While I'm a console gamer myself, this is an absurd statement, we're not in the early 2000's anymore. Intel architecture and bootcamp as well as native ports make gaming on a mac a perfectly acceptable and enjoyable experience.
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Retina Gaming is going to make me cry.
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While I'm a console gamer myself, this is an absurd statement, we're not in the early 2000's anymore. Intel architecture and bootcamp as well as native ports make gaming on a mac a perfectly acceptable and enjoyable experience.
Its been great, everything i was expecting in terms of os x gaming in fact.
thanks to how awful, unstable, slow, delayed and expensive os x ports compared to windows releases i keep my limited ssd space clear of all games and instead only use a windows desktop for them.
Shame to say, the windows box with sandy bridge i5/560ti works far better for games than the mighty i7 ivy/overclocked 650m in the 15" retina.
Nobody should be satisfied with the state of os x gaming considered the price points required to purchase a machine with dedicated graphics.
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A 560ti will also outperform virtually every gaming laptop on the market, excluding the beasts with the super-high-end or SLI mobile chips. The rMBP provides adequate (Windows) gaming performance with unparalleled mobility (2kg weight!). Sure, its expensive, but I do hope that nobody here gets a MBP solely as a gaming machine. For me, its my main work machine that I can also use for recreation (gaming), which saves me from buying and maintaining multiple computers.
Agree 100% with this post. PC laptops/notebooks have become more upgrade friendly though with MXM cards. You do need to be more adventurous than a desktop modder (like modding out the case to make the card fit lol) but it's still doable to upgrade a PC notebook graphics card.
From my very limited experience with Mac (this is my first Mac, and I picked it up last Saturday
) OSX "ports" like Witcher 2, Driver SF and such are really poor in comparison to their Windows counterparts. If you are considering serious gaming on a Mac you need to run Boot Camp without question, which then begs the question why didn't you buy a Windows machine in the first place.You definitely buy a Mac for OSX and for the Apple ecosystem, both hardware and software. Gaming is definitely doable, but always secondary, that is if you're really serious about gaming.
Not saying the machine is a complete slouch. The rare games I play now it handles just fine, maxed out or nearly maxed out with one 1080p screen (old 37" tv).
But comparing the same game in windows on the i5/560ti box vs the 15 retina at much lower settings in os x, not even a comparison. (Borderlands 2, guild wars 2 for example). Hell the windows box is using an ancient 320 gb hard drive that was laying around (maybe from 06/7, generic 7200 rpm wd), and still shows no real loading time differences compared to the rmpb and its pretty impressive ssd.
If you assume that with the current hardware market to have a "good experience" on new, demanding games dedicated video is required, the cost to purchase such a machine in the flavor of apple and the necessity to partition and purchase (legally of course) windows just to have a good experience on that hardware; It's absurd.
I fully get the whole idea of buying and supporting one less machine. But lets break down the costs anyway.
15" rmbp $2200 and up. $500 extra to upgrade the hard drive from 256 to 512mb, which running a dedicated windows partition for games you'll probably want to do.
So $2700 plus a windows license
, but since the windows license is necessary for the windows box that cost will be canceled out. Vs. $2200 on the rmbp since you don't need the windows partition plus the following items, which the prices of typically stay fairly consistent the last number of years.
Current gen sweet spot processor= $150-200 range typically
Current gen sweet spot gpu= $175-225 usually
mobo= $80
ram= $60
hard drive= $140
case/psu = $100
monitor= $120
Total = $900 give or take for something that in terms of games would be flat out superior to any current rmbp (including the ops fully loaded $3k rmbp) apart from portability. A combined $3100 for the base rmbp and windows box, and really if you can afford a $2700 computer you can afford a $3100 for two computers, if you can't, than you really shouldn't be purchasing the $2700 computer either.
mouse, keyboard and speakers will not be factored since they'll probably be purchased for any real gaming on either device anyway. "Maintenance" is a wash also since outside of the hour to put the box together either way a dedicated windows install is being created and "maintained"
The system itself could be refreshed in a couple years just with a new gpu saving $ down the road, let alone the case, monitor, hard drive, probably the psu and maybe even the memory being reusable later on for a new mobo/processor. Initial outlay of cash, higher no doubt, but keeping current for the following generations becomes far cheaper.
Getting back to the point buying apple hardware for "gaming" is retarded until games start being written for os x rather than money grab ports.
