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List of games working great on a Macbook pro 13 inch 2.26Ghz, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
- Thread starter Wizardtwist
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the reason why GTA4 runs so bad is because it is terribly optimized. CoD4 runs well if u bump the settings down a bit.
Good stuff! saw a youtube video of a dude playing it on a macbook pro 13" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F0FT95zOj0) so may pick up on that. HOWEVER i dont know whether he's playing it on the base macbook pro 13" model (same one ive got)..so rather be wise and avoid making hasty decisions. Do u know a good site where i could dwnload the demo by any chance?
I wish I was lying.
If could have something to do with my fans though. They remained at 2k RPM.
that's very very interesting indeed, if you could detail your set up, it'd be nice to know?
are you running it on bootcamp? (probably...) WinxP? Win 7?
Or are you doing it by cross-overs?
I've been delaying my purchase of DA:O because I don't want to fork out $90AUD and then have it go, "hah no game for you!"
But if the white macbook can run it...then I think the MBA shouldn't struggle too hard...
I got low FPS in Mass Effect when running on max resolution (1280x800) but it increases a bit on 1024x768.
I'm running a Unibody Aluminium MacBook and below are the games that I think works fine on Boot Camp.
Call of Duty 4 - 1024x768 works fine, FPS drops when HDR kicks in.
Mass Effect - Play on 1024x768
Left 4 Dead 2 Demo - Works OK, if you can live with the stutters (game problem not computer)
Counter Strike: Source - Runs VERY well on max settings
Portal - Very good.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 - Best game running on my laptop.
Halo 1 PC - Runs it very very very good.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X - Works good.
That's about all the games I have lmao.
Thanks, mine has a slightly slower processor but others are the same. I'm getting Mirror's Edge.
I'm running a Unibody Aluminium MacBook and below are the games that I think works fine on Boot Camp.
Call of Duty 4 - 1024x768 works fine, FPS drops when HDR kicks in.
Mass Effect - Play on 1024x768
Left 4 Dead 2 Demo - Works OK, if you can live with the stutters (game problem not computer)
Counter Strike: Source - Runs VERY well on max settings
Portal - Very good.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 - Best game running on my laptop.
Halo 1 PC - Runs it very very very good.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X - Works good.
That's about all the games I have lmao.
Thanks, mine has a slightly slower processor but others are the same. I'm getting Mirror's Edge.
PC:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chornobyl - plays fine on high res. (1024*768 or 1280*800, i dont remember) and med-high settings
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Pretty much the same as SoC
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat - Same settings, as SoC but a bit lower fps
Cossacks: European Wars - Would be surprised if the game didn't run on max
Cossacks II - High settings plays fine
Source games - All work great on max settings
GTA Vice City - Works well on max settings, no surprise there
GTA IV - Bad, maybe cos its installed on my external hd.
UT3 - As others have posted
Rome: Total War - Plays fine on high settings
Prototype - On low res. it works fine
Mac:
Call of Duty 4 - 1280*800 with textures on medium-high, and eyerythings
else low, gets me 20+ fps
CivIV + Warlords - Works fine, dont remember settings, but I dont think it matter in a game like that
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Works fine on [blank] (unfortunately I dont remember settings)
Diablo II - Slowdowns happen for some reason, and mac heats up
Sims 3 - Fine
C&C: Red Alert 3 - Works fine on high res. adn low settings
Spore - works fine
Battlefield 2142 - Dont get this game, online it is **** due to ****** porting by EA
CoD 2 - based on the demo, just fine
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chornobyl - plays fine on high res. (1024*768 or 1280*800, i dont remember) and med-high settings
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Pretty much the same as SoC
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat - Same settings, as SoC but a bit lower fps
Cossacks: European Wars - Would be surprised if the game didn't run on max
Cossacks II - High settings plays fine
Source games - All work great on max settings
GTA Vice City - Works well on max settings, no surprise there
GTA IV - Bad, maybe cos its installed on my external hd.
UT3 - As others have posted
Rome: Total War - Plays fine on high settings
Prototype - On low res. it works fine
Mac:
Call of Duty 4 - 1280*800 with textures on medium-high, and eyerythings
else low, gets me 20+ fps
CivIV + Warlords - Works fine, dont remember settings, but I dont think it matter in a game like that
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Works fine on [blank] (unfortunately I dont remember settings)
Diablo II - Slowdowns happen for some reason, and mac heats up
Sims 3 - Fine
C&C: Red Alert 3 - Works fine on high res. adn low settings
Spore - works fine
Battlefield 2142 - Dont get this game, online it is **** due to ****** porting by EA
CoD 2 - based on the demo, just fine
All tested in Native resolution, if possible for the game. 9400M on native Macbook pro 2GB memory. Note that some of the games not running at full settings can be bumped up more once 4GB is in the system, given you usually get a performance increase by doing so.
Mac Software:
World of Warcraft. (Compared to the X3100, this screams with relatively high settings all around, native resolution. Ok, it's no 60fps, but it'll run smoothly in even busy areas. A little bit of screen tearing when spinning the camera around, but nothing too much)
Sims 3 (Also an improvement over the X3100 because it runs just as well, but with high graphic options. Let these default and push to Native Resolution. Looks great with what they give you.)
