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Macbook Air slower graphics than older Macbook?

S

StickerBox

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 2, 2010
21
0
I have a Macbook air 2011 and the Macbook 2008 unibody one. When I play Minecraft on both machines, the 2008, 9400M, 2.3GHz C2C one runs at 50 fps but the 2011 13" runs at 25-30.

They're both running the same version of Minecraft and Java, and both have the same amount of RAM allocated to minecraft.

Anyone got any ideas why this is happening??
 
StickerBox said:
I have a Macbook air 2011 and the Macbook 2008 unibody one. When I play Minecraft on both machines, the 2008, 9400M, 2.3GHz C2C one runs at 50 fps but the 2011 13" runs at 25-30.

They're both running the same version of Minecraft and Java, and both have the same amount of RAM allocated to minecraft.

Anyone got any ideas why this is happening??
Click to expand...

Air has the integrated ULV HD3000. 2008 has a discrete graphics card. The HD3000 sucks.

There you go. And before I get hounded, yes it sucks. It's integrated. For everything except games, it's fine; however, when you want to play something like Portal 2, Oblivion, Starcraft 2, or some heavy game (CoD), you're going to mid-low settings.
 
yeah they're both integrated - in fact the 9400M is much worse than the HD 3000 in everything else, except minecraft.
 
Concerning the first 2 posts, things are not exactly like that. It seems that hd3000 performs better for newer games, since drivers are focused on them. Comparing the 2 last mb air models (that is, 2010 and 2011) shows that 2010's nvidia gpu can do better on most older games while 2011's hd3000 seems to be slightly better on new games (like portal 2 for example). So, you can expect mb air 2011 to outperform the older models as new games come out.

In any case, having worked with both of them myself I can assure you the 2011 mb air is very much faster on the desktop graphics (mission control responds significantly faster). And that's the most important issue for me, since playing games on a mb air is an exception, but desktop graphics are always there.

As for games, generally is not a good idea playing 3d games on a mb air anyway, since the internal temperatures are going to crazy levels (don't take my word, just download istat pro widget and check), so for me is not an option as it lowers laptop's life (since none would get a mb air for games as a main job).
 
The only game I ever play is Minecraft, I don't play anything else, I have an xbox for that.

I just can't understand why it would perform better on an older, much less powerful Macbook than my MBA 2011...
 
Ok so I've done some testing and I have found some very interesting results.

Here is a screenshot of my MBA:

2iw1put.png


Here is a screenshot of the Macbook 2008:

r1zoxx.png


Notice how the MBA is using one core heavily, another core lightly and then the two virtual cores are not being used at all.

Is this normal?
 
looks like the i5 is having an issue with Minecraft.

The i5's are designed that if it detects you're using a single threaded application, it ramps up one of the cores and uses the other one a lot less. sort of diverting power from the 2nd core to the 1st one, and increases it's frequency to speed things up.

looks like for some reason on the air, minecraft is doing this. But on your old Macbook, it used 2 cores pretty evenly.

maybe a bug? lion? java? no clue
 
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