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1) Use Bootcamp, and I agree most games under OSX just don't perform the way they should.
2) If you really want an upgradable laptop look at Sager/Clevo systems. Just about everything is upgradable. CPU, Memory, GPU's HDD. And most reseller's of Sager/Clevo system offer upgrade kits. My Son has an oder Clevo, and it has lasted 2 upgrade cycles and still performs well, just about all games maxed out. He has an investment into, but he has had no trouble selling his older hardware.
His PC beats my rMBP in any game and Benchmar, and even the with upgrades cost about the same.
Why Sager/Clevo haven't become more popular I just don't know. Performance to cost they just can't be beat.
I use a 22GB Windows 7 partition + an USB3 external disk for games. Works like a charm.
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Yes, Sager and Clevo are excellent laptops, high-quality, functional and reasonably priced. I guess its just the lack of advertising...
Get Trine 2 for Mac and use a ps3 controller it's such a good game great visuals runs like a champ . Games on Mac will run fine at 1080p but it's just a side thing your mostly buying for battery / portability and screen NOT for the small ssd to have your 25gb game anyway lols
I m going to get the new rMBP with 750ti, 512 flash can it seriously run those games on ultra that to on boot camp and what About heat ??
I'm not going to lie...I'm a bit jelly! (for all you South Park fans out there )
I had the 2.6 for a little bit but I gave it back. Let me tell you something, retina gaming is NO JOKE. I have the 13 inch now and it's not the same as the 15 inch
)I had the 2.6 for a little bit but I gave it back. Let me tell you something, retina gaming is NO JOKE. I have the 13 inch now and it's not the same as the 15 inch
Your device contains a 750m. . . not a 750ti. . . You'll be able to "run" games on high settings, but don't expect high framerates. . .
On really old games a GT 750m with be able to render very high frame rates.
Most people are happy even when games only run at around 30 FPS until they see how much smoother the game feels at for example 60 FPS on average.
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The bottom line is that if you want a machine mostly for gaming or GPU performance , don't buy a Mac laptop.
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Don't forget that Apple likes to lock down their hardware so you can't simply replace the GPU in your laptop as well and Apple doesn't use high end GPUs (due to the high TDP) in any of their notebooks since they are too thin to deal with the amount of heat produced by a high end GPU.
And before anyone says that no Windows based laptops offer a user replaceable GPU , you should look up the MXM slot and check out mobile workstations while you are at it as well.
I have a 13'' Haswell, 2.6 Ghz. Playing Diablo 3.
1280x800 looks ugly
1400x900 looks a bit less ugly
1680x1050 still ugly, and rather slow
2560x1600 beautiful and sharp, but unplayably slow (10 fps or less!)
I guess the maxxed out 15'' will perform better. But the GPU won't be able to run games on high settings in 2880x1800, and lower resolutions don't look so great in my opinion. So IMHO the retina MBPs are not for gaming, except very casual with lower settings.
1280x800 looks ugly
1400x900 looks a bit less ugly
1680x1050 still ugly, and rather slow
2560x1600 beautiful and sharp, but unplayably slow (10 fps or less!)
I guess the maxxed out 15'' will perform better. But the GPU won't be able to run games on high settings in 2880x1800, and lower resolutions don't look so great in my opinion. So IMHO the retina MBPs are not for gaming, except very casual with lower settings.
At 1680x1050, my 15" retina (2GB GT750M) handles around 47-50 fps in Battlefield 4 (mix of high and ultra, FXAA and 16xAF).
Yours is a 13", so it's never meant for gaming as it doesn't have a discrete GPU.
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Look at my post above.
Well, rMBP is not a gaming machine. But it's a very capable laptop with quite powerful internals.
Personally I don't play a lot, but I might occasionally drive few races in F1 2013 game. The game runs smooth on 1680x1050 resolution and all setting on high. It looks pretty awesome.
I'd say... you should not be worried about rMBP's gaming performance. It will run games just fine unless you're looking for superior gaming performance.
Personally I don't play a lot, but I might occasionally drive few races in F1 2013 game. The game runs smooth on 1680x1050 resolution and all setting on high. It looks pretty awesome.
I'd say... you should not be worried about rMBP's gaming performance. It will run games just fine unless you're looking for superior gaming performance.
That is not what Apple says... but that is besides the point.
I just tried turning on AA, and indeed it makes things look nice again in 1680x1050 on the 13'' rMBP (though it still looks better on my high-res 15''). So if the 750M can handle AA at a decent resolution (seems it works for BF4 in your case), then it is fine.
