know the cost would be crazy and the heat would cause the machine to throttle.

:apple: Peace :D
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Most modern Games can be played at max on decent resolutions with the rMBPs GPU, for example Skyrim on 1980x1200 with full AF and AA on Ultra with HighRes Texture Pack. Of course the GPU cant run most games on the native resolution, but hey, its a laptop we are talking about.
 
topocalypse said:
I have read that. I forgot to mention what I meant was GTX that are like GTX 675m 680m. GTX 660m wouldn't be enough for Retina display to run smoothly in demanding applications like games either. GTX 680m would be my dream rMBP, but I know the cost would be crazy and the heat would cause the machine to throttle.
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imagenxkqg.jpg


gentlefury said:
Truth is, if games look fine in that resolution on an older gen MBP they will look just as good on the new one. A higher density screen doesn't mean that downressing will make it automatically look like crap.
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How does the Retina MacBook Pro handle lower resolutions in games? Do they use pixel doubling (hard edged pixels) or do they scale the image? If it’s being scaled, one could argue that you’re better off with an older screen displaying that resolution natively.
 
Beta Particle said:
Image

How does the Retina MacBook Pro handle lower resolutions in games? Do they use pixel doubling (hard edged pixels) or do they scale the image? If it’s being scaled, one could argue that you’re better off with an older screen displaying that resolution natively.
Click to expand...

HAHAHA Honestly that is basically what alienware M18x is.
 
DeafZebra said:
I'm downloading Civilization V (not Gods and Kings) as we speak, I will let you know how it goes after it finishes.
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I've played Civ V on the retina. At native resolution, it's perfectly playable. However, all the text, icons, etc... are very tiny at that resolution. After a few hours, I ended up lowering the resolution just to enlarge all the trinkets on the screen.
 
Great thread and good reading. I have a bunch of games I have bought in anticipation of my rmbp finally getting here. Where do you guys get wineskins and such for running windows games under OS X. I have been planning on playing under windows mostly because I figure performance will be no where near as good if running games in wine and such. What methods are you guys using?
 
Beta Particle said:
Image

How does the Retina MacBook Pro handle lower resolutions in games? Do they use pixel doubling (hard edged pixels) or do they scale the image? If it’s being scaled, one could argue that you’re better off with an older screen displaying that resolution natively.
Click to expand...

Scaling is a function of the OS. Windows does not support scaling. You will be setting resolution in Windows in the same manner as any other display...so in windows you probably won't venture higher than 1440x900 anyway...since it gets too small to read past that.

----------
01mggt said:
Great thread and good reading. I have a bunch of games I have bought in anticipation of my rmbp finally getting here. Where do you guys get wineskins and such for running windows games under OS X. I have been planning on playing under windows mostly because I figure performance will be no where near as good if running games in wine and such. What methods are you guys using?
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Not worth it...emulating DX on Mac is just too much of a draw...you will get horrible performance.
 
gentlefury said:
Not worth it...emulating DX on Mac is just too much of a draw...you will get horrible performance.
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that depends on the game, and your own opinion. Being able to run a game at full graphics settings at 60 fps with Wine vs 80 fps in Windows... well I won't run Windows for that.
 
gentlefury said:
Scaling is a function of the OS. Windows does not support scaling. You will be setting resolution in Windows in the same manner as any other display...so in windows you probably won't venture higher than 1440x900 anyway...since it gets too small to read past that.
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It is not possible to set the screen resolution in Boot Camp to 1440x900 for some odd reason.

I have it set the 2880x1800 with DPI at 150% and it's perfectly usable for me.
 
gentlefury said:
Scaling is a function of the OS. Windows does not support scaling. You will be setting resolution in Windows in the same manner as any other display...so in windows you probably won't venture higher than 1440x900 anyway...since it gets too small to read past that.
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That's not strictly true. Scaling can either be handled by the operating system and done in software, or by the display hardware.