Spore (I think it still needs to be tweaked to medium settings in order to perform well enough when dealing into and past the Creature stage).
On Bootcamp:
Guild Wars and expansions, native resolution, high details, runs pretty much perfectly for its game type. Good performance there.
All Telltale games. Runs great at native resolution. However, you want Wallace and Grommit to stay at the defaults they give you when you start the game. Pushing it up to high drops the frame rate lower than full speed and you don't want that for those games. This has an action part or two, and you don't want any slowdown there. Fortunately, pushing the graphics higher does very little to make it look better, and it's not worth the slowdown. It looks perfectly like a Wallace and Grommit episode at defaults.
Pretty much any of those free-to-play MMOs and Online RPGs you see out there. Whether it's an action-based one, or a more time-based one, they all play great. They usually don't have the hardware requirements like the ones done by the big companies.
Trine. Install it in your Bootcamp windows and let it go. Great graphics, quick gameplay, runs perfect. One exception, though. The way they programmed the Right mouse button, in that game, seems to ignore the bootcamp settings for the trackpad. Best to play the game with any connected or wireless mouse.
Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst over the well-supported Schtack private servers. (While the X3100 intel had some severe slowdown issues in parts of that game (mines, etc), the 9400M plays the game perfectly throughout the whole experience). Plays best with a USB game controller like the wired 360 pad.
Civilization 4. Install and have fun. Also runs pretty good without having to turn stuff down on the 9400M. Works where the X3100 struggles.
Mac Software:
World of Warcraft. (Compared to the X3100, this screams with relatively high settings all around, native resolution. Ok, it's no 60fps, but it'll run smoothly in even busy areas. A little bit of screen tearing when spinning the camera around, but nothing too much)
Sims 3 (Also an improvement over the X3100 because it runs just as well, but with high graphic options. Let these default and push to Native Resolution. Looks great with what they give you.)
Spore (I think it still needs to be tweaked to medium settings in order to perform well enough when dealing into and past the Creature stage).
On Bootcamp:
Guild Wars and expansions, native resolution, high details, runs pretty much perfectly for its game type. Good performance there.
All Telltale games. Runs great at native resolution. However, you want Wallace and Grommit to stay at the defaults they give you when you start the game. Pushing it up to high drops the frame rate lower than full speed and you don't want that for those games. This has an action part or two, and you don't want any slowdown there. Fortunately, pushing the graphics higher does very little to make it look better, and it's not worth the slowdown. It looks perfectly like a Wallace and Grommit episode at defaults.
Pretty much any of those free-to-play MMOs and Online RPGs you see out there. Whether it's an action-based one, or a more time-based one, they all play great. They usually don't have the hardware requirements like the ones done by the big companies.
Trine. Install it in your Bootcamp windows and let it go. Great graphics, quick gameplay, runs perfect. One exception, though. The way they programmed the Right mouse button, in that game, seems to ignore the bootcamp settings for the trackpad. Best to play the game with any connected or wireless mouse.
Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst over the well-supported Schtack private servers. (While the X3100 intel had some severe slowdown issues in parts of that game (mines, etc), the 9400M plays the game perfectly throughout the whole experience). Plays best with a USB game controller like the wired 360 pad.
Civilization 4. Install and have fun. Also runs pretty good without having to turn stuff down on the 9400M. Works where the X3100 struggles.
Here's another addition to the bootcamp games on a MBPro 13 inch 2.26ghz Ge Force 9400M and 2GB memory.
Dragon Age Origins:
Runs perfectly playable and plenty smooth with default settings. The defaults for Dragon Age will be:
800x600 resolution, No AA, Max High Texture Detail, and Low graphic detail settings. However, I would advise, for continual great performance to keep all the settings with the exception of the graphic detail. The default setting underestimates the 9400M a bit. Bump it up to Medium for hardly any difference to your speed, but with much of the graphical bells and whistles added back in. That is, on Medium, a lot of the special screen effects (character clothing/equipment details) and distortions come to life, which are turned off at Low. It's kind of the best of both worlds, if keeping the frame-rate up is your concern. That'll also keep the character animation, movement, and lip-sync right on time with the vocals during realtime cut-scenes (of which there are many) and behave rather smoothly. You'll be able to zoom in and out very well, and smoothly spin the camera and run, even in tactical view mode.
It's no 1280x800 that people try to push all games to use, but considering the kind of graphics they are using here, 800x600 looks almost like the game was still written for that resolution. Still, it's rather impressive to see a game released within this month run so well on the 9400M. Seems perfectly playable, with those settings.