However it is not really "retina" gaming. The retina screen doesn't do anything for you here, the game would look just as good on a 1680x1050 screen. And that's fine, because this is not a gaming machine - just a great laptop which is good at doing many different things.
Maybe I misinterpreted the OPs post: I had the feeling he was looking for a special retina gaming experience, but maybe he is just looking forward to play games with high/ultra settings at a reasonable resolution and good FPS, and certainly the rMBP (with discrete GPU) can do that.
Tomb Raider's not that great on 2.3 16gb. I'd say it's runs average 23-25fps with everything on medium-low, and textures on ultra. It's not that impressive, but it runs decent, at 1440.
A few years back, I was pretty concerned about the quality of a GPU in a macbook pro, but multiple people here said it was fine, it was fast enough, and so on. They quoted frame rates they'd gotten in WoW, since that was one of the things I'd mentioned playing. So, believing that they were almost certainly not outright lying, I got the top-of-the-line then available. Lovely machine. Really pleased with most aspects of it.
... But it was utter garbage for gaming, because the GPU in it (the nVidia 330M, I think?) was awful. It was pretty much hopeless. I had to have a third-party fan utility to get the machine not to crash under load, because OS X wouldn't run the fans fast enough. (Yes, people told me that must be a problem with my machine. It's a problem reported by a whole lot of people with that particular machine, or with other MBPs, and one that Apple did not think was a problem they could diagnose or fix.)
Since then, I've gotten a 2012-era MBP. It's got a decent GPU (nVidia 650M), and it basically runs, but the fact is, if I want to play video games on a laptop, I use an ASUS gaming laptop, because while it's not nearly as sleek, thin, and lightweight as my MBP, it can actually run things pretty well. It has about 5x the surface area for its exhaust vents, meaning that if it's running both CPU and GPU full-speed, it sounds like a laptop with its fans running; the MBP sounds like a jet engine, getting to something over 6kRPM just to try to keep cool, and even then I believe it's throttling the CPU and GPU a bit to avoid overheating.
Also, the MBP's got a 1680x1050 screen, which is the absolute highest resolution you can get that's not HiDPI-mode Retina, while the ASUS has 1920x1080. Guess which one can display 1080p video natively? Hint: It's the one with a 1080-pixel screen. The MBP no longer crashes without a third-party fan utility, but if I run even fairly simple games on it that require 3D rendering, it will end up revving the fans up to 5k-6k RPM pretty quickly, and leaving them there. And that's annoying, because it's loud.
Of course, that's not just gaming. Xcode will make the machine do that too. Open a new project in xcode that has a bunch of code for it to index? Time to go do something else for a few minutes so I can come back when the fan noise has died down.
Honestly, while there's a lot of very nice things about the Apple hardware, they've completely abandoned the high-end market, and aren't even remotely trying to compete in it these days. Which sucks for me, because I would totally spend $3k+ on a 1920x1080 display, decent GPU, decent CPU, and enough heat sinks to allow them to function. Even if this was heavier than the slimmed-down MBPs. I don't care about a pound or two of laptop weight, but I desperately miss the days when I could get a high-end machine from Apple and it would actually compete with the performance of the PC side of things.
There's also price. My MBP, a late-2012 high-end 15", was something over $2,000. My ASUS laptop (G55VW) was about $1500... And that's including buying a 480GB SSD for the ASUS, while the MBP, I bought the SSD separately. So it's not quite a factor-of-two price difference, but it's close, and the technical advantages of the MBP are... uhm... Honestly, I got nothing here except OS X. Screen isn't as good, fewer USB ports, worse performance, less expandable. Half as much video memory. I think the CPU's slower, and I'm pretty sure the GPU's a model number lower (650 vs 660).
Not to say that OS X isn't worth it to me for getting stuff done, it totally is. This machine is doing a great job of the thing I got it to do.
But honestly, yeah, I will totally warn people away from going to OS X if gaming is their big priority, because Apple simply does not make any laptops which are decent for gaming, and if you really want to game and also to have OS X, you are better off getting a mid-range Apple laptop with no expectation of using it to play video games, and a PC laptop to play the video games, rather than trying to get a high-end Apple laptop to play games.
