Any Gamers Regret Getting a Mac?

go to youtube,search gaming on MBP and see...maybe your card was defective?

 

alright thats fair Arquis. i cant comment in the 8600 256mb version. from what i understand that plays games well but not insanly with aa and the whole deal. that just makes me regret not getting a MBP even more. if your getting performance like this the 512 version must great for such a thin laptop. but yea the 128mb version (i had the 8600 not the ati) in the last version of the MBP was awful. the best games it could play where WoW and source.

 

Yeah, I never got the chance to try the 128mb version of it. So I guess I'll take your word for it. As for the 512, I hear that there is no noticeable difference when gaming compared to the 256, as the 8600 isn't fast enough to really use the 512mb for games. As for it playing games insanely, well no, it can't, it wasn't meant to, and I will never call this card "amazing." What I'd call it is "good" for the average gamer who doesn't demand 60+ FPS at max AA in DX10. And wow, I hear even that x3100 can play WoW decently!

 

Lethal Lottery are you trying to play games on OSX side? Because you don't make sense.

The 8600GT in the MBP is just like any other G84, thru bootcamp (I use XP Pro). The whole "low" settings thing made me laugh, I have yet to see any game default to low settings on mine. If anything, it always sets it higher than I want :shrugs:

also I just wanted to say OSX was probably your problem with apples drivers. Get yourself some windows and a laptopvideo2go driver. I play in Ultra, and the only time its not at 60fps is when theres tons of crap on the screen. I took these pics at stock clocks, I didnt feel like messing around with them right now

 

Yeah nothing against mac, but saying that coding in windows is worse then mac is just plain ignorant. Hell when I was taking java classes a long time ago there was a compiler that pretty much coded for you. Basically we were given 3 compilers; (well 4 but the 4th wasn't recommended) Jgrasp, Jcreator, Eclipse, and emacs(the one not recommended). I listed them in complexity, I used all but jgrasp as it basically wrote the code for you as well as was too involved for me (personally I like to sit down and crank out code and work it out myself). The great thing is they are all free, now granted visual studio isnt free but for the price of a mac you can get a PC with the same hardware and studio with money to spare.

But on a lighter note the 8600mGT is a nice card handles all I could ever want including new and popular titles with great settings and performance.

 

I'm really curious to see what kind of performance will the 8600m GT DDR3 in the Macbook Pros offer to future games like Spore, Diablo 3 and GTA IV.

But by that time, at least I hope so, new MBPs will be out with better GPUs...

 

Well, GTA IV shouldn't pose much a problem. It's a console port after all, and I don't think they will ever give it *too* much of a problem. PC exclusives are another story though.

 

I agree, San Andreas ran pretty good when I gave it a try so I doubt IV won't be much worse (I've got it on PS3 so I wont be checking out the PC version...)

DIII shouldn't be too bad either, Blizzard is usually good at making games playable for most. I'll be sure to pick it up

 

Well, if you think of it that way, the Creature Creator just flies at 1440x900 with everything up.

And so does San Andreas. I'd imagine Rockstar will spice up the graphics for IV.

I'm playing San Andreas now with everything up, AA, native res, and it's just great

And Diablo III, from what the gameplay vid shows, it's not going to be that demanding...

 

The ability of the MBP to play Doom 3 is not dependent of whether the user is a fanboy. Rather it's dependent on whether you've patched the game to be an Universal Binary. Doom 3 was released before the Intel transition, so unless you've patched it you're running it PowerPC emulation mode. The Doom 3 demo in particular hasn't been updated to be a Universal Binary, but I believe the Quake 4 Demo was, although it's probably still not as optimized as the latest patch. Was your experience with Doom 3 in OS X based on a Universal Binary version?

 

I did regret for getting a macbook pro, but it's nice machine at least.

 

Well I can say for a fact that the 128mb version can game decently. I've played COD4,TF2, bioshock, Conan, GOW, etc, etc, all on high to medium.

The key is to have the right drivers in windows, they really can make the difference between a game running, or not.

 

opengl games in windows run faster than the osx counterpart. d3d games in windows also run faster than their opengl ports to the mac platform.

its one of those things that i REALLY wish wasn't true. but i just can't argue with the facts. its in the same group with "rolling your clothes is a better use of volumetric space than folding them nicely".

i just hate it for being true and i wish that it wasnt, but there it is... mocking me.

 

Have you ever tried Torque game builder? We used the 2d edition and you can buy it for mac. I ran our game on my macbook. I will try to post pics when i get back home from work. But its nice engine.

 

Same boat (starting mac dev). Still need to buy a mac though - so should I wait for the refresh? What GPU should we expect to see?

Stupid question #3: And what's the equivalent of VS and 3DS Max?

 

Likely a 9600m GT or a 9700m GT at most. The new macbook pro's even thinner by the looks of it so i'm going to go ahead and question the heat capacity of that thing.

 

BlitZX, I would expect a newer-equivalent to the 8600M GT the MBP currently has; probably a 9600M GT or 9700M GT as adyingwren noted. Maybe something from ATI if they can do that.

 

3 possible GPUs from NVIDIA...

~20W:

(65nm) 9600M GS - same performance as current 8600M GT but consumes less power

~23W:

(65nm) 9600M GT - increased performance over 8600M GT but consumes same power
(55nm) 9650M GT - increased performance over 9600M GT but consumes same power

Hopefull we get to choose from one of each (battery savings w/ same performance or increased performance w/o increased battery drain compared to current card - which drains 23W).

 

What about the ATI 3850? That would be a really sweet card, it has a 256-bit memory interface and should be a lot faster than the 8600M GT. Anything up to the 9700M GTS (which uses almost triple the power of the 8600M GT, so Apple probably won't use it), won't be a big jump in performance, which won't look good for Apple if it performs similarly to the MBP that was released a year and a half ago. The 3850 will probably consume a little more than double the power of the 8600M GT, which should be similar to the x1600 in the first MBP. since it was on a bigger fabrication (I'm just guessing here since ATI never released the power consumption for any of their cards and NoteBookCheck doesn't have them either). The 3850 should be around the performance of the 8800M GTS and the 9800M GT/8800M GTX, which would be amazing in the MBP.

 

any link about 3850 performance?

 

hey,read this!

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Newsentry.153+M5972edd65ef.0.html

 

My money is on the 9650GT. It makes the most sense.

The ATI mobility 4850 looks nice but there's no way in hell that thing would be in a mbp. Heat dissipation would be a nightmare and god only knows what kind of power draw that thing has in order to get 10K+ 3dmark06 points.

 

There's no way this side of the universe that you're going to see that in a macbook pro

 

lol,i want it!