i've seen it on low/med/high/ultra. on my desktop, i use ultra. on the 11", i use a mix of low and a few med ( I think just landscape on medium?), but basically it's low with shaders on. at the 11" size, the difference in quality is very minimal compared to the FPS you get. now, if the screen were bigger, the difference would be more obvious, but not at 11". I find that these are the best settings to play on, especially on multilayer.
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MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010) - Gaming Benchmark Thread!
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i've seen it on low/med/high/ultra. on my desktop, i use ultra. on the 11", i use a mix of low and a few med ( I think just landscape on medium?), but basically it's low with shaders on. at the 11" size, the difference in quality is very minimal compared to the FPS you get. now, if the screen were bigger, the difference would be more obvious, but not at 11". I find that these are the best settings to play on, especially on multilayer.
Downloading CS:S for my 11.6 right now
I would literally love you long time, also if you know how to use FPS configs let me know. I can step you through it how to make your game run 20-30% faster, albeit taking all the eye candy out.
if you get 15-35fps with a 9400m you'll probably get it smooth enough with a 320m considering that is nearly 3x as powerful.
However, I'm not criticizing you if you want to see how it performes, I just saying that I guess that probably will be great on it.
If I had an account I would have done it for you, but I deleted them.
Received my 13" MBA (1.86/4GB ram) and played some SC2 when I got home. I wanted to stress it as fast as possible so I just played Marine Arena twice and the results were what I expected.
First few minutes were very playable but after 20-30 minutes into the game, when there are hundreds of units on the screen at once, it started to choke. I set it to use native resolution in full screen windowed mode, turned everything to Low except terrain and one other option that I can't remember.
I couldn't get the FPS counter to show up (I thought it was ctrl option f?) so I don't have any numbers but it's looking good so far
First few minutes were very playable but after 20-30 minutes into the game, when there are hundreds of units on the screen at once, it started to choke. I set it to use native resolution in full screen windowed mode, turned everything to Low except terrain and one other option that I can't remember.
I couldn't get the FPS counter to show up (I thought it was ctrl option f?) so I don't have any numbers
but it's looking good so far I'm pleasantly surprised by the performance I'm getting on Starcraft 2. Played on a mix of medium and low at native resolution and it runs smoothly, just played for about an hour and didn't notice any slowdown whatsoever. Obviously it's not as pretty as when I play it on my iMac, but it really doesn't look as bad I was expecting.
I only really play SC2 and Football Manager and both run well enough.
I only really play SC2 and Football Manager and both run well enough.
It seemed to run alright. The mighty mouse/dirty table/ slow internet connection were no good though haha. Tell me how to to turn the FPS on or what settings to try and I'll give it a shot!
I have CS:S on my MBA 13 Inch with 2GB ram.
It runs pretty smooth, settings are medium and the resolution is 1440*900
It runs pretty smooth, settings are medium and the resolution is 1440*900
Received my 13" MBA (1.86/4GB ram) and played some SC2 when I got home. I wanted to stress it as fast as possible so I just played Marine Arena twice and the results were what I expected.
First few minutes were very playable but after 20-30 minutes into the game, when there are hundreds of units on the screen at once, it started to choke. I set it to use native resolution in full screen windowed mode, turned everything to Low except terrain and one other option that I can't remember.
I couldn't get the FPS counter to show up (I thought it was ctrl option f?) so I don't have any numbers
Might be option-alt-f. Can you try a normal game like 2v2 or something with all low settings? You don't have to ladder or anything but maybe a custom or something.
My old MBP 2.2ghz with 8600m ran SC2 well enough on all low that I could ladder with no issues. Just wondering since your model is the exact one I'm looking at and it seems like it would work but it'd be nice to get some solid numbers. Thanks.
You have to go into Keyboard Options and enable developer console. Then hit the "~" key on your keyboard and type in "net_graph 1" or "cl_showfps 1". Either will give you a reading, the net_graph 1 command will take up a bit of screen because it shows networking statistics too.
I would try to do default resolution with everything on low, and if that doesn't yield higher than 30-50FPS try putting the resolution down to 640x480 as that is where I play at for competitive reasons.
