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    Oh what a difference Snow leopard made in Warcraft..

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by psxsage, May 13, 2011.

  1. psxsage

    psxsage Notebook Evangelist

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    Awhile back i posted a thread about trying to get playable frames on a 2006 White macbook 1.83 ghz Core duo with an intel GMA 950. After doing several upgrades to the Machine...

    512 MB Ram --> 2 GB Ram
    60 GB 5400 RPM HD ---> 320 GB 7200 RPM HD

    The game was still Neigh unplayable using Tiger OSX 10.4 with everything on LOWEST settings and 800X600 i was getting 8-12 FPS outside and 15-18 inside instances....However the last upgrade (which i honestly thought would make the least difference...made the most)

    Tiger ---> Leopard...---> Snow leopard..wow..

    What a dramatic difference Snow leopard made, The machine can now play World of Warcraft at native resolution with everything on lowest settings with a stable 25+ FPS outdoors (30-35 if it's not a really busy area, Although FPS in cities is still crap (10-12) but enough to get in and get out) And instance FPS i actually LIMITED because they were hitting 55-60 FPS and making the fans crank.

    So all and all besides having a much faster responding machine in general World of Warcraft went from UNplayable to Very Playable mostly due to Snow leopard. This 2006 machine still has life!
     
    psxsage, May 13, 2011
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  2. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    sounds good. the memory may have helped a very little bit, the hard drive probably didn't help much at all.

    snow leopard vs. tiger is a huge change. Tiger was originally made for PowerPC and they basically ported it to intel. Leopard was their first ground-up focused attempt at an intel-supporting operating system (large performance difference for intel machines). Snow leopard is intel only, and also had huge performance improvements over leopard.
     
    masterchef341, May 13, 2011
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  3. psxsage

    psxsage Notebook Evangelist

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    I'm sure the memory did make some substantial difference in snow leopard but oddly enough under Tiger the FPS barely budged. All in all i can say i'm quite amazed the difference snow made...i may not even bother boot camp it now. And yeah your right the HD impacts Warcraft performance VERYYY minimally that upgrade was not for WoW's sake.
     
    psxsage, May 13, 2011
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  4. doh123

    doh123 Without ME its just AWESO

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    Right now 10.6 is the best for gaming... mainly the improved drivers. Theres even games that cannot work right in 10.5 or older because of driver problems. Just like Civ5 ported with Wineskin runs almost as good as the Aspyr native port, but due to GPU driver problems just crashes and burns on 10.5...

    after 10.7 comes out, most likely for 6 months or so 10.6 will still be the best for gaming, then eventually 10.7 should end up being the better choice. This is because Apple doesn't keep up with drivers for the older OS versions.
     
    doh123, May 13, 2011
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