Gaming on base Macbook Pro

I didn't buy the Macbook Pro for gaming but thought I'd give it a try.

I have the base 2GB RAM and 128MB video card 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MBP.

I ran Medal of Honor 2 on default settings and it was really choppy! It's not exactly a new game so I thought the MBP would be able to handle it. Same thing goes for Halo. Maybe these games were not made for Intel-based Macs?

so anyway.. I guess I'm just wondering what your experiences have been with games (assuming you own the base MBP). Thanks!!

 

you'll probably have to edit some settings, the MBP isn't really made for gaming

 

Well if u have bootcamp and throw xp in it than u good to go im a hardcore bf 2 and 2142 player , ahd ill tel ya im playing on the highest settings , and i have nvidia nvmonitor repots gpu temp as 79 c when i game , and like i said if u xp on it its one helluva gaming machine,but its not gonna be as good if u game in os x , cause open gl sux. Providing we are talking about macbookpro 2.4 ghz

 

I don't have bootcamp yet because the base model hard drive is so small. I will probably upgrade it myself once the warranty period is up and then I'll install xp

 

Yeah don't expect decent framerates under osx. You can play any game on the low end mbp provided you are running xp with modified drivers from laptopvideo2go or whatever, I forget the address. The only thing you might not be able to do is play at native res since it only has 128mb of video memory.

 

It does depend on the game. Stuff like UT3 and Bioshock will be playable at 1440x900 with the 2.2 MBP, but for the sake of smoothness I tend to put the res down a notch to 1280x800.
Older games are fine at native res, just anything super recent that you'll have to play around with to get the optimum settings, really.
But yes, the base MBP is fine for a bit of light/medium gaming. Any more and I daresay you'd be better off with an Asus G1S or similiar for about the same prices or cough up a bit more for the 256mb MBP.

 

Well see the base MBP has the 128MB GDDR3 card which is equivalent to the 256 or 512mb 8600GT in GDDR2 so you can still game a lot.

 

is it seriously that significant?

but back on topic... an 8600M GT is decent enough to play most games at decent settings, so I guess it's what the previous posters said.

 

if the games were indeed earlier PowerPC based games, it is quite logical that they might run slow on an Intel-Mac because they must run through emulation.

are the games Universal Binary? those are both fairly old at this point so it is most likely they are earlier PowerPC versions.

 

I can't even begin to tell you what's wrong with this statement.

The biggest problems with gaming in OS X aren't necessarily due to products that have insufficient dedicated video memory, though. The larger issues are the games themselves, which are often poorly done ports of either other PC or console games. There's also Apple's OpenGL support, which is lackluster at best. The games that run on OS X do indeed run, but not nearly to the level of their Windows counterparts. Halo is a terrific example. The Windows port will run great, even on a 128 MB card. Not so much the universal binary version for the Mac.

 

It doesn't work like that.
A 128mb 8600GT DDR3 will match (or come very very close to) the performance of the 256mb DDR3 model up to a point where it runs out of video memory and the performance drastically drops away. So if you stay under this point, the 128mb DDR3 8600GT will still be significantly quicker than the 256mb DDR2 card.