MBA 11 and Farmville

[marcusmacman99]

Hello Everyone,

I am new Apple owner and new to the forum. I just bought a MBA 11, with standard config for my GF. She plays Farmville a lot and this computer was bought so that she could use it to play, among other things. I loaded Flash on it and asked her to test it in Farmville. After about 5 minutes of playing she handed it back to me and said she was going back to her PC. I was watching it and Farmville was taking forever to do anything. I don't think it was the network since no one else was on the network and her PC was working fine on the same network.

I then downloaded Firefox 4 thinking that Safari might be an issue. But, I am also thinking I need to bump up the ram to 4 instead of 2.

Anyone else run into this? How was it solved, or do I need to return the MBA and look at getting something more powerful?

Thanks,
Mark

 

[TheMacBookPro]

Make sure Flash is fully updated, and try other browsers like Chrome and Safari.

 

[Twe Foju]

Hello Everyone,

I am new Apple owner and new to the forum. I just bought a MBA 11, with standard config for my GF. She plays Farmville a lot and this computer was bought so that she could use it to play, among other things. I loaded Flash on it and asked her to test it in Farmville. After about 5 minutes of playing she handed it back to me and said she was going back to her PC. I was watching it and Farmville was taking forever to do anything. I don't think it was the network since no one else was on the network and her PC was working fine on the same network.

I then downloaded Firefox 4 thinking that Safari might be an issue. But, I am also thinking I need to bump up the ram to 4 instead of 2.

Anyone else run into this? How was it solved, or do I need to return the MBA and look at getting something more powerful?

Thanks,
Mark

RAM is not your problem, even 2gb is an overkill to play Farmville

my suggestion is try and update your browser and then the flash

 

[YMark]

My wife plays that nutty game on her 13" MB Pro with 2Gb memory without issues. She uses Firefox 3.6. I don't recall what version of flash she is running.

FF 4.0 has some real issues. There is a confirmed memory leak with FF 4.0. I uninstalled in on my iMac.

 

[marcusmacman99]

Update on the issue:

I downloaded Firefox 4. Running FV on FF 4 seems to improve the response time of FV. However, she is still not happy with the performance of the MBA in comparison to her PC for FV. I did notice when she was playing that FV froze up on 2 occasions. But, I know FV has its own issues and have seen this before when FV is "out of sync".

Bottom line is that I'm going to return the MBA tonight. I'm not sure if going to a PC with a i5 or i7 processor would be better, but it seems the MBA is not a good fit right now.

Mark

 

[Beanoir]

Amazing...

 

[Beau10]

Is this the Twilight Zone?

 

[mwayne85]

Not surprised. My understanding is that Flash is very CPU intensive, which is one instance of showing the true colors of the MBA's 1.4Ghz. The more crap you have on your farm, the more its going to chug. I would go for something with high clock speeds in your case. Flash can chug on a PC with a weak processor as well.

 

[Boston007]

I have you answer

Stop playing Farmville
LOL

 

[marcusmacman99]

After having used the MBA for a few days myself, I really like the ergo's. It's very light, stays cool, and fine for most things I do on the web. However, I get a sense its under powered. Don't take this as a criticism, but I'm coming around to the opinion that the 11" is either an under powered lap top, or an over priced netbook.

We will be looking at the Mac Book or MBPro. Heavier, yes, but will offer better performance at comparable prices.

 

[Beanoir]

or an over priced netbook.

Thats because thats essentially what it is, although most are still in denial about it.

However, I can't believe how much money you are willing to lay out just to get Farmville to work...thats pretty sad.

 

[Twe Foju]

Not surprised. My understanding is that Flash is very CPU intensive, which is one instance of showing the true colors of the MBA's 1.4Ghz. The more crap you have on your farm, the more its going to chug. I would go for something with high clock speeds in your case. Flash can chug on a PC with a weak processor as well.

but...

for this to happen in a laptop that can play games such as COD and all that?

i mean, farmville could be played with a p4 cpu or maybe lower ( hell, even atom chip could play it )

 

[Ridley]

Thats because thats essentially what it is, although most are still in denial about it.