On the desktop, OS X gives you options on the Retina MacBook Pro equivalent to a 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, but I don't believe this applies to 3D rendering.

retinai3zzy.png


Windows does actually offer scaling to 125%, 150%, or a custom DPI, it's just handled poorly and looks terrible.

dpi6ul3q.png



What happens when you send 1440×900 to the display, is up to the display hardware. From the sound of things, it will be scaled rather than pixel doubled (soft edges rather than hard edges) which is unfortunate for gaming.

On Windows, you should have scaling options in the Nvidia drivers to choose between scaling on the GPU or passing the selected resolution on to the display hardware. Scaling on the GPU lets you select whether an image is scaled up to fill the screen, kept in the original aspect ratio and scaled up, or displayed at its original size.

nvidiapvlcg.png


Perhaps in a future update Nvidia could offer pixel doubling as an option. That way 1440×900 would look just as sharp as it does on a 1440×900 panel, but would be clearer due to the higher pixel density. (no "grid" over the image)
 
Well I'm not intending to game on it a lot, but I did throw Tera on there, runs decent at Medium-High settings at native resolution. Just gotta scale the UI up to be usable. Though the 50GB I set for windows is now full... Not like I need it for anything else.
 
Beta Particle said:
What happens when you send 1440×900 to the display, is up to the display hardware. From the sound of things, it will be scaled rather than pixel doubled (soft edges rather than hard edges) which is unfortunate for gaming.
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Its the same thing. Linear upscaling from 1440x900 to 2880x1800 is pixel doubling. What you talk about is application of a smoothing filter after the image has been upscaled.
 
Lord Appleseed said:
Most modern Games can be played at max on decent resolutions with the rMBPs GPU, for example Skyrim on 1980x1200 with full AF and AA on Ultra with HighRes Texture Pack. Of course the GPU cant run most games on the native resolution, but hey, its a laptop we are talking about.
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Sorry, but that is not correct.

You can have adequate gaming experience in most modern games, though not at MAX!

To put things into perspective, look at the charts in the following review, the GT650 is quite a bit worse the the worst card featured in the charts.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-670-2-and-3way-sli-review/1

At 1980x1200 the Retina is not running modern games at max with decent frames.

Don't want to be hard on you, but the problem on these forums is that you have people who are used to Desktop gaming and those used to laptop gaming. There is a huge difference between what one camp considers a good gaming experience. For me under 30FPS is not gaming.

Though you last advice is spot on, its a Laptop, so people have to be realistic about it.
 
leman said:
Its the same thing. Linear upscaling from 1440x900 to 2880x1800 is pixel doubling. What you talk about is application of a smoothing filter after the image has been upscaled.
Click to expand...
What I mean when I say "pixel doubling" would be equivalent to "nearest neighbour" resampling, whereas "scaled" would be equivalent to "bilinear" resampling.

Nearest Neighbour scaling would display images on the 2880×1800 display exactly as they would appear on a 1440×900 display, but without the "pixel grid" overlaid on top of the image due to the higher pixel density.

Bilinear scaling results in a softer image than a 1440×900 native display. (but may be preferable in some cases) It sounds like this is what the Retina MacBook Pro is doing at all times.


1440×900 Native:
1440qlb0n.jpg


Nearest Neighbour:
nearest56kes.jpg


Bilinear (note the considerable softening of the image)
bilinear82nj1u.jpg


2880×1800 Native:
2880fgk43.jpg



Neither of the scaling options are ideal, but Nearest Neighbour maintains the sharpness of the original, and is closest to viewing the game on a 1440×900 native display.
 
01mggt said:
Great thread and good reading. I have a bunch of games I have bought in anticipation of my rmbp finally getting here. Where do you guys get wineskins and such for running windows games under OS X. I have been planning on playing under windows mostly because I figure performance will be no where near as good if running games in wine and such. What methods are you guys using?
Click to expand...

Well, I'll answer your question and you can be the judge as to wether it's 'worth it' or not. For the record, WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". My experience with Wineskin is that games either run flawlessly, at full speed, or they are fundamentally broken.

For WINE 'wrappers' that have been tweaked for specific games (including Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, etc.):

http://portingteam.com/frontpage

Or, try your hand at making your own wrappers with the Wineskin utility. I've had limited success with this, but managed to get Homeworld and Baldur's Gate up and running with my own wrappers.

http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php

Cheers.
 
