Back in 2010, I was curious about video game performance on the MBP. I got two categories of answers:
1. You are a bad person for wanting to play video games. Macs are for sleek professionals who don't care about games. Stop liking Apple.
2. The nVidia 330M is an incredible chip and will perform great.
So I thought, heck, I get a lot of use out of my Mac either way, might as well, and got a MBP 17".
The gaming performance was atrocious. Without third-party apps to increase fan speed, the machine overheated and crashed badly running WoW. With the third-party fan speed increase, it performed about as well as a two-year-old machine had under Linux, which is to say, poorly.
Well, long story short, I do not learn from my mistakes. My spouse wants a laptop. We'd prefer a Mac. We'd also like to be able to run games on it (specifically RIFT). By preference, we'd be using Crossover Games rather than Bootcamp, because I don't want to spend an extra $100 on a Windows license and have to deal with viruses and malware. Obviously, it would be suicidally stupid to try to get this to work on the Intel HD Graphics. Questions:
1. How much difference is there between the 6750 and 6770?
2. Can the machine actually run both CPU and GPU without overheating?
3. No, really. The goal here is not to prove the ultimate superiority of Apple.
Basically, if it's not going to be remotely practical, we can save a lot of money by not getting the extra video hardware. It doesn't have to be able to run the game at ultra settings at 60fps or anything; I'm just looking for, say, the ability to run with the regular renderer and play decently.
I am aware that games "run better under bootcamp". I don't necessarily care; if the one game we care about runs acceptably under Crossover, we'll be fine with that. I am aware that I can get a better video game machine for less. Heck, I am aware that, for the price difference of buying a Mac that can run games at all, I could get a faster PC laptop that could run games better. The goal is just to not have to have two separate machines or have to deal with Windows if I can possibly avoid it.
Anyone have concrete information about performance, especially of Rift in particular? I know I've seen some threads claiming overheating problems with some of the early 2011 MBPs, but I haven't found that much, and not that many people are playing games on them for some completely mysterious reason.
1. You are a bad person for wanting to play video games. Macs are for sleek professionals who don't care about games. Stop liking Apple.
2. The nVidia 330M is an incredible chip and will perform great.
So I thought, heck, I get a lot of use out of my Mac either way, might as well, and got a MBP 17".
The gaming performance was atrocious. Without third-party apps to increase fan speed, the machine overheated and crashed badly running WoW. With the third-party fan speed increase, it performed about as well as a two-year-old machine had under Linux, which is to say, poorly.
Well, long story short, I do not learn from my mistakes. My spouse wants a laptop. We'd prefer a Mac. We'd also like to be able to run games on it (specifically RIFT). By preference, we'd be using Crossover Games rather than Bootcamp, because I don't want to spend an extra $100 on a Windows license and have to deal with viruses and malware. Obviously, it would be suicidally stupid to try to get this to work on the Intel HD Graphics. Questions:
1. How much difference is there between the 6750 and 6770?
2. Can the machine actually run both CPU and GPU without overheating?
3. No, really. The goal here is not to prove the ultimate superiority of Apple.
Basically, if it's not going to be remotely practical, we can save a lot of money by not getting the extra video hardware. It doesn't have to be able to run the game at ultra settings at 60fps or anything; I'm just looking for, say, the ability to run with the regular renderer and play decently.
I am aware that games "run better under bootcamp". I don't necessarily care; if the one game we care about runs acceptably under Crossover, we'll be fine with that. I am aware that I can get a better video game machine for less. Heck, I am aware that, for the price difference of buying a Mac that can run games at all, I could get a faster PC laptop that could run games better. The goal is just to not have to have two separate machines or have to deal with Windows if I can possibly avoid it.
Anyone have concrete information about performance, especially of Rift in particular? I know I've seen some threads claiming overheating problems with some of the early 2011 MBPs, but I haven't found that much, and not that many people are playing games on them for some completely mysterious reason.