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Retina Macbook Pro Game Performance

J

Josh Kahane

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 29, 2006
439
1
Suffolk, UK
Hi everyone,

Lots of people seem to be curious, especially as the graphics capabilities seem to be such a strong talking point, post your gaming performance for games played on your Retina Macbook Pro.

Tell us your model (13" or 15"), game and how it plays running at full resolution at your desired settings. Hopefully we can pool together a nice thread of knowledge of this subject.

I for one, haven't yet bought my rMBP (I'll share as soon as I do), but am curious, how does World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 play?
 
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I'm very satisfied with the gaming performance. The 650M is an incredible low power GPU.

I'm playing World of Warcraft with 1920x1200 in Windows 7 with 150% scaling. Details are set to "high", fps is around 50 to 90, but I'm limiting it to 30 which feels and plays the same but the fans are a lot more quiet then. In some low level areas the fans are even running idle - I like it.

I'm also playing games through emulators and the rMBP is a beast here. One of the most demanding games for PCSX2 is MGS2, which it can run at full speed with 2x resolution.
Dolphin is even faster, games like Resident Evil 4 for Wii run at full fps with 2880x1880 and 4x (the maximum) internal resolution - still the CPU is at 40% and GPU at 50% load.

League of Legens runs at 2880x1800 on high details at around 60-70 fps, but I limit it to 30 and the fans stay at 3k rpm which is very silent for gaming. Even the speakers at the lowest setting drown the fans easily.
 
I'm playing StarCraft II for OS X on at external monitor.
I get between 45 and 60 FPS with Extreme settings at 1920x1200.

If I play on my internal screen with Extreme settings and native resolution, I get between 20 and 30 FPS so I'd rather lower the res to 1920x1200 since it doesn't look too bad and it's a much smoother experience.
 
The 13 sucks, as expected. Diablo 3 is barely playable at 1300-something. Full resolution lags like hell.
 
Diablo 3 - 60 FPS on my 15 Retina, this sucker screams. The 13 is laughable, not even worth it.
 
0x000000 said:
Ok, the 13" rMBP isn't all that bad in the end. At a 1300-something-ish resolution it runs with quite stable 30fps, drop it to 980ish and it's consistently at 60, with high textures, medium shadows/details and no AA. Still worlds apart from even the bad and years old, cheap, non-gaming PC my roommate has, where AA seems to be no problem at all.
Click to expand...

Try running the game under Bootcamp ( Windows ) and see how it goes there.
Blizzards games are usually not too well optimized for OSX.

PS: Make sure you have up to date drivers in Bootcamp.
 
I've been running WoW at native (2880x1800) on my MBP (high settings IIRC), and I get 45-50 FPS on average, with the low and high framerates of 29/72 FPS.
 
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