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- Thread starter Rubydoppler
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Now about Mass Effect 2, i can say that it will run nicely on almost maxed out details with the 330m, because the 9600m gt ran it pretty nicely too...and i didnt need to deactivate anything.. I did tune Windows 7 a lot however...(no overclocking)
How do you guys think Fallout 3 (With a lot of mods) will run with the 330m ?
On the 9600m gt it ran mostly pretty good...only lights and fog seemed to make things worse, so i promise myself quite an improvement with the new card due to more shaders...
How do you guys think Fallout 3 (With a lot of mods) will run with the 330m ?
On the 9600m gt it ran mostly pretty good...only lights and fog seemed to make things worse, so i promise myself quite an improvement with the new card due to more shaders...
The only problem that I see with the new MBP vs. the old one is for people upgrading from a 15" previous-gen to a 15" hi-res model. I haven't put it to the test but I would think that the increase in resolution would negate or at least diminish some of the performance gains since the 330M GT is not a whole lot faster than the 9600M GT.
It's not much for 1024 x 768 and x1 AA.You enjoy watching paint dry and slideshows?
Lol.. running native on a high res screen would more than just negate the benefits.. you'd be going down to 8600M GT levels.
There's no other way to say it, with a price hike AND a resolution bump, the 330M GT is an astounding failure.
Could you provide tips or links to some of the tuning you did in Windows 7 to optimizing your computer for better performance? Thanks!
It depends a lot on the hardware.
I have a 9800GT (desktop) card, and it has no performance difference at all in WoW between 1024x768, no AA, and 1920x1200, 8xAA.
Because the bottleneck isn't pixel-pushing.
On my 8600M GT (2007 MBP), there's only a small amount of performance difference between 1920x1200 and 1024x768, because again, the primary bottleneck isn't pixel pushing, it's textures and polygons, and there's the same number of those regardless.
For an occasional game the normal screen on a 15" would be better than a high resolution screen then? I am planning on purchasing a new 15" model, but I am doubting about the screen to choose. My current laptop has a resolution of 1680x1050 which is good. I am worried that the normal resolution on the new 15" will be too small to my liking.
We won't know until we've seen some real benchmarking done on the hardware. I would guess that it wouldn't be that bad between the lower rez and the 1680x1050, but it's really hard to predict. Some hardware has plenty of pixel pushing and not enough texture hardware, some hardware has plenty of texture hardware and not enough pixel pushing. Also, it will depend on the specific game which is the limiting factor.
When talking about framerates, there is little doubt that the low-res will be better than the high-res. However, you're already used to the high res, and since you'll only occasionally going to be playing games I would recommend sticking with the high-res.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but note that the high-res screen has 26% more pixels. That's kind of a lot.
Sure. But as I said, on slightly older desktop hardware, going to 8x as many pixels has no effect at all on framerates. I know the laptops are weaker, but when a factor of 8 doesn't matter, a factor of 1.26 probably doesn't either.
Can't you just switch the resolution of the game to 1440x900 and get essentially the same frame rate as a native 1440x900? I think the hi-res screen was the thing I was most happy about. I only wish they would have offered the 512MB VRAM upgrade on the i5 model. Looks like the performance boost of the i7 is very minimal.
Anything but the native resolution on an LCD display will look significantly worse while playing games.
Yes you can switch the resolution down, but the problem with doing that on LCDs (as opposed to CRTs) is that the image gets very blurry as the physical display pixels are no longer in a one-to-con correspondence with the virtual resolution. Try it out on your current MB. Change the resolution down in System Preferences and the screen will get fuzzy. Unfortunately this is often the trade-off if your game don't run well at "native" resolution.
Amen though, I truly didn't expect high res screens but I waited for four months to buy my MBP (coming from a dual 1.25 G4!) and the high-res option alone was worth the wait for me!
All I know is on my 2008 unibody Modern Warfare 1 & 2 both play much better at 1280X800 compared to 1440X900. If I play at full res I can't use max settings or any AA.
Yeah. I think the thing is that my desktop system is totally CPU-bound, so there's a ton of spare headroom for the video card.
Until we know more about the 330M's bandwidth and capacity, we won't know how resolution-dependent it is. (The good news is, I've always been using 1920x1200 on the Mac, so if it's any better, it'll be better for me even if it would be faster still at a lower res.)
I would like to have the ability to utilize both graphics chipsets--discrete and integrated--when playing games. Seems that running both graphics processors wouldn't push the TDP too high for the enclosure, but perhaps I'm wrong...
Wouldn't help. You'd have to duplicate a ton of information from one to the other, at which point you'd be losing more to bandwidth costs than you'd be getting back from the low-power GPU.
Yes, that's correct IF you run at 1920x1200 in the game (which obviously looks best).
As an example, I _had_ a last-gen (Mid 2009) MPB 15 (returned it in Jan at 13 days to wait for the new ones!) and I also have a 23" Cinema Display (1920x1200). Running, say, COD4 on the MBP's 1440x900 in multiplayer was great, plugging in the Cinema and going 1920x1200 sucked. The same will happen with the 17 unfortunately.
But hey, once you break the non-native resolution barrier (turn it down from max) you can go pretty low and not really see a huge difference in the fuzzieness, so just put your 17 at 1440x900 or even lower and most games should run pretty well with the texture/detail setting pretty high. Ain't much else you can do for a sharp image but get a 15" with low-res screen.My brand new Macbook Pro i7 stock edition just got a 3DMark06 score of 6763. Not too bad.... but at PCMag they were able to get the i5 version to score 7371. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy?
I wouldn't pay that article too much attention. They say the 330m "pummeled" its predecessor, but they were comparing it to the 9400m
Also, were you running in native resolution? Because they scored much lower when running at native resolution. The 7371 was scored at 1024x768.
I wouldn't pay that article too much attention. They say the 330m "pummeled" its predecessor, but they were comparing it to the 9400m
Also, were you running in native resolution? Because they scored much lower when running at native resolution. The 7371 was scored at 1024x768.
Ahh that explains it. I ran it at the "standard" 1280x1024, the only resolution allowed by the basic edition.
In terms of actual games - Fallout 3 runs between 30 and 60 fps on "high" settings at 1280x720 resolution, but with AA turned off. Average FPS of around 40-45. I haven't tried at 1400x900, but I suspect it would still be playable.
L4D2 I was able to basically max out, again with no AA, and my FPS never dropped below 28.