Intel GMA 950 Snow leopard vs Win 7

Now that i have Snow leopard installed on our older 2006 Macbook would it be worth bothering a boot camp partition for the few games it plays? Or at this point with Snow leopard is the 950GMA's performance about the same under OSX as it is Windows? The games to which i refer are...

World of Warcraft
Warcraft 3
Starcraft 2


Anything besides gaming i prefer to do in OSX without a second thought but i wonder even though Snow leopard made a HUGE fps gain over Tiger if a Windows 7 partition would improve it even further? Or enough so to warrant a 100$ OEM DVD purchase.

 

In all honesty, you aren't going to get much of anything out of the GMA 950 under Windows 7 or OS X. It was a GMA solution designed to consume extremely low amounts of power just enough to run an OS and enjoy a 360p Flash video (as a 480p Flash video even has some issues on the GMA 950 especially when paired with a weak processor). I doubt you would be able to play those games at any decent resolution, level of detail, or framerate with either OS X or Windows, it won't really matter.

So no, I would not purchase Windows 7 as it really isn't going to do anything in terms of increasing your (lack of) gaming performance with that Intel IGP.

 

Actually All the games i listed ARE quite playable as it stands under Snow leopard now(There all installed and i play them all)..my only wondering is the improvement W7 would offer.

Also it plays HD netflix quite fine too..i think you underestimate the GMA when overclocked quite a bit. Does it compare to my Pro? Hell no..My vaio? Not a chance. But can it do HD streaming and some gaming? With some technical knowhow Most definitely. My question is for users with actual hands on experience and know for a fact the difference if any between OSX and 7 under this particular GPU.

 

short answer:

assuming you go through the correct process with the driver setup in windows 7, yes.

 

You never mentioned anything about overclocking or making tweaks. Your post came off as if you were talking about OS X and Windows 7 with the standard drivers and running the GMA 950 as-is.

Just in conducting a quick Google search, it appears that there are more custom drivers out there for the GMA 950 under Windows than there are for OS X. So yes, you can get it to run those particular games a little better with Windows.

I am not sure if you are a student or not but Microsoft is selling either the 32-bit or 64-bit upgrade discs to Windows 7 Professional for $30 so long as you have a valid *.edu e-mail address. You can use the upgrade discs to perform a clean install but you may need to do a little trick in order to get the serial number to work at the end. Many university bookstores often have licenses allowing them to sell copies of software as well. For example, the UC bookstore is selling the full install disc of Windows 7 Pro (either 32-bit or 64-bit) for $7 flat. It isn't an "official" copy but it has a valid serial number and works nonetheless. You can always rely on a friend with a valid *.edu e-mail address as well since even $30 is better than spending $100.

 

The program below overclocks Intel GMA video cards quite well. It made CoD 1 playable on a Dell Mini 9. Its free, and works with Windows, OS X, and Linux.

gmabooster