MacBook Pro 15in Video Card questions.

[Samuriajackon]

Can anyone point me to a good thread or webpage detailing how well the 15in 9600 Video cards will run games on a MacBook Pro running Xp SP2 or 3? I wanna buy a MacBook Pro but i'm only going from the 13in MB to 15in for the graphics card so i can play games like...

Spore(Yes I know they make it for Mac)
Company of Heros'
Age of Empires 3(again something i could get Mac side)
GuildWars

If I've erroneously posted this please let me know which area to post this in. Thanks...

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

http://tinyurl.com/bkgove

 

[Samuriajackon]

Thanks I've actually seen that article before. Does anyone have experience running games on the Lowest price MBP? I really trust first hand experience more then anything.

 

[Markov]

I bet that made you feel real welcome... haha. Anyway, I have the nVidia 8600m GT with the older version of macbook pro, and it runs games very well. The newest games I run on it are as follows: Half Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Grand Theft Auto 4 (which runs like Sh** on everything).

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Thanks I've actually seen that article before. Does anyone have experience running games on the Lowest price MBP? I really trust first hand experience more then anything.

It's better than the 8800 series for sure. Don't worry about the extra 256MB VRAM in the 2.53GHz MBP. It doesn't really make much of a huge difference in games, it shows its true colors in 3D modeling, rendering, photoshop, stuff like that. Maybe Final Cut. Games won't use that much VRAM. I've seen my friend bust out Crysis on that thing. Not on high settings, but its very playable.

 

[Samuriajackon]

Crysis is like New York City, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Thanks for info.

 

[Darth.Titan]

From earlier today.

 

[giobox]

It's better than the 8800 series for sure.

No it isn't. Bear in mind recently with Nvidia chips a higher model number often doesn't translate to higher performance, given their recent chipset renaming shenanigans.

The 9600M is faster than the 8600M in the previous MacBook for sure, but an 8800 (which Apple have never put in a laptop, only the iMac and Mac Pro) part will generally destroy a 9600M in performance terms. The 8800 was technically the first Geforce 9 product although not named as such, utilising the G92 chip.

The G94 in the 9600 has half the number of stream processors found in the G92, hence the performance gap. Heck even the higher performance 9600GT desktop part is slower than an 8800GT - See here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-9600-gt,1780-3.html
and here for benchmarks:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-9600-gt,1780-13.html

The desktop 9600GT is 38% less powerful than an 8800GT. Bear in mind the mobile 9600M has even worse performance than a 9600GT. It's a distinctly average part, but that's the price you pay for decent battery life. That said the G92 cards were awesome when they came out, and its no surprise they still turn in good numbers in the latest games.