See, here's the thing. You seem to be framing everything in terms of whether or not people are buying Macs. I'm framing them in terms of whether users are happy. I don't want people to be encouraged to buy a machine they'll be unhappy with. If I'd known that the people on the forums were just plain making stuff up because of the MacRumors rule that forum posts are for saying whatever you think will make someone buy a Mac, I would have spent maybe $2k instead of $3.6k on that MBP (yes, really, it was the 17" with the big SSD and everything), and I would have been really happy with the machine for doing the things it did, and I wouldn't have been resentful of it for being about 2x as expensive as it needed to be for what I could actually use it for.
But what about the people for whom a Mac serves their gaming needs just fine? Would they be lying or making stuff up if they say positive things about Macs as gaming devices? Very often, people come to these forums expressing interest in buying a Mac, and sometimes they mention that they also like to game. Typically they either mention the kind of games they like to play, or others will ask them. I've never seen the kind of widespread dishonesty on these forums that you claim to have seen. It's common knowledge that if gaming is your sole priority on a machine, you're better off getting a gaming laptop/desktop. But you can absolutely run most current games pretty well on an rMBP, even if it's not to your personal expectations.
When you look at the majority of "gaming laptops", they are often large and built primarily around a ventilation system (ASUS RoG for example..).
I feel like the RMBP is a great trade off, they maintain a good heat dissipation system with performance. I think the GPU's already being taxed with the scaling system to accommodate the Retina screens limits it somewhat, but all things considered, for it being a "professional tool", it handles some games pretty darn well!
I feel like the RMBP is a great trade off, they maintain a good heat dissipation system with performance. I think the GPU's already being taxed with the scaling system to accommodate the Retina screens limits it somewhat, but all things considered, for it being a "professional tool", it handles some games pretty darn well!
I would say that in my experience the rMBP has exceeded my expectations for light gaming. Even at a non-native resolution, the screen is just better than my other monitors. It has just enough oomp that should I choose older titles can be run on an external monitor.
While I am quite satisfied, I use my laptop as my main work computer, and as a mobile processing station for astrophotography, so the graphics card was a secondary concern. To put things in context, the graphics card in this laptop is weaker than a single GTX 460 1gb out of my 'outdated' SLI. That is a nearly four year old, 'budget' desktop card I purchased three months after release for $160. While it is discarded as secondary, I also have the option of overclocking that video-card (and do) to gain some extra.
I completely agree that the rMBP is a fantastic all-in-one package (heck I got one didn't I?). However, while it *can* play games, I question its efficiency in doing so, or listing it as a benefit of the system, as it certainly isn't optimized from a design perspective for that work. Again, as a mobile work-station/light gaming rig it is great, but if raw performance is a concern, there are other options (like a 13" rMBP + budget gaming rig, but you'd lose the portability).
Anyways, those are just some thoughts. That's the beauty of all this: we get to evaluate these things and make decisions for ourselves. Just be aware that even a tower with 2x460's @ 850mhz, and a Ivybridge i7 @ 4.5 ghz can struggle with modern games. For me my work was more important, and my previous 2008 MBP was the best computer I had owned, so I picked updating it instead of pursuing the ragged edge of gaming performance. (The cpu in my tower was also selected for processing not gaming).
Cheers
While I am quite satisfied, I use my laptop as my main work computer, and as a mobile processing station for astrophotography, so the graphics card was a secondary concern. To put things in context, the graphics card in this laptop is weaker than a single GTX 460 1gb out of my 'outdated' SLI. That is a nearly four year old, 'budget' desktop card I purchased three months after release for $160. While it is discarded as secondary, I also have the option of overclocking that video-card (and do) to gain some extra.
I completely agree that the rMBP is a fantastic all-in-one package (heck I got one didn't I?). However, while it *can* play games, I question its efficiency in doing so, or listing it as a benefit of the system, as it certainly isn't optimized from a design perspective for that work. Again, as a mobile work-station/light gaming rig it is great, but if raw performance is a concern, there are other options (like a 13" rMBP + budget gaming rig, but you'd lose the portability).
Anyways, those are just some thoughts. That's the beauty of all this: we get to evaluate these things and make decisions for ourselves. Just be aware that even a tower with 2x460's @ 850mhz, and a Ivybridge i7 @ 4.5 ghz can struggle with modern games. For me my work was more important, and my previous 2008 MBP was the best computer I had owned, so I picked updating it instead of pursuing the ragged edge of gaming performance. (The cpu in my tower was also selected for processing not gaming).
Cheers