Beta Particle said:
What I mean when I say "pixel doubling" would be equivalent to "nearest neighbour" resampling, whereas "scaled" would be equivalent to "bilinear" resampling.

Nearest Neighbour scaling would display images on the 2880×1800 display exactly as they would appear on a 1440×900 display, but without the "pixel grid" overlaid on top of the image due to the higher pixel density.

Bilinear scaling results in a softer image than a 1440×900 native display. (but may be preferable in some cases) It sounds like this is what the Retina MacBook Pro is doing at all times.
Click to expand...

Right, I am sorry, I am stupid :(

Or rather, the bilinear filtering is being stupid here. I completely forgot that it was weighting based on the distance to the nearest texel's center. For some reason I thought that it would weight based on the texel area overlap. This way, upscaling would give the same results as nearest neighbor for integer upscale factors. Would make much more sense for retina, as well. Now I understand that images indeed would look blurry on the RMBP.
 
iMacFarlane said:
Well, I'll answer your question and you can be the judge as to wether it's 'worth it' or not. For the record, WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". My experience with Wineskin is that games either run flawlessly, at full speed, or they are fundamentally broken.

For WINE 'wrappers' that have been tweaked for specific games (including Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, etc.):

http://portingteam.com/frontpage

Or, try your hand at making your own wrappers with the Wineskin utility. I've had limited success with this, but managed to get Homeworld and Baldur's Gate up and running with my own wrappers.

http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info and I agree. I tried running civlization v on my 2008 UMB (9400m video) and it ran flawlessly in windows 7 and windows 8 rp. Using the wineskin or crossover it was basically unplayable. I figured it was just my video card but maybe there really is more to it than just that. I also don't like wineskins because from my understanding any game that requires a disc means I have to spend time looking for nocd cracks for games I legally own since discs don't work right with wineskin. Then there is also the problem of digital downloads. Some are steam and others are various different downloads that may take even more configuring to work with wine and such. Maybe it's best I just stick with windows as much as I hate it lol.
 
MH01 said:
Sorry, but that is not correct.

You can have adequate gaming experience in most modern games, though not at MAX!

To put things into perspective, look at the charts in the following review, the GT650 is quite a bit worse the the worst card featured in the charts.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-670-2-and-3way-sli-review/1

At 1980x1200 the Retina is not running modern games at max with decent frames.

Don't want to be hard on you, but the problem on these forums is that you have people who are used to Desktop gaming and those used to laptop gaming. There is a huge difference between what one camp considers a good gaming experience. For me under 30FPS is not gaming.

Though you last advice is spot on, its a Laptop, so people have to be realistic about it.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but it is correct.
My example with Skyrim was proved by a user of this forum with a video youtube.
Also again, the GT 650 in the rMBP performs significantly better than a normal 560. It is above the GTX660 in benchmarks. I am not camparing it to desktop gaming but i am following several different game tests with the rMBP and all show that you can either Max games or play on High, with 1650x1080 or 1920x1200.
But in order to prove my claims i will upload my own gaming videos once i recieve my rMBP.
 
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I just wanted to add that I just downloaded Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from the app store for the rMPR and I must say its amazing. On single player I set the resolution to about 1920x1200 with everything on normal and averaged 50-90fps on single player. Very respectable. However on multiplayer I was playing around with the setting and to get super fluid gameplay on multiplayer I turn down the res to 1440x900. Even though the single player was very playable at the higher resolutions. If you guys have anymore questions on this please feel free to PM me :)
 
Lord Appleseed said:
Sorry, but it is correct.
My example with Skyrim was proved by a user of this forum with a video youtube.
Also again, the GT 650 in the rMBP performs significantly better than a normal 560. It is above the GTX660 in benchmarks. I am not camparing it to desktop gaming but i am following several different game tests with the rMBP and all show that you can either Max games or play on High, with 1650x1080 or 1920x1200.
But in order to prove my claims i will upload my own gaming videos once i recieve my rMBP.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, I'd be interested to know how your tests go.
 
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