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Can I play Starcraft 2 on the new macbook

P

paynay

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 18, 2010
8
0
I am in the market for a new lap top. My main uses for this laptop will be for school/college, and playing Starcraft 2. I am very interested in the new macbook that just came out today. But is it enough to handle starcraft 2 when it comes out?

I am not familiar with macs at all, it will be my first mac computer, so I am unsure how the processor, ram, and video will handle. Any help is appreciated. Thanks guys.
 
With a mac book pro I have to say yes hands down because of the 256mb minimum on dedicated vram.

The latest macbooks seem to have the heft to play the game at medium settings at least. however I don't say that with much confidence because the ram is shared rather than dedicated which all but says the 256mb number is made up.

Your best bet for gaming is to go with the mac book pro. SC2 doesn't look bad on low settings, but I wouldn't expect a MacBook (standard) to play it with anything cranked.

That being said my roomte has an older Nvidia card in his windows laptop (which is a complete peace of crap) and he can deal with the gpu / cpu lag and do some decent dammage. (however his gpu is not a 320m which should be able to compensate for ram issues)

At the very least you will be able to play without lag but it might not look as nice as it will on my mac pro
 
Running it now on a 13" Macbook Pro (not the new one). My graphics are worse than the new Macbook. Works fine with all settings on low, so you should be ok. Getting the 15", as other have said, will ensure that your performance is much better.
 
Thanks for the replies and feedback everyone. I think I will have to stick with the the 13 inch macbook however since I will be carrying it in my backpack everyday on a motorcycle, I don't want to have a heavy load.
 
paynay said:
Thanks for the replies and feedback everyone. I think I will have to stick with the the 13 inch macbook however since I will be carrying it in my backpack everyday on a motorcycle, I don't want to have a heavy load.
Click to expand...

I've carried my 15" PowerBook in my backpack along with a few textbooks while on a normal bicycle and it's not bad at all...
 
You can play with medium graphics for sure with the 330m, but it'd also help your cause to boot up and play sc2 in windows, because sc2 performs way better in windows.
 
I'm on board for the MBP. I have a MBP from 2 versions ago and it plays it perfectly fine on Medium with processor intensive things set to high. MB would probably play it but the experience wouldn't be as enjoyable.
 
how well it runs.. and how much enjoyment you get out of it... totally depends on you. Two people can play on the same machine with the same settings and one think its horrid and the other love it... just depends if you get more enjoyment out of higher graphics settings or not. A lot of people who love higher graphics settings like to call things less enjoyable or runs bad if you use lower settings... but they don't understand that not everyone shares their opinion.

the 320m IGP is the fastest IGP ever made.... but its still an IGP. and yes it has 256mb of ram... thas why on a 4gb MBP it'll say system memory is only 3.75gb... the other 0.25gb is the video ram.
 
I think he owns the latest model of the MacBook which came with the Nvidia 320m graphics card which should support this game.

In short i beleave the answer he is looking for is yes
 
ert3 said:
I think he owns the latest model of the MacBook which came with the Nvidia 320m graphics card which should support this game.

In short i beleave the answer he is looking for is yes
Click to expand...

lol yeah I was just hoping it would be able to support it. I have a 3 year old Windows PC that performance wise can handle the game, but video card wise is lacking according from the performance run in yougamer.com. So I am hoping I will be very satisfied with my mac purchase.

Thanks again everybody
 
Would do fine.

Hey im playing the starcraft 2 beta now for 2-3 days. i like the game and i run it on a 3-4 years old 15 inch laptop with a:

2 gig Ram.
I have no idea what my videocard is. something like a Nvidia 7300. it works fine with me on low graphics. but its just the beta i dun know if it will do online in the real game.

Good luck on it
 
iPrevail said:
Hey im playing the starcraft 2 beta now for 2-3 days. i like the game and i run it on a 3-4 years old 15 inch laptop with a:

2 gig Ram.
I have no idea what my videocard is. something like a Nvidia 7300. it works fine with me on low graphics. but its just the beta i dun know if it will do online in the real game.

Good luck on it
Click to expand...

Beta has been down for about a month now....
 
Rithem said:
Beta has been down for about a month now....
Click to expand...

UCLA ftw, what hall you live in? I was class of '08, I miss that place.

to the OP: I have a 320M 13 inch. i used to play RTS fairly competitively so i like my games to perform well. back when beta was up I installed the game on both OSX and windows 7 64 bit through bootcamp.

to be honest, i wouldn't play with anything higher than low settings in OSX. medium starts out OK (30-40 fps) but starts lagging as soon i hit the early-mid game, and sometimes spiked to as low as 10 fps. i pretty much only used the mac client to watch replays for this reason, since i didn't like the game on low settings.

on the other hand, the game runs pretty well on medium settings under bootcamp. starts out around ~50 fps at the beginning and only occassionally dipped below 30 fps during larger battles. that was 1v1 though - still had a little trouble in team games and FFAs.
 
hey guys, do you think if I set everything on high (not very high) it would run nicely @ 1920 x 1200; 2XAA? I have the i5 17" with 512mb video memory, overlocked 330m. If not I probably will skip it because I did not care for the original. To me it just seemed like any RTS but fantasy, which has been done so many times. I just want this one because it looks really beautiful colors and graphics.
 
aznguyen316 said:
beta launcher + AI hacks ftw?
Click to expand...

eh I guess.

brandnew2 said:
UCLA ftw, what hall you live in? I was class of '08, I miss that place.

to the OP: I have a 320M 13 inch. i used to play RTS fairly competitively so i like my games to perform well. back when beta was up I installed the game on both OSX and windows 7 64 bit through bootcamp.

to be honest, i wouldn't play with anything higher than low settings in OSX. medium starts out OK (30-40 fps) but starts lagging as soon i hit the early-mid game, and sometimes spiked to as low as 10 fps. i pretty much only used the mac client to watch replays for this reason, since i didn't like the game on low settings.

on the other hand, the game runs pretty well on medium settings under bootcamp. starts out around ~50 fps at the beginning and only occassionally dipped below 30 fps during larger battles. that was 1v1 though - still had a little trouble in team games and FFAs.
Click to expand...

