Macbook Pro Gaming Performance

Hi! I have recently got a 2011 Macbook Pro 13" and so far I am very happy with it. However I have tried using it for some light gaming (Minecraft, Portal 2) and I am getting low fps when compared to what people get on their Macbooks. For example: On Minecraft I can only get up to 50 fps while others get up to 100fps on the same detail. Could this be because I am running Lion? Can you please tell me what fps you get on your Macbooks?

(Please dont reply telling me that a Macbook is not ideal for gaming, I know that)

My MBP:

i5 2.3GHz
4GB DDR3
Intel HD3000
Stock 320GB HDD

Thanks

 

Since I have neither of those 2 games. here is a sum of what I gamed so far on the same setup (although I upgraded to 8gb 1333MHZ RAM, and a 120gb SSD)

Empire at War - All max - min 30 fps max 100 fps (windows)
Europa Universalis - All max - min 60fps max 100+fps (OSX)
Hearts of Iron - All max - min 60fps max 100+fps (OSX)

 

Make sure you are actually comparing the same exact games (whether they have been patched or not) under the same exact OS (again, making sure all of the updates are or are not installed) with the same exact hardware. I can understand seeing such a large difference if you are comparing your 13" MBP to a 15" or 17" who have dedicated GPUs (along with the HD 3000 IGP) but not when comparing against another 13" MBP with all of the same conditions. I don't have those games on my MBP (I am a console gamer) but you could link us to the posts/sites showing those benchmarks for futher comparison.

 

Ok thanks. Did anyone see any fps loss after installing Lion from Snow Leopard?

@Mr MM : Did you see a difference in performance (especially in gaming) when you upgraded to the 8GB Ram?

 

Yes there is a difference, however I wasnt able to get a 1600mhz stick of ram that I intended to get in the first place (the higher the clocks in the HD3000 the higher the fps)

However I dont really recommend to do it. I did because I use my mbp to work, which involves VMs and a series of RAM intensive programs

 

Oh ok So as I will use it for school (programming and some light gaming) I guess I will be better off getting an SSD as a main drive (and still use my HDD instead of Superdrive) right? (Btw...does an SSD help at gaming at all if the game is installed on it?)

 

SSD is only going to help mostly with loading times. Most games don't access files from the HDD all that much in the midst of play, so benefits there are minimal.

 

No, most games don't use the hard drive while running.

The hd 3000 is pretty much a bottom barrel performer, I think maybe your performance expectations are off. Where did you see people running minecraft at 100 frames in OS X 10.6 or 10.7?

 

Yeah you can use a ODD caddy, still waiting for mine to arrive. So you put the SSD in the caddy and the HDD in the main bay

And no the SSD wont speed up any games at all.

Yesterday I was so tired of having so little space on my SSD (its 120gb), basically I had the space to put a single (not large) game on it. So I got the 500gb drive that I had laying around and installed on the things there, it was a joy of space. I did all of this in less than 2hs, started at 5pm, when it was 10:30pm I just gave up, couldnt go back to the slowness that the HDD provided me. And reinserted the SSD.

For programming here are some tips:

Divide the HDD equally (usually a 120gb SSD is more than enough), so 60gb for each OS.

Install office and other productivity programs on OSX (the os boots up way faster and it gives you way more battery life against using it on windows)

Since usually GUI work is involved in programming I do leave CS master edition on OSX as well, since its way smaller than the windows version (and I do web design as well, its more than needed to have that package, although way expensive)

For windows you put the visual studio 2010 in there (I received mine for free, which is a god send since I have the ultimate version, it costs U$ 13.000)

There will be more space left on windows, so when you need to run a VM do it from there, I do recommend using VMware for that. I run a linux VM in there so basically its all filled

BTW try Xcode too, its a great IDE, easy to learn

When the caddy arrives I will finally have the space to put my music collection in there.

 

actually if you manage to overclock a intel gpu, the hd 3000 can reach 1.3ghz core speed (or 1.2, i forgot)

 

Netbeans and Eclipse both work on Mac. But yes, 120/128gb is perfectly adequate for dual booting, not factoring in media files/games. I've got >60 GB of space left after the "essentials", about 70 GB if I delete the sleep file.

Everything on the Windows side seems to be a bit more "costly" in terms of sheer usage though.

I run VM from my HDD.

 

and how would I oc the HD3000?

The problem of running the VM from the HDD its much slower than doing it from the SSD, the usual bottlenecks of a VM is the amount of RAM and how fast the HDD is.

I do use visual studio, because I use the .net framework, and for c# for that matter there isnt a better IDE

 

overclocking the CPU by doing a BCLK overclock, usually pinmodding a PLL to do it.

see nando4's sig for information

 

yeah thats the problem, pinmodding dont work with sandy bridge, nor any form of overclocking unless you have a K type processor.

I found it strange that people are claiming that the 2630qm can be overclocked.

 

I for the life of me don't understand why Apple didn't put in a better GPU into the 13" and baseline 15". They could have put a 6490m into the second tier 13" pro and maybe a 6650 into the baseline 15". That way there would be more differentiation between the air and the pro. I guess people who want a mac still buy them anyways minus the lack of graphics card though.

 

they are getting better on GPUs lately since more gaming has been coming to Macs... but really some of the better GPUs are a total waste for most Mac users that I don't think Apple has cared much.

 

Thanks for all the answers! I dont think that I will be doing any programming with Visual Studio for now so I can leave it on the HDD (I only use it for some incompatible apps) and install Lion and most used apps on SSD.

As for gaming, even though it is not very powerful it is not as bad a people imagine it. I am able to run Starcraft 2 on Texture settings Medium, Low Shaders and everything else on high and get 60-70fps

 

The only thing is a lot of apps like Mathematica and I think Mat Lab and even like video editing/photo editing apps are GPU accelerated. I was just thinking that if you didn't care about stats the 13" Air would be a good choice and if you did you might get a pro.

But I guess they would expect you to get the $2.2K 15" if you really cared about gaming, which probably features one of the best cards seen on a MBP.

 

The main issue is that the 13" MBP is Apple's mainstream notebook. That is the one that many people buy simply because the 15" starts out at a price higher than they want to spend and 13" offers a nice trade off between performance and size (I have textbooks bigger than my 13" MBP). Mainstream audiences do not need more than what the HD 3000 offers. It has hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding so programs can use it for GPU acceleration if they are properly coded.

MATLAB's GPU acceleration is also in the experimental stages for using it as an additional number crunching platform and any further usage of the GPU is all done for graphical interpretations. They are working on using the GPUs of systems as an additional processing platform (similar to having a multi-core machine) but that hasn't been finalized yet and, from my understanding, the people doing it are only currently looking at Nvidia cards which would make all current MBPs null and void anyway.

Honestly, the Intel HD 3000 is fine for everyday usage and then some. It can decode HD video without issues, it can even encode video but programs (I am looking at you Handbrake) need to be updated to support that, it can output to multiple high resolution monitors without taking a hit in performance, and it can even play older games about as well as the Nvidia 320m. That is about all anyone in the mainstream audience needs. People who want higher performance will go with the 15" MBP and people who really, really want to game with go with a different company all together.

 

I have a small question I have seen many people claiming that the new MBA 13 is much faster than the MBP. However I have guessed that this must be due to the SSD as apart from that the MBP specs are much better. So if I upgrade my MBP to SSD (along with HDD in caddy) it will be faster than the Air right? (Just want to be sure that I made the right choice xD)

 

yes ( 10 char )

 

Ty Then I guess the SSD will be the next upgrade