You can forget about Fallout NV. That is one poorly coded game. The Sony Z with 330M dedicated 1gb Vram has issues with it. This is even under Win 7 64. Bethesda should be ashamed of themselves.
New Vegas has crashed several times on my 360 as well. You would think they design these games to work pretty well on consoles.
Ah that's right, remember reading a post on Ars about it. Oh well, I don't own it anyways. But I DO own Fallout 3 and I'd still like to see that!
Fallout NV runs well on my MBP, I've only put in about 3-4 hours but no crashes..
here's my vid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxBc5cdse4
here's my vid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxBc5cdse4
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Pretty consistent 40 fps, and not bad settings either. I installed FO3 on my white 24" iMac but it was so hideous I couldn't play it. That looks quite good though.
aznguyen316 said:
Pretty consistent 40 fps, and not bad settings either. I installed FO3 on my white 24" iMac but it was so hideous I couldn't play it. That looks quite good though.
Fallout New Vegas with the performance .dll installed ran great on native resolution with most settings low-medium. I was getting roughly 40fps max and sometimes it would dip to 20 when there was a lot of action. I'm only a couple hours into the game but after playing it for an hour on my air my temps got a bit high and my fan was at 6K+ speed. Dragon age i still need to install and I'm pretty sure Bioshock will run fine with medium settings.
I went into the Apple store today to try out the 11" MacBook Air. Since I had a bit of time to kill before watching a movie, I decided to install Steam and Counter-Strike: Source on the base model 11" version. Basically, it ran 30-50FPS on high settings on default resolution. Turning the graphics down did not help much, but it did pass 100FPS in some points. This is just me running around in a listen server though.
I expected these results, and I would imagine the results would almost be 30-40% higher when run in Windows. So, it is quite capable of running Counter-Strike: Source that's for sure.
Though, I went in thinking I liked the 11" version over the 13". I came out pretty set that I want the 13" version. I think the extra money is well spent on a card slot, better CPU, and more flash storage.
I expected these results, and I would imagine the results would almost be 30-40% higher when run in Windows. So, it is quite capable of running Counter-Strike: Source that's for sure.
Though, I went in thinking I liked the 11" version over the 13". I came out pretty set that I want the 13" version. I think the extra money is well spent on a card slot, better CPU, and more flash storage.
I have been playing TF2 and L4D2 and both games perform pretty poorly on low/medium settings. Basically, movement/fps is fine, but it keeps freezing up every few seconds. Granted, I only have 2GB ram and I have a ton of apps open, but that really shouldn't be an issue.
That's unfortunate. I had a different experience and I was on the Apple display models. However, I wasn't playing online.
You should boot into Windows if you want to play Steam games with any kind of decent performance.
The resolution of either screen doesn't bother me. Being a competitive gamer I have been using 1024x768/1280x1024 as my desktop resolution for years. I just want more storage and a better CPU, thus my decision on the 13". However, I am still on the fence. I like how the 11" looks over the 13" for some reason.
I may go to the Apple store and try CS:S on the 13" version today.
I can't believe all of these people who have bought MacBook Airs and aren't taking the time to post back some of their gaming benchmarks...
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Should be getting mine next close to or on Thursday, I'll post impressions then.
I have seen that "stutter" in lots of games running in OSX. I think it's a combination of RAM and poor drivers in most cases. Hence why I only play games in bootcamp. The only games that feel flawless in either system are the old Blizzard games like Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft 3.
Should be getting mine next close to or on Thursday, I'll post impressions then.
I have seen that "stutter" in lots of games running in OSX. I think it's a combination of RAM and poor drivers in most cases. Hence why I only play games in bootcamp. The only games that feel flawless in either system are the old Blizzard games like Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft 3.
On the base 11" model I'm seeing about 40fps on average (30-60 is the range) running CS:S on OS X on medium settings.
I bet under Windows it would run perfectly. 40fps makes it kind of tough to be accurate lol. I may need to turn the settings down.
I bet under Windows it would run perfectly. 40fps makes it kind of tough to be accurate lol. I may need to turn the settings down.