Dragon Age Origins:
Runs perfectly playable and plenty smooth with default settings. The defaults for Dragon Age will be:
800x600 resolution, No AA, Max High Texture Detail, and Low graphic detail settings. However, I would advise, for continual great performance to keep all the settings with the exception of the graphic detail. The default setting underestimates the 9400M a bit. Bump it up to Medium for hardly any difference to your speed, but with much of the graphical bells and whistles added back in. That is, on Medium, a lot of the special screen effects (character clothing/equipment details) and distortions come to life, which are turned off at Low. It's kind of the best of both worlds, if keeping the frame-rate up is your concern. That'll also keep the character animation, movement, and lip-sync right on time with the vocals during realtime cut-scenes (of which there are many) and behave rather smoothly. You'll be able to zoom in and out very well, and smoothly spin the camera and run, even in tactical view mode.
It's no 1280x800 that people try to push all games to use, but considering the kind of graphics they are using here, 800x600 looks almost like the game was still written for that resolution. Still, it's rather impressive to see a game released within this month run so well on the 9400M. Seems perfectly playable, with those settings.
Play around with the settings, it works seamlessly. I have a first generation unibody macbook (2gigs ram), and I sometimes used to play Empire Total War hooked up to the 24" LED monitor at full resolution (with most of the settings on low, models on medium, grass & shadows off.) and it never slowed down either & looked good at such a high resoulution. CA made the game really scalable, so even old machines could play it.
So I would say go for it, it will run & look fine.
I was playing it on Windows XP, using Bootcamp by the way. I also downloaded some modified drivers for the unibody macbook. Can't remember where I got them from, because I took everything off when I bought a desktop PC for gaming a while ago.
Interesting, thanks!
I was reading that it runs ok on native Res with all settings at medium, will try both when I grab it off Steam.
Comparing
hey ppl, i was wandering which gameplay would be better if u were to play some game ( for example, gta on mac os and gta on window xp ) which will give a better gameplay experience?
i'm currently a mac 13", 2.4 Ghz , 4GM ram with NVIDIA 9400M
running window xp on boot camp.
another thing will window 7 give a better performance compare to window xp on boot camp? am wandering can the spec meet the requirement.
hey ppl, i was wandering which gameplay would be better if u were to play some game ( for example, gta on mac os and gta on window xp ) which will give a better gameplay experience?
i'm currently a mac 13", 2.4 Ghz , 4GM ram with NVIDIA 9400M
running window xp on boot camp.
another thing will window 7 give a better performance compare to window xp on boot camp? am wandering can the spec meet the requirement.
The 4 gigs of ram should do very well to improve your performance further. Not that it'll be fully utilized in older Windows OS versions, but it helps in the idea of having more free ram for your graphic card access. Likely, one of the things that help out the 9400M performance is that the memory it has access to is also fast DDR3 ram, which used to be the big advantage of older dedicated video cards. You know. PCs using DDR2 ram, but the card itself had DDR3.
I can't speak much for Windows 7, but I've normally stuck with XP, since it's pretty low on resource use in comparison to Vista. I may go W7 in the future, though. Especially once I know drivers work well enough and whether I can take better advantage of 4GB or better ram, with it. Some games, in which I know had dedicated development for Mac, I'll just get the Mac version. Partly because the OS itself is much more resource-saving, and thus you can play the Mac software, under battery power, for much longer.
However, there is a number of games for which they seem to play better with the Direct X libraries than anything else. (Civilization IV, for one) I would suppose it is probably judged on a game-by-game basis. But I usually go with the rule of thumb. If the company itself makes a PC and Mac version together, I'd say the Mac version should perform quite well and on a more efficient system. If the company generally doesn't do Mac software, and some other company comes to port it, perhaps the coding would not be so well Mac OS optimized and run better with Direct X in Windows.
I can't speak much for Windows 7, but I've normally stuck with XP, since it's pretty low on resource use in comparison to Vista. I may go W7 in the future, though. Especially once I know drivers work well enough and whether I can take better advantage of 4GB or better ram, with it. Some games, in which I know had dedicated development for Mac, I'll just get the Mac version. Partly because the OS itself is much more resource-saving, and thus you can play the Mac software, under battery power, for much longer.
However, there is a number of games for which they seem to play better with the Direct X libraries than anything else. (Civilization IV, for one) I would suppose it is probably judged on a game-by-game basis. But I usually go with the rule of thumb. If the company itself makes a PC and Mac version together, I'd say the Mac version should perform quite well and on a more efficient system. If the company generally doesn't do Mac software, and some other company comes to port it, perhaps the coding would not be so well Mac OS optimized and run better with Direct X in Windows.
fallout 3, bastman: arkham asylum, bioshock and borderlands all work quite well on lower settings (at native resolution). Mass effect works reasonably well on medium settings and games like deus ex and half life obviously work really well on full settings.
really need a solid reliable answer to this one.....
before you redirect me...... please read below...
I got the new unibody WHITE macbook for Christmas.... almost the same specs as this macbook pro...
has the 9400M graphis card....
I have one question....i ONLY PLAY left 4 dead (the original version)
can this new macbook handle this on MAX SPECS or close to it?
Thanks in advance for your help......
before you redirect me...... please read below...
I got the new unibody WHITE macbook for Christmas.... almost the same specs as this macbook pro...
has the 9400M graphis card....
I have one question....i ONLY PLAY left 4 dead (the original version)
can this new macbook handle this on MAX SPECS or close to it?
Thanks in advance for your help......