Will a MBP perform well for gaming?

Hello! I might purchase the 2.4 Ghz, 15.4" MBP soon but I had a couple concerns...

I've read about some MacBook Pros freezing and performing badly while playing games using boot camp and windows. Is this a common problem? Is it likely that this problem is going to be resolved through video card driver updates in the future? The incidents I read about were under boot camp 1.3 and not 1.4 though...

Also, how does the MBP perform with intensive games in a windows (under boot camp) environment? When I mean intensive, I mean GPU daunting games like Oblivion and Supreme Commander.

Sorry if this thread is redundant, but I've searched through these forums for a definite answer and I can't seem to find one. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

The 2.4 comes with a 8600M GT Nvidia Card (256MB) DDR3. It should do fine for most games. Os X will be your weak point for games.

 

The hardware can obviously handle it, as its one of the most powerful 15 inch notebooks out there. As far as games glitching under bootcamp...thats a great question...can anybody answer this?

 

First off, my configuration:

Apple MacBook Pro
15.4" LED back-lit WXGA+ glossy display
Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz, 4MB Cache, 800MHz FSB)
2GB Dual-Channel PC-5300 (667Mhz)
Fujitsu 160GB 5400RPM Hard Disk w/PMR technology
NVidia GeForce 8600m GT 256MB GDDR3 VRAM

Boot Camp 1.4 Beta
Windows XP Professional SP2

The machine performs beautifully in XP Pro though there are occasional slow downs. It actually runs more reliable than my DELL XPS 410.

Here's a run down of the games I play, at what settings, a long with any errors I've run into. All games are played with 4x Anti Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering.

DiRT - 1440x900x32 - Max Options - 6fps
DiRT - 1440x900x32 - Low Options - 22fps
Driver Parallel Lines - 1440x900x32 - Max Options - 30fps - Lags for about a half second when loading other sections of the city, which is annoying.
http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/9055/driverparallellines2007ww6.jpg
Need For Speed Most Wanted - 1024x768x32 - Max Options - 40fps
Need For Speed Carbon - 1024x768x32 - Max Options - 30fps - Tends to crash after awhile

I play a lot more games but can't remember their FPS. Basically every game played well except DiRT. The GPU usually idles at 60C and quickly reaches 75C while gaming. The laptop is EXTREMELY hot to the touch especially above the keyboard. I use my machine in an air conditioned room (68F-72F) with a ceiling fan above it on high, so my machine is well ventilated.

Hope this helps, I don't play Oblivion of World Of Warcraft. DiRT is a very intensive game, though.

 

if you don't have proper cooling, you could certainly experience a blue screen / glitch / forced shutoff.

with proper cooling, you could overclock and still be very stable.

one thing you can do is first boot into osx, set up the fans with smc fan control, then reboot into windows without turning off the machine. that will keep your fans blasting.

overhead fan / being in a cool environment will also help dramatically. i would recommend something like that if you are going to overclock.

 

So pretty much there are no serious flaws with bootcamp to deter a windows user like me?

 

Nopes. Boot Camp works fine. Just go for it (graphics drivers and touchpad drivers can be better, but that may be fixed in future versions of Boot Camp).

 

I read that Parallels has its drawbacks such as not support directx, and just no getting OpenGL emulation of sorts?

But I thoght Half Life 2 was Directx based yet I have seen screenshots of it running in Parallels. I haven't found very much or good information concerning the technicals on what Parallels does and does not support efficiently and at that end I decided I'd just go with a Windows Laptop instead since it is windows that I will be using at least 90% of the time.

I'd rather wait for or figure out the OSX aspects for my Laptop. And if it works well I might consider running OSX with Parallels on it if I find Parallels up to par.

While we're on this discussion could anyone chime in about any hardware on the macbooks that may not work in Windows if any?

*Update Sam responded while I was typing... so is that it? No other issues? And what kind of issues are you referring to about "graphics drivers" could be better? Just the inherent driver bugs you might get anyways? I did read that version 158.22 seems to be the most stable.

 

Parallels does support DirectX9. Its VMware Fusion that has limited DirectX8 support. So yeah, Parallels will run basically any graphics-intensive application (whether that be games or architectural software).

Right now the touchpad still doesn't support two-finger tapping. That'll probably be fixed in future Boot Camp versions.

 

No other issues? And what kind of issues are you referring to about "graphics drivers" could be better? Just the inherent driver bugs you might get anyways? I did read that version 158.22 seems to be the most stable.

Also that last part of my first sentence didn't make any sense, I meant to say it just has OpenGL emulation from what I had read.

I must have fallen into some old outdated information.

Sam, you seem very up to date on these matters, so what kind of hit in gaming performance are people reporting with Parallels? Also do the applications in Parallels take advantage of one CPU or both?

 

I wouldn't game in Parallels, the system resources just to run Parallels already takes away a lot of resources from gaming.

Parallels doesn't offer multi-core support for running Windows, so nopes. VMware Fusion, another virtualization application, does offer multi-core support though.

 

Parallels offers DirectX9 support - but not full support, yet.

And I think what he meant by graphics driver issue is that it is not updated very often compared to the standard Windows version.

 

too bad Virtualizing OSX is against their EULA, no respectable company is even considering it yet. MS has done the same with Vista except for Ultimate, if Apple would do the same I am sure there are plenty of people who would pay $400 to 600 to install or virtualize OSX legitimately.

Only thing I can figure they feel it would make their technical support go up due to all the different hardware. Even though they can simply say there is no support offered for any hardware configurations that is not by Apple.

 

I'm a newbie to mac software. How do I go about setting the SMC Fan Control? What is a good setting? Thanks again! This is very helpful!