VERY disappointed with my 3.06 GT130

[bchreng]

Wait a second. My macbook 2.2 with x3100 graphics doesn't tear on youtube videos. Something is wrong here.

I don't know, some of those youtube videos can be pretty taxing. I think they can run as high as 720p nowadays.

 

[nusynergy]

Agreed. I've been playing WoW on my various macs since it's release. The one big thing to realize is that not every setting changes performance the same way. Cranking multisampling will hurt, full screen glow is brutal, shadowing(from what i heard) is shooting yourself in the foot.

If you want to get optimal performance, cripple every setting and reload the game. Seriously, minimize everything, and turn on/off anything that you can that will improve performance. Log in to a busy area (Dalaran would be optimal), and change things little by little, starting with the minor things, and moving to the more major things. Eventually, you will reach a point where you aren't willing to sacrifice more FPS to get more effects. Thats where you end up happy.

WoW is a very very different beast the any other games because its so dynamic. Performance in the middle of no where classic area vs performance in overcrowded dalaran vs performance during a heroic raid encounter might as well all have their own benchmarks.

For anyone with performance issues, start with full screen glow off and 1x multisampling, and shadowing low/off. Check the mac tech support section of the WoW forums for a lot of good information.

Good Post.. This explains alot and your very right on WoW being different they most other games.

 

[itommyboy]

You Realise the GT130 is a lesser card than the 8800 GS? (Which was Actually an 8800 GTS). You Should of done your homework before you went out and bought an obviously slower system, and you have no one to blame but yourself.

You should do your homework before spewing about because you sir are quite simply wrong.

 

[CrysisFX]

Uh, the osx86 partition is just to use osx. Nobody seriously plays games with osx, all games would be played in Windows. I'm sorry you get better gps in osx, but when a 3870 is more powerful than an 8800gt, something is wrong. Thanks for your osx86 explanation, I'm new to computers.

First of all a lot of people play games in osx. it may not be like crysis but they do. As i said before WoW runs better in opengl rather than directx just switch your config.wtf around and youll see. also considering its an 8800m gts which is a mobile chip its not surprising also with the fact that the processor in it is only 1.6ghz i get more cpu lag than graphics as wow does not run in dual core.

all i am doing is trying to convince this guy to not return his mac for a pc he will regret it. this has gone off topic with osx86 among other things.

the short answer is yes maybe atm the gt130 (if it even is a real gt130) may be slow but it wont be. Snow leopard is soon to be released this year and will change the preformance of OSX completely. another note is that unless you go under 30fps you wont see any difference in the playability of wow.

 

[bchreng]

First of all a lot of people play games in osx. it may not be like crysis but they do. As i said before WoW runs better in opengl rather than directx just switch your config.wtf around and youll see. also considering its an 8800m gts which is a mobile chip its not surprising also with the fact that the processor in it is only 1.6ghz i get more cpu lag than graphics as wow does not run in dual core.

all i am doing is trying to convince this guy to not return his mac for a pc he will regret it. this has gone off topic with osx86 among other things.

the short answer is yes maybe atm the gt130 (if it even is a real gt130) may be slow but it wont be. Snow leopard is soon to be released this year and will change the preformance of OSX completely. another note is that unless you go under 30fps you wont see any difference in the playability of wow.

Microsoft is touting the same thing for their next version of windows. They say it'll be more streamlined and perform better than Vista.

 

[jmpage2]

Microsoft is touting the same thing for their next version of windows. They say it'll be more streamlined and perform better than Vista.

You have to understand what is under the hood for both companies in their next OS versions to understand the differences.

In synthetic benchmarks Windows 7 will not surpass XP for raw system performance until there are at least 32 real or virtual CPU cores available to send instructions to.

Additionally Windows 7 still will not jettison the .dll/registry structure that severely affects Windows boot up times, clean up, etc.

Windows 7 will also likely be just as vulnerable to attack as previous versions which leaves users forced to run performance affecting virus/trojan/spyware checkers on top of the OS. Windows is so vulnerable, in fact, that the OS actually nags you constantly if you do NOT run a virus scanner.

A good deal of what Windows 7 is doing are UI improvements to try to leap frog OS X. You'll notice that Windows 7 adds a "dock" similar to what Tiger/Leopard have had for years. It will also add touch screen support, improved driver configuration and support, etc.

Snow Leopard is going in a different direction. Instead of adding lots of new features it is a top to bottom 64 bit re-vamp of the OS that should jettison the 32 bit pieces of the OS that are still there (32 bit apps will still run though, presumably in a virtual space with limited memory, etc).

The two key technologies that the new OS X load will have are Grand Central, which appears to be a way for programmers to lean on the OS itself to handle mult-cpu threading and Open CL which is going to enable some use of the GPU(s) by the system software.

These are much more "game changing" technologies than what Windows 7 aims to do, but naturally only time will tell on how effective they are... I would say though that hopes are very high that the bar will be set very, very high for system performance with the new Snow Leopard load.

I should point out though that Windows 7 will have native OS level support for Blu-Ray. Apple needs to pull their heads out on this one before they look like idiots.