Is Bad SimCity Performance Normal On A rMBP?

You have a laptop, you will never have great gaming performance on graphics intensive games. All computers stop being able to run graphics intensive games at some point, laptops sooner than desktops (if they ever could on day one).

High settings sounds about right for SimCity. SimCity is not a port, it's fully native. I'm sure Bootcamp would help some, but I'm not sure how much. You're already running at high settings so I'm not really sure what the point of using Bootcamp would be.

Bootcamp will not mess up your computer, you really think Apple would let that happen?

 

I agree with the other poster. Gaming on a laptop such as the MBP is never going to be an awesome experience. Laptops in general are bad gaming platforms. Once geared for gaming or otherwise labeled as "Desktop Replacement" will probably offer a better experience.

I did a little testing myself on my late 2013 rMBP and WoW on Good settings just about gets 30-35fps. No way could I run on High or Ultra settings and still have acceptable gameplay. SimCity is one game that I own but sadly have not played... yet. I bet what you are seeing is normal.

 

Bootcamp makes a huge difference in most games, apple's Nvidia drivers are pretty bad when it comes to game optimization. Even after you install bootcamp, you will have to go to Nvidia's website and manually download the latest driver updates for windows as they are not included in the bootcamp windows support files.

IMO if you plan on doing any gaming do yourself a favor and install windows via bootcamp.

 

This. For me, Borderlands 2 has to run at much lower settings to run smoothly compared to Windows 8.1 (bootcamp).

 

Even though Mac's are capable of gaming, either nativly in OS X or Bootcamp, they are not ideally suited to graphically demanding games.

As for running Sim City at Retina resolution, are you seriously expecting to run that game at such a high resolution and expect good performance on your Mac''s weedy dGPU? Sim City is garbage anyway, so maybe your Mac is simply trying to save you from wasting your time on that atrocity.

 

While I don't see a technical reason why a game like Simcity should not run at native resolution with the 650M, it is a quite bad port and combined with lower-performing OS X drivers, it makes such request quite unrealistic. Just play at 1680x1050 or so - it still looks much better then most 15" displays out there.

 

Its not necessarily poor. Its runs quite 'ok' on 1680x1050. I am not very happy with the game, but for different reasons.

 

Just install bootcamp. The performance difference is huge. The lack of good drivers and DirectX on OSX kills the performance. The Macbook is actually a pretty decent gaming laptop when running Windows, if you ask me.

 

I just played SimCity last night I used low setting because I am more concern about heat inside my rMBP.

 

Your macbook won't get hot enough to cause any damage to itself, especially not with Simcity.