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Macbook Pro, gaming, and VRAM limit under Bootcamp

K

KungFucious

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 21, 2017
1
0
I just bought Star Wars Battlefront 2 and am trying to run it on my Macbook Pro under Bootcamp with Windows 10. My laptop is the most recent, non-touchbar version, bought earlier this year, 16GB RAM, Core i7, 2.2Ghz chip, with the Iris Pro 5200 integrated Intel graphics card.

The game crashes when I run it, and EA says the game should be able to run, just talk to Intel about the video driver. So I did, but Intel says the driver only allocates 112MB of VRAM to the graphics processor (out of the onboard 1.5GB!). The game requires 512MB of video RAM to run... Now Intel is passing the buck to Apple, who I know won't help me on this since it is being run under Bootcamp.

Any advice on how I might be able to get this game running on my machine?

Thanks!
 
Huntn

Huntn

macrumors Penryn
May 5, 2008
24,019
27,100
The Misty Mountains
Last edited:
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G

geromi912

Cancelled
Mar 19, 2018
209
248
KungFucious said:
I just bought Star Wars Battlefront 2 and am trying to run it on my Macbook Pro under Bootcamp with Windows 10. My laptop is the most recent, non-touchbar version, bought earlier this year, 16GB RAM, Core i7, 2.2Ghz chip, with the Iris Pro 5200 integrated Intel graphics card.

The game crashes when I run it, and EA says the game should be able to run, just talk to Intel about the video driver. So I did, but Intel says the driver only allocates 112MB of VRAM to the graphics processor (out of the onboard 1.5GB!). The game requires 512MB of video RAM to run... Now Intel is passing the buck to Apple, who I know won't help me on this since it is being run under Bootcamp.

Any advice on how I might be able to get this game running on my machine?

Thanks!
Click to expand...
Are you seriously trying to run Star Wars Battlefront 2 on something without a discrete graphics? You're SERIOUSLY below the system requirement anyway lol
 
M

matt3526

macrumors regular
Mar 7, 2011
201
298
Yeah it's not going to run unfortunately. People seem to think that an integrated graphics card with shared memory is no different that a discrete graphics card with on board memory. Graphics cards have to continually have to read from and write to ram. With integrated, this has to go through the cpu, so the card sends an instruction to the cpu to write to ram, and so the cpu does it, then sends the memory location back to the graphics card. Then, when it wants to read information in ram, it has to ask the cpu for it, then the cpu reads it and sends it back to the graphics card. This is a seriously time consuming process, which is why discrete cards have their own onboard ram, you need to get at this information quickly, and an integrated card can't do that. So whilst integrated cards can have a lot of shared ram, it's going to lag you like crazy and for anything where you need quick access (like intensive video games) it's not going to be up to task.

Next time, get a machine with a discrete graphics chip. In the mean time the best thing you can do is to turn all video game graphics settings down to absolute minimum.
 
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