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MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010) - Gaming Benchmark Thread!

Has anyone played any RPGs (w/substantially good graphics such as Oblivion, Dragon Age, etc.) on the 13" Air yet?
 
DeusEx said:
Has anyone played any RPGs (w/substantially good graphics such as Oblivion, Dragon Age, etc.) on the 13" Air yet?
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The old 9400m was able to handle these games at 1280*800 low settings (Fallout 3 as well). So the Air can probably handle them with better settings.
 
found an ME2 benchmark

33358.png
 
That black ops post was two days before the patch. The latest patch holds significant improvements! I hope someone revisits testing this game.
 
Please forgive my noob question.

I just bought an Air, loaded COD 4 with an external drive, unplugged the Air from the drive and continued to play fine. However, when I went back to play it later, it said I needed the COD CD to do so, i.e., I'd have to go back and hook back up to the external drive to re-initiate game play.

Does anyone know the deal? Or a work-around?

(multiplayer is fine, but I'd like to do the campaign)
 
OconRecon said:
Please forgive my noob question.

I just bought an Air, loaded COD 4 with an external drive, unplugged the Air from the drive and continued to play fine. However, when I went back to play it later, it said I needed the COD CD to do so, i.e., I'd have to go back and hook back up to the external drive to re-initiate game play.

Does anyone know the deal? Or a work-around?

(multiplayer is fine, but I'd like to do the campaign)
Click to expand...

Yes that means that you need a disk to continue playing. Are you playing COD on windows or mac? If you are on mac then you need to use toast titanium 10 to mount a disk image ( there are vids on youtube to help). If you are on windows then you need to use daemon tools to mount a virtual disk drive ( again vids on youtube to help).
 
Zackmd1 said:
Yes that means that you need a disk to continue playing. Are you playing COD on windows or mac? If you are on mac then you need to use toast titanium 10 to mount a disk image ( there are vids on youtube to help). If you are on windows then you need to use daemon tools to mount a virtual disk drive ( again vids on youtube to help).
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on a Mac. Will check it out. Thanks a bunch.
 
Can you install/load games off a connected external drive and play them, instead of on the internal SSD on an Air?
 
DeusEx said:
Can you install/load games off a connected external drive and play them, instead of on the internal SSD on an Air?
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Yes you can. All you need to do is change the install hard drive (mac) or location (windows). All of my games for the air are installed on my external drive.
 
Why would you want to play the games using an external drive? I understand you have to, without a work around, but man that's a pain to always have to get out my external drive in order to play a game.

I was at Apple last night and they recommended the $99 Roxio product, but that's a steep way to go, so I'm hunting around for a cheaper virtual disc image option.
 
OconRecon said:
Why would you want to play the games using an external drive? I understand you have to, without a work around, but man that's a pain to always have to get out my external drive in order to play a game.

I was at Apple last night and they recommended the $99 Roxio product, but that's a steep way to go, so I'm hunting around for a cheaper virtual disc image option.
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Looking at how much space modern games take up nowadays, I was considering using an external for the majority of games that I don't play as often, and keeping the half-dozen or so that I do play quite a bit on the SSD, since the internal storage isn't as much as I'm used to.
 
DeusEx said:
Looking at how much space modern games take up nowadays, I was considering using an external for the majority of games that I don't play as often, and keeping the half-dozen or so that I do play quite a bit on the SSD, since the internal storage isn't as much as I'm used to.
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I'm with you on that one, but for those half-dozen or so you plan to play quite often and keep on the SSD, what's your method for avoiding the task of connecting to the external CD drive to start the game each time? Are you loading those half-dozen games with Virtual Disc Image software, like Toast?



(I just bought my Air prior to Xmas and am seriously considering taking it back for a Pro just to solve this problem).

(Nice YouTube vids Samurai)
 
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How is Football Manager 2011 on the MB Air?

I have a Unlimited 13" coming this week from Apple and to be honest it is really the only game I play.
 
A little late, but I've had some gaming time with this now and thought I'd update the thread a bit.

WoW and Starcraft both run just fine, WoW can even handle some higher settings, and can run fine on an external monitor.

Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 all run flawlessly at native res. I turned off film grain and a few other things in ME2, but it really looks beautiful. Strangely enough, Mass Effect ran worse than it's sequel. ME2 seems to be better optimized.

Bad Company 2 single player runs well with low settings and anti-aliasing off. A little tweaking and it's perfectly playable. Can't vouch for multiplayer, but I imagine it would be just fine.

About to try Black Ops.
 
efirmage said:
A little late, but I've had some gaming time with this now and thought I'd update the thread a bit.

WoW and Starcraft both run just fine, WoW can even handle some higher settings, and can run fine on an external monitor.

Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 all run flawlessly at native res. I turned off film grain and a few other things in ME2, but it really looks beautiful. Strangely enough, Mass Effect ran worse than it's sequel. ME2 seems to be better optimized.

Bad Company 2 single player runs well with low settings and anti-aliasing off. A little tweaking and it's perfectly playable. Can't vouch for multiplayer, but I imagine it would be just fine.

About to try Black Ops.
Click to expand...

Do you know what frames the games are running at (FRAPS, for instance)? Would be very helpful, to say the least. Thanks!
 
does MBA 13", 128GB, 1.86ghz, 4GB RAM able to play counter strike, Mission Against Terror, L4D, Ragnarok Online @ mac OS X without any problem? i'm not sure that these games do have mac version anot.:eek:
 
efirmage said:
A little late, but I've had some gaming time with this now and thought I'd update the thread a bit.

WoW and Starcraft both run just fine, WoW can even handle some higher settings, and can run fine on an external monitor.

Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 all run flawlessly at native res. I turned off film grain and a few other things in ME2, but it really looks beautiful. Strangely enough, Mass Effect ran worse than it's sequel. ME2 seems to be better optimized.

Bad Company 2 single player runs well with low settings and anti-aliasing off. A little tweaking and it's perfectly playable. Can't vouch for multiplayer, but I imagine it would be just fine.

About to try Black Ops.
Click to expand...

The only game I keep going back to is ME2 - it has so much replay value and never gets old IMO. Using an iPad everyday, the only thing I miss is being able to run ME2 whenever I want and the ability to open a whole pile of tabs in Safari at once.

The porting team has ME2 ported. Can one of you guys try it on your MBA?

Here is the wrapper:

http://forum.portingteam.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=4587
 
BENJMNS said:
why's windows a crappy os? i find it to be more intuitive to use than the one on my mba.
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Yeah the Start Menu is so intuitive.

Windows is a crappy OS because its still a security sieve, it makes poor use of hardware resources such as processor and memory, its got years of cruft code from past versions which do nothing but use resources and contribute to instability, it still requires manual defrag, registry cleaning etc because it has none of the characteristics of a modern os, the interface is designed by committee and it shows, in short it is mediocre in every sense.
 
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