Finally got around to trying SC2 a few days ago. Just started the campaign and the game runs beautifully on native resolution and medium graphics. The colors are incredibly vibrant and no lag whatsoever. Fans did start whirling a bit initially but seemed to stabilize quickly and weren't an issue. Top left corner got warm but didn't get hotter even as the game progressed. Very happy with initial results considering this is an ultra-portable after all!
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MacBook Air 2013 Gaming Performance (Intel HD 5000)
- Thread starter Yixian
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The i5 receives around ~3000 pts on standard settings, 720p. You'll be fine.
Thought it better to post here than start a completely new thread.
My current setup is a 2010 27inch iMac ( i3, 8gb 1333mhz ram, ATI Radeon HD 5670 512 MB) and a 2011 11inch macbook air, (i5 with 4gb ram).
I'm thinking of having just one computer, and going with the base 11 macbook air 2013 with an extra 8GB ram, hooked up to a 2560x1440 display.
I only do very light photoshop work, so i'm not worried about that as my 2011 can handle what i do. The only thing i was thinking about was gaming. I don't game too much, generally pick up older games from the steam store when they are on sale.
How will these games play on my suggested new setup?
Will they play on the highest settings?
Will it put much stress on the machine, i.e fans blazing etc
The games i play are:
Civ V
Team Fortess 2
The walking dead
My current setup is a 2010 27inch iMac ( i3, 8gb 1333mhz ram, ATI Radeon HD 5670 512 MB) and a 2011 11inch macbook air, (i5 with 4gb ram).
I'm thinking of having just one computer, and going with the base 11 macbook air 2013 with an extra 8GB ram, hooked up to a 2560x1440 display.
I only do very light photoshop work, so i'm not worried about that as my 2011 can handle what i do. The only thing i was thinking about was gaming. I don't game too much, generally pick up older games from the steam store when they are on sale.
How will these games play on my suggested new setup?
Will they play on the highest settings?
Will it put much stress on the machine, i.e fans blazing etc
The games i play are:
Civ V
Team Fortess 2
The walking dead
Has anyone got a frame-rate for Borderlands 2 in say, 1280x800 or similar?
Just after some perspective of frame-rate vs my MBP 2011 with 6750M.
i don't game a heap but BL2 is a staple, if it can run that well enough I could be tempted to ditch the Pro...
Just after some perspective of frame-rate vs my MBP 2011 with 6750M.
i don't game a heap but BL2 is a staple, if it can run that well enough I could be tempted to ditch the Pro...
This isn't completely related to the original purpose of this thread, but I figured this would be a better place to post it than anywhere else.
First some background: I installed Parallels 7 onto my 2013 MBA, and then moved over my VM of Windows 7 from my cMBP 13" 2012 model. I did this by simply copying over the .vm itself and then opening it in Parallels.
Things seem to be working fine in general, except when playing a game. When playing devPRO on my cMBP, it runs fine, and generally, at a consistent 60 fps. On my MBA however, it also runs at 60 FPS, although it will occasionally dip to the 40-50 range. This by itself isn't really an issue to me (it's a card game...FPS isn't that important), but it also plays the game at 2-3x faster than it does on the cMBP, giving a "fast-forward" type of effect, which is a little distracting. There was one instance where the audio was a little glitchy too, but since reinstalling Parallels Tools, I haven't had that issue.
If you were to youtube a devPRO match (doesn't matter, any one) and watch a replay, you'll notice it goes faster than normal during the replay. Well, on my MBA, it's going even faster than that.
Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach this? I tried re-installing devPRO and it didn't help. I would really prefer not having to re-install Win7 if I don't have to...although I can live with this "problem", since nothing else is acting up (that I'm aware of).
EDIT: I was able to resolve this issue. VMware Fusion 5 has no issue with DevPro. Perhaps Parallels 8 (or 9 when it comes out) also resolves this.
