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Gaming on the New MacBook Air
- Thread starter Deagon
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I played the new SimCity on here before without much trouble. You can't jack all the graphics sliders all the way up, but it was much improved over the $250 Gateway notebook I had with a Celeron CPU and 2GB of RAM.
What about games like Hitman absolution, Batman Arkham games? Grand theft auto V is definitely out of the question as you need a quad core to run it.
I play Minecraft at 1080p on my 2013 11" MBA (HD5000) with external display and its more than playable. I also play Starcraft 2 at a lower res with medium details and it's also playable at about 20-30 fps.
So I would say that even newer games can be played at lower res and reduced detail settings but it's better not to expect too much.
So I would say that even newer games can be played at lower res and reduced detail settings but it's better not to expect too much.
I don't have anything like that on a computer. I've got an Xbox 360 and Wii U for most games.
I don't play much on my mac to be honest but there's 2 or 3 games I love to play on my mac if i'm bored and not at home on my xbox. Hitman and batman being 2 or 3 of them. Using a 15" mid 2012 rmbp at the moment but I need to downsize for work. I was gonna go for the new macbook but with the issues of there being only one port and not enough processing speed the air is looking good. If only it had a retina screen lol. That's it no more about it now I promise lol
I only play games on mine that really benefit from computer input, such as WoW or SimCity. I haven't played WoW in a few years because I couldn't justify $15 per month after a few months, and I haven't really played anything at all this year because school takes up too much time. Thus I play time-wasters on iPad mostly.
Could be nice to see comparison between the 2014 and 2015 MBA in games like StarCraft and CoD.
20 % higher fps would be great.
20 % higher fps would be great.
I'm going to the Apple store tomorrow to check out the MBA. I'll probably wait till next month when the RMB is released just to see what all the fuss is about. I don't suppose it will happen but what are the chances of Apple updating the air quietly with a Retina screen on the 10th? Zero but I can only hope lol
I posted this in another thread. Both machines were run up to 79-81 degrees C at the CPU before running the benchmark.
Do you mean a gaming machine like a full-size ATX tower case with liquid cooling and SLI'ed, overclocked GPUs that needs 800W just to POST?
Because you're right, the ~3 lbs. ultrathin MacBook Air is not one of those computers. Well noticed.
Or a Razer Blade, which acts as a sleek gaming ultrabook with powerful GPU (Nvidia 970m) that even blows a rMBP 15 (750m) out of the water.
You can generally get more than you expect, but within reason. Your exactly going to be playing Battlefield at Ultra settings with Intel HD graphics.
To get the best performance you really need Windows however, Direct X is far, far more optimised, combined with OSX using a relatively old version of OpenGL, and the drivers being comparatively unoptimised. I can only hope that Apple decide to embrace the OGL group's next generation technology known as Vulkan.
Problem with gaming under windows on a modern macbook is that the lower capacity drives (128/256) are a little stingy for installing a windows partition, unless you can successfully install one on a USB 3.0 drive these days.
To get the best performance you really need Windows however, Direct X is far, far more optimised, combined with OSX using a relatively old version of OpenGL, and the drivers being comparatively unoptimised. I can only hope that Apple decide to embrace the OGL group's next generation technology known as Vulkan.
Problem with gaming under windows on a modern macbook is that the lower capacity drives (128/256) are a little stingy for installing a windows partition, unless you can successfully install one on a USB 3.0 drive these days.