How is your Gaming Experience on your Mac?

If you use your Apple Computer for gaming, how is the general experience? Can you play games like Fallout 3 and Crysis? if so how well does it play?

 

Well,if you want to play,then you must install win to be able to play good games...and at win,you get exact same FPS and on any PC with same spec

 

"good" games... depends what you find good.

Don't care for games like Crysis or Fallout 3 from what Ive seen of them, so never tried... but for all the gaming I do, i don't have any problem... pretty rare I use Windows even for Windows games... can either use Crossover/Wine or hacked together with Cider from other games... its just as fun making your own 'port' of a game as it is playing it.

 

CSS & BF2 ran amazingly on my aluminum macbook 13 inch. Settings weren't maxed out but they were a little above standard settings. GMOD too. I haven't tried Steam's Hitman Blood Money yet.

Then there are older games like Soldier of Fortune 2 and Tony Hawk's Underground. Those ran excellent maxed out.

I don't even need to say how Peggle Deluxe ran.

 

I can play CSS maxed out with no AA on my mbp and its very smooth. Your thread has made me curious....I'll download Crysis from Steam this weekend and see what it can manage.

 

what resolution are you using, 1920?

 

yup 1920x1200

 

Call of Duty World at War has been great for me. I play it right under 1280x800 and I get a good 35 fps. I've been very surprised on how strong it really is.

 

I play most source games maxed out at 1440x900 or 1920x1080 on my HDTV, they all play.

left 4 dead runs great on medium-high settings up to 1920x1080.

fallout 3 runs fine on mediumish settings and resolution IIRC.

 

Ya know, I had a chance to play on my bud's 17" MBP (2.93ghz), and installed WoW. Had to download the original, as just like on my original dual core G5 Power Mac Tower 'o Power, Disc 2 was corrupt. I set it to download overnight, and Blizz was kind enough to go ahead and auto download/install TBC too, so all I had to do was install Wotlk DVD and let it update.

It plays *really* well under OSX (10.5.7 I believe). I mean, shockingly well. Details to medium, draw distance to max, native res (1920x1200), and it is downright nice.

I'm not sure what OSX is doing right (or Vista wrong), but with the same settings on the 1722 @ 1650x1080, it is much chunkier and less fluid with both having the same GPU (9600GT DDR3) and the 1722 having a T9400 (2.53ghz) vs. the T9800 (2.93ghz) in the MBP.

BUT, man, the MBP can heat up like crazy. I left my Hunter in Dalaran right in front of the bank facing towards Krasus's landing for 30 minutes to really get the system churning. The upper keyboard and bezel above the keyboard (especially to the left), gets wicked hot. Yes, it runs fine and WoW never crashed or slowed down and looked downright purdy on the WUXGA+ LED panel (and the fans made a very pleasant WHOOSHing under load....leave it to Apple to make even exhaust fans sound pleasant while doing their job), but seriously, the heat was toasty. On the 1722, the lower left palm rest heats up under gaming load, but nowhere near on the scale of the MBP. I did notice when using the IGP 9400, the lower left palm rest heated up a smidge (nothing major).

I did some farming (got my Hunter to 450 herby to go along with his 450 mining) for ~60 minutes, flying all over Northrend. Gaming performance was a very pleasant surprise.

+1 for the MBP.

 

Not sure why your other computer with a 9600 is slowing down. My old hp laptop with a ge force go 6150 128mb vram could play TBC 1440x900 about 30 fps medium settings, and that gpu is garbage. I don't think it takes much to run wow. But I don't play wow anymore so I couldn't tell you about WotLK.

Needless to say my macbook with the 9400 can only play old games on about medium. My clevo can pretty much max out any game, so now I play all my games on it. One of my friends has a 2.66ghz mac pro with the 9600 + 512mb, playing crysis gets about 25-30fps at 1280x800, I think like medium. All his other games he says he plays on high and never has problems, so unless your playing newer games the macbook pro is decent.

 

WotlK is much harder on GPUs than TBC or the original ever was, especially key areas like Wintergrasp, Some open areas, Dalaran, Ulduar and parts of Naxx.

TBC and the original especially ran like a champ even on my G5 Dual Processor with a 6800 Mac edition card @ 2560x1600 on a 30" Screen back in '05.

The WotlK engine was greatly enhanced, and it is putting the smackage on a lot of systems. I went SLI (280 x 2) on my desktop in the sig because with a single 280, I was dropping to under 30fps in areas in Northrend. That is with everything to Ultra but shadows to zero. Before that, the 280 and TBC was 60fps everywhere, everything to max.

 

Has nobody else noticed anything strange about this thread? Started by a user who recently asked what a troll is. Who also has in their sig that they recently ordered an alienware computer. Who also gives no reason why they would like this question answered.

I could be wrong but it seems like a troll thread to me. I miss the search options at times like this.

 

I don't think its a troll thread. Airsinner has made quite a few helpful posts here in the Mac forum, and I think he works for Apple as well.

I wouldn't want to be him when Apple finds out about the Alienware though...Steve does have a private team of highly trained ninjas decked out in stylish mock turtleneck ninja outfits.

 

I tried crossover with a few games, but it didnt work out too well. Ended up downloading win7 RC for free and installing it with bootcamp.

It will play any game I through at it. Its not at max settings, but it also is a super tiny laptop.

 

doesn't work by default most of the time... have to do other things to get stuff to work... the main one that works most f the time is just isntalling a real version of DX9 in the bottle... but there are registry tweaks, visual C runtimes and other stuff to tweak things around and fix problems. With gaming if you just try to run the install and play doing nothing else, yeah it usually wont work. Their games database has all types of info people like me keep up with and report back how to get things to work... so usually takes a bit of reading and following specific instructions. Once I get them to work however, i take it to a higher level that isn't exactly part of crossover, and bundle it all up into a .app, making it a port kind of like how Transgaming makes Cider ports... not always running it through Crossover.... but thats a bit more advanced than most people need with just using Crossover.

 

I posted this thread out of personal curiosity mostly. To be honest I really don't know how Mac's fair out in the gaming world when compared to gaming PC's. As I'm sure we all know that a gaming PC's can be very powerful and could eat an Apple computer alive in regards to gaming. However, for multimedia purposes such as streaming movies or film editing and CS4 work a Mac is much more preferable. However I am going sightly off topic, in the end I just wanted to know how Macs handle games.

 

I don't think this is a troll thread either.

 

Crysis did not work with any level of the triple ccc pack. 8-15 fps. Fallout never tried but that would run medium at best on the 8600/9600. I wish apple would come out with a more powerful solution, but it would be pointless to 90% of the market.

 

Sounds like you answered your own question. I said I could be wrong but it did look like a troll thread. My apologies.

 

My gaming experience on my Mac is fantastic. And that basically just involves playing Valve games, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, etc. On an optimized copy of Windows XP. Works like a charm under boot camp.

And for those Hardcore gamers that like Macs:

EVGA has released its first High-End GPU for the Mac Pro, and it is quite a performer.

 

I bought a 17" 2.8 MBP yesterday to replace my VAIO Z for gaming when I'm out of town and general usage. I was worried that the 9600M would struggle at 1920x1200 and am accustomed to gaming on a 280 SLI desktop, but I'm pleasantly surprised with general performance. I played Prototype on default settings today with an average of 30 FPS at native resolution. WoW is also playing well at max settings minus shadows and AA/AF in raids.