First some background: I installed Parallels 7 onto my 2013 MBA, and then moved over my VM of Windows 7 from my cMBP 13" 2012 model. I did this by simply copying over the .vm itself and then opening it in Parallels.
Things seem to be working fine in general, except when playing a game. When playing devPRO on my cMBP, it runs fine, and generally, at a consistent 60 fps. On my MBA however, it also runs at 60 FPS, although it will occasionally dip to the 40-50 range. This by itself isn't really an issue to me (it's a card game...FPS isn't that important), but it also plays the game at 2-3x faster than it does on the cMBP, giving a "fast-forward" type of effect, which is a little distracting. There was one instance where the audio was a little glitchy too, but since reinstalling Parallels Tools, I haven't had that issue.
If you were to youtube a devPRO match (doesn't matter, any one) and watch a replay, you'll notice it goes faster than normal during the replay. Well, on my MBA, it's going even faster than that.
Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach this? I tried re-installing devPRO and it didn't help. I would really prefer not having to re-install Win7 if I don't have to...although I can live with this "problem", since nothing else is acting up (that I'm aware of).
EDIT: I was able to resolve this issue. VMware Fusion 5 has no issue with DevPro. Perhaps Parallels 8 (or 9 when it comes out) also resolves this.
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I don't have bootcamp on my i7/8gb/256gb 2013 13" Air, so no frame rate, but BL2 on OS X (Steam version) seems to be running fluidly in the native 1440x900 res. with most options between medium and high (AA off).
You should never do any gaming in a VM.. resources are split and video drivers aren't very good at all. Always game native in OSX or Bootcamp into Windows.
Err...this game isn't resource heavy, and it's something I only open up every now and then. It's not worth going through the trouble of setting up a Bootcamp partition, and it works fine on my cMBP, which has an inferior gpu and comparable cpu performance anyway.
Neat.
If that is indeed the case, HD5000 would seem to perform similarly/better than my 6750M. I drop res to 1280x720 (i think?) and have most stuff on medium, in bootcamp, to get it what i would call "fluid"...
I haven't noticed much difference with BL2 between bootcamp and OS X though. I certainly wouldn't bother boot-camping simply for BL2 unless you have PC friends (mac version seems to lag behind with patches and then can't play multiplayer with PC)
Yes, it seem to have ran quite nicely. Here is a detailed log:
FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Official Benchmark (Exploration)
Tested on:7/19/2013 5:54:35 PM
Score:3545
Average Framerate:28.423
Performance:High
-Easily capable of running the game. Should perform well, even at higher resolutions.
Screen Size: 1280x720
Screen Mode: Windowed
Graphics Presets: Medium
System:
64-bit (6.2, Build 9200) (9200.win8_gdr.130410-1505)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4650U CPU @ 1.70GHz
7972.270MB
Intel(R) HD Graphics 5000(VRAM 1792 MB) 9.18.0010.3165
Civ V on MBA 2013
I've been reading this thread since a month now, but so far there was no satisfying feedback on Civ V on the new MBA. So, after I got my base model 11" I bought Civ V (OSX version) off the steam sale and tried it.
I played a full game on a small map with 7 AI opponents and 12 city states. I set the game to native resolution and put all settings to high:
Overall I'm quite impressed, the MBA fits my playstyle of Civ rather well, and I'm definitely going back. Just one more turn...
I've been reading this thread since a month now, but so far there was no satisfying feedback on Civ V on the new MBA. So, after I got my base model 11" I bought Civ V (OSX version) off the steam sale and tried it.
I played a full game on a small map with 7 AI opponents and 12 city states. I set the game to native resolution and put all settings to high:
- Overall I had hardly any noticeable frame rate drops on the world map, even when the complete map was revealed. Only when a lot of notification where coming in it slowed down a bit for a second or so.
- Graphically the only problem which occurred was that the high res map textures where loading quite slow.
