Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Question - Gaming on Macbook.

K

klaze

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 14, 2010
73
0
When I try playing the sims 3, and sometimes I try to minimize the game and try to surf on Safari, it's impossible to surf because it's so laggy.

Is this normal for Mac??

I played some games on the Bootcamp side and it's normal( I can play games and surf the net at the same time).

The only reason I'm asking is because my Bootcamp is mainly just for school stuff while my Mac is for anything else.

I really want to play games on the Mac side and not the Bootcamp side but I want to be able to surf the net while the game is being minimized.


I have a White MacBook, 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB ram.

Thanks!
 
No, it's definitely not supposed to do that on the Mac. It's not normal. It should run smooth.
 
I have a high end iMac with the mobile 4850 chip, which is a rather good chip, and I still get choppy window movement/scrolling and flash video while on safari and a demanding game is active in the background.

The gpu effects the smoothness with which all of that stuff works (videos,window movement and scrolling) to a certain degree, so a good part of it would be your gpu putting all of its resources into the game. My only guess as to why it happens on osx side and not windows side is because of its implementation of open gl rather than direct x. As it stands, osx runs on inferior drivers compared windows-- in fact gaming is usually met with higher performance on windows side of things.
 
Oh I forgot to add, it's not just trying to surf the net, it can be anything, it's super choppy. If I put my mouse over anything over dock, it takes over 5 seconds to reach each icon. I just included surfing the net because that's what I want to do while my game is minimized, but really, it can be anything that is laggy/choppy.

I was wondering because I'm going to get Starcraft 2 next month, but I really want to play it on my Mac and not my Bootcamp, but if the Mac side will be this laggy, then I guess I'll have to play on Bootcamp.
 
Oh you'll definitely want to run starcraft 2 on windows. The difference in performance is huge.
 
I get the same thing. However I also find it's actually easier just to press Cmd-Enter to go into Windowed mode, and then Cmd-Tab into another app to do something. It's much, much smoother this way and you can keep an eye on your game.
 
tristangage said:
I get the same thing. However I also find it's actually easier just to press Cmd-Enter to go into Windowed mode, and then Cmd-Tab into another app to do something. It's much, much smoother this way and you can keep an eye on your game.
Click to expand...

Okay thanks, I'll give it a try, hopefully it will be better.

Though I am disappointed because I really just wanted my Windows side to be pure school work, now the only thing I'll probably do on the Mac side is surf the net?



Edit: I just tried the game in Windowed mode(Cmd-Enter), and it's a lot better now to do other stuff. It's not as fast but I guess this will do, thanks a lot!!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back