256MP ATI x1600 performance in MBP

I know the 256MB ATI x1600 is a pretty old graphics card. What is its performance like? Can you compare it to another card, or give some stats to show its performance.

Will the x1600 be able to play games smoothly at reasonal settings?
Also will there be a performance difference in gaming going from 2 to 3 gigs of ram using this cad?

I plan on buying a MBP just wanna know if i can tear up some FPS's if i install windows.

P.S. - Sorry if i put this in the wrong forum, i didnt know whether to put this here or in the gaming section.

 

This guy posted some of his results:

http://lartren.com/mac/

The X1600 is clocked at 418.50/445.50.

Got 3955 in 3DMark05 and 2126 in 3DMark06.

You can find other X1600 threads which should give you a general idea of what kind of gaming performance you can expect.

This will likely change with the updated Santa Rosa MBP's though; it seems very likely they will see a GPU upgrade, with either an ATI X2600 or a GeForce 8600M, so performance should increase accordingly.

I don't think 2GB to 3GB of memory would make a whole lot of difference for most games you would reasonably be able to play.

 

Just as reference points.

I get 60fps easy on CoD 2 at 1280x768(somewhere around there) and all settings to mid level. I'm sure I could go even higher on the detail, but it looks great the way it is, no reason for me to mess with it.

Halo gets a bizillion fps on high settings at the same resolution.

Half Life 2 runs and looks great(haven't done any fps testing yet) at the same resolution and settings mid/low. This is the only game I'm using in Windows. Everything else I have in OS X.

And this is with the 128mb GPU. I've heard that the performance isn't as large as you would think going from the 128 to the 256, but it is better. As zadillo said there's probably going to be a better gpu in the refreshed MBP, but when that is and what the gpu will be is only speculation for now.

 

If the new MBP is released with an X2600.. you can expect to wait another year... the desktop X2 series aren't even out.

 

I don't see why that would be. The X2600 is already in that new HP HDX 20" laptop, so it is clearly available now as a part. I don't see any reason it won't be available to use in a laptop likely to come out in June or July.

 

The HDX doesn't come out till the end of June. Considering that Apple tends to be a little behind the times, if they did go with the x2600, then I would expect it to be out a few months after that. It's not quite a year, but still a while away.

Yet one more reason they should put an 8600M GT in there.

 

I just meant that the X2600 part itself seems to be there (if magazines have already gotten final review units of the HDX), so if Apple is in the midst of preparing their MBP update, again, there's no reason they couldn't be secretly putting the X2600 in there right now either).

I wouldn't mind seeing an 8600M GT either, of course...