- Turns where processed rather quickly, only past 1900 it started to take a bit longer, with the last turns taking 10-20 seconds. In total there where something like 50 cities on the map, I had 8 at the end and was ally with all 10 remaining city states.
- The fans where constantly running at max speed during the play sessions, with the MBA getting rather hot, esp. in the upper right corner of the keyboard.
- I played my game in three three-hour sessions, during the sessions the performance did not change at all
Overall I'm quite impressed, the MBA fits my playstyle of Civ rather well, and I'm definitely going back. Just one more turn...
LOL! I've played a couple of games with huge maps, 24 city states, 12 civilizations, and the "Have Fun" mode which essentially lets me have Giant Death Robots in 4000BC. The game was very playable, I had a very similar experience to yours with the slowness in refreshing and the time between turns, but it was very enjoyable.
I've already skipped sleep altogether two nights playing this thing. I have the MBA configured to "say" the hour on the hour. It's 1 o'clock. It's 2 o'clock. It's 3 o'clock. It's 4 o'clock. It's 5 o'clock (in the morning). One more turn....
I know you might have covered this, but this thread is huge now...
At around how deep into the game does the slowdown begin? Like a few hours in or do you start noticing within an hour of starting a new game?
Thanks for the heads up! I usually like to start over by then anyways (Dat OCD, must be perfect!!), or I play smaller maps
The Witcher 2: 2013 MBA i7 128gb 8gb RAM. I started to play the game and was really excited from all of the great talk I've heard about it. Unfortunately, once I started to play the game got very laggy, the text got delayed, and the screen started to go black from time to time. All of the was on the lowest settings.
Witcher 2 is a game that can punish even a high end PC
Personally i'm hoping L4D, Dead Island, Torchlight 2... you know, a few fun coop games. Run okay.
Hoping torchlight 2 launches the Native client some time soon.
MBA13";17610321 said:
Your air will be fine, you wont have critical issues start popping up. The only thing I'd note is playing games will have your air run hotter, so keep it properly ventilated (i.e. don't block the exhaust ports).
On the subject of improving FPS, I got 1 word for you: Bootcamp.
The mac version of dota 2 was LITERALLY released this week. All OSX versions of Valve games have, historically, underperformed the windows-based version. This is doubly true when the OSX version just came out.
tl;dr: Switch to bootcamp for better fps, don't block heat exhausts.
Been playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. And it runs great on my mid 2012 Air.
Btw, any test results for these games below?
Assassin's Creed II
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Portal 2
GTA: San Andreas
GTA: Vice City
Btw, any test results for these games below?
Assassin's Creed II
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Portal 2
GTA: San Andreas
GTA: Vice City
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My results...
Macbook air 2013 i5, 256Gb, 8Gb RAM:
League of Legends: Smooth at High, even better at Medium.
SC2 : 30-40 fps at medium in a match 4x4., can handle high/ultra at 1x1, 2x2.
Team Fortress: not as smooth as I thought it would be, about 30-40 fps with some stutter.....
If you look at the quality of the image of SC2 at medium/high it is impossible not to become very impressive with this ultrabook.
In the next few days I`ll install one of the games of the total war series...
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Except for maybe AC2, which need some testing, those others should run very smooth as they are old games.
Portal runs on Source engine which is really good under Mac OSX, though it is even better under windows.
Macbook air 2013 i5, 256Gb, 8Gb RAM:
League of Legends: Smooth at High, even better at Medium.
SC2 : 30-40 fps at medium in a match 4x4., can handle high/ultra at 1x1, 2x2.
Team Fortress: not as smooth as I thought it would be, about 30-40 fps with some stutter.....
If you look at the quality of the image of SC2 at medium/high it is impossible not to become very impressive with this ultrabook.
In the next few days I`ll install one of the games of the total war series...
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Except for maybe AC2, which need some testing, those others should run very smooth as they are old games.
Portal runs on Source engine which is really good under Mac OSX, though it is even better under windows.