I live off campus in the Palazzo with my frat buddies. I'm actually supposed to graduate in '11 but I'm staying an extra year. I <3 college

OP: I didn't play on native res (I think. Not really sure since I just reformatted my Bootcamp partition) but most of my settings were on high/very high.
 
Slightly O/T...

Is anyone else seriously peeved that SC2 wont be coming with LAN capabilities and that they have removed chat rooms from Battlenet 2.0?

LAN was how SC really made a splash. And they also removed the Spawn ability to install the game on multiple accounts.

Getting together with a few of your mates to play sc2? Oh, wait, Battlenet 2.0 is down. Well, lets get SC1 out.....
 
Cerebrus' Maw said:
Slightly O/T...

Is anyone else seriously peeved that SC2 wont be coming with LAN capabilities and that they have removed chat rooms from Battlenet 2.0?

LAN was how SC really made a splash. And they also removed the Spawn ability to install the game on multiple accounts.

Getting together with a few of your mates to play sc2? Oh, wait, Battlenet 2.0 is down. Well, lets get SC1 out.....
Click to expand...

I hear chat rooms are coming - and so they should be.

Lack of LAN is very disappointing, the only rationale I can understand is to combat piracy, which I guess I can sort of understand but it does still suck, given among other things we don't yet live in an era where interet connectivity is universally and always available (not to mention as you say requiring bnet to be operational).

Spawn was a great feature of BW and I'm sure it really helped the game get popular - but I can't say I'm surprised they didn't carry it over. It's not like there is anyone left who doesn't know what Starcraft is.

My personal worst feature is lack of cross-realm play. I know they are concerned about pings and all, but honestly, that should be our decision to make, imo. I have friends all around the world, do they seriously want me to buy the game 3 or 4 times? Not to mention the retrograde effects of having the progaming scene artificially divided.

Sigh.
 
I'm going to miss PLAGUUUUUU
I'm going to miss MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE
I'm going to miss WEAVER WEAVER WEAVER
 
aki said:
I hear chat rooms are coming - and so they should be.

Lack of LAN is very disappointing, the only rationale I can understand is to combat piracy, which I guess I can sort of understand but it does still suck, given among other things we don't yet live in an era where interet connectivity is universally and always available (not to mention as you say requiring bnet to be operational).

Spawn was a great feature of BW and I'm sure it really helped the game get popular - but I can't say I'm surprised they didn't carry it over. It's not like there is anyone left who doesn't know what Starcraft is.

My personal worst feature is lack of cross-realm play. I know they are concerned about pings and all, but honestly, that should be our decision to make, imo. I have friends all around the world, do they seriously want me to buy the game 3 or 4 times? Not to mention the retrograde effects of having the progaming scene artificially divided.

Sigh.
Click to expand...

Agreed about spawn. I wasn't surprised it didn't come over, but nonetheless, disappointing.

Man, I forgot about the cross realm restriction. I usually dont condone hacking a system, but I really hope someone can come up with a pirate Battlenet. We use to play this a game a lot when we went to school. Now, over the years as we have gone our separate ways (Im in Australia, originally from Europe) it's going to blow the fact that one of us (apparently) will have to buy a second copy....and people are still reporting that despite this new 'feature' ping is higher then ever (I realize that BN2.0 is still not the final product but....)
 
Cerebrus' Maw said:
Now, over the years as we have gone our separate ways (Im in Australia, originally from Europe) it's going to blow the fact that one of us (apparently) will have to buy a second copy....and people are still reporting that despite this new 'feature' ping is higher then ever (I realize that BN2.0 is still not the final product but....)
Click to expand...

Yeah I have to say I think they sort of messed up on this whole social aspect.

Facebook, seriously, who cares. It's mostly an American fad, probably won't last that long, and even if it does become the next Google or whatever, there are plenty of people who don't really want all their personal info available to Starcraft opponents.

In the meantime, no chat channels (tho they are coming, ok accepted), silly messaging system (no Do Not Disturb settings etc etc) and no cross-realm gaming (accepted, for progaming ping is vital; but for social gaming, which, let's be honest, is the vast vast majority of customers for this game, ping honestly is not that critical)...

Then again maybe they'll come good with bnet 2.0 version 2... :p
 
Did everyone upgrade thier macbooks this year? It used to be any "will it run" thread would mention the 9400m within 3 posts ;)

Those of us with the late 2008 macbooks, anyone played SC2 on the 9400m? I am hoping medium to low is possible.
 
It will run, but it will probably lag so bad that it might as well be unplayable on a Macbook unless you turn all the settings to off/low (basically making it look like a slightly better version of starcraft). If you genuinely want to play and take advantage of the multiplayer aspects, then the Macbook Pro is a significantly better choice.
 
Well I am looking at getting a MBP later this year, but for now the single player will do me just fine.
 
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