However, I can't believe how much money you are willing to lay out just to get Farmville to work...thats pretty sad.

Sorry it drives me nuts when I see people judge others like that. Who cares if his gf wants to play farm ville!? I for one am interested to hear about things like this not because of what game it is, but because instruction sets are instruction sets for a processor.

All that said, I don't know why the lag would occur. I haven't played the game and don't know how it responds on other hardware or an atom processor for example so can't say 100% what the reason is. If using a computer with a higher clock rate seems to fix it, maybe the problem is with flash. Someone mentioned the MBA plays COD but that is a whole different engine and doesn't relate to this.

 

[Beanoir]

Sorry it drives me nuts when I see people judge others like that. Who cares if his gf wants to play farm ville!? I for one am interested to hear about things like this not because of what game it is, but because instruction sets are instruction sets for a processor.

All that said, I don't know why the lag would occur. I haven't played the game and don't know how it responds on other hardware or an atom processor for example so can't say 100% what the reason is. If using a computer with a higher clock rate seems to fix it, maybe the problem is with flash. Someone mentioned the MBA plays COD but that is a whole different engine and doesn't relate to this.

You're right, apologies to marcusmacman99 for my being kinda rude. You're perfectly entitled to buy whatever you want to play whatever you want on, none of my business.

 

[Catonow]

You're right, apologies to marcusmacman99 for my being kinda rude. You're perfectly entitled to buy whatever you want to play whatever you want on, none of my business.

I've heard of a great system for avoiding judgment of your choices. It's called "not posting them on Internet forums."

 

[Oldandintheway]

Try this first

I had issues with video on my MBA but I followed the instructions in this thread and now it works perfect.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1133968/

 

[SR71]

Are you running Flash 10.2? If not, update to it immediately because it allows the GPU acceleration when using Flash which helps reduce lag and processor load immensely.

This is most likely your issue.

 

[marcusmacman99]

I appreciate the proposed causes and solutions. The input of more experienced and knowledgeable users is why I post on a tech forum like this, so thank you. I'd rather try a few solutions before going through the pain of returning the unit (which I would rather not, but it was her birthday present from me, so...).

I'm going to look at the flash version. I'm not hearing a lot of good things about this Flash. When we unpacked it Monday and I tried You Tube, I had to download Flash to play anything in You Tube. I had assumed it was the latest version of Flash, but maybe not.

Best regards,

 

[SR71]

I appreciate the proposed causes and solutions. The input of more experienced and knowledgeable users is why I post on a tech forum like this, so thank you. I'd rather try a few solutions before going through the pain of returning the unit (which I would rather not, but it was her birthday present from me, so...).

I'm going to look at the flash version. I'm not hearing a lot of good things about this Flash. When we unpacked it Monday and I tried You Tube, I had to download Flash to play anything in You Tube. I had assumed it was the latest version of Flash, but maybe not.

Best regards,

If Flash is not the cause, you might have a lemon. When you do go to return it, try out farmville on one of the 13" MacBook Air's. I'm playing it right now on my 13" MacBook Air and it is running super smooth with no lag.

 

[RealScience]

I occasionally play FrontierVille (another Zynga game) on my 13" Ultimate, and the fans kick in very fast and keep going until the browser window is closed. The game is not very smooth and freezes every once in a while, but since I've never played it on a recent Windows machine I can't say how much of that is the Mac part, and how much is just the fact that it's a Flash-based game. This was the case even on a 15" MacBook Pro (late 2009) for me, so I don't think the MacBook Air is really the issue here. I'm guessing that it's a combination of Flash not being optimized on Mac OS X (Apple and Adobe aren't exactly best friends), and Zynga not being terribly concerned about optimizing their games, especially not for Mac-specific issues.

A potential way to solve the problem (or at least determine whether the issue lies with hardware being underpowered, or software not being optimized for the Mac) would be to install Windows 7 via BootCamp and see how well Flash/FarmVille performs there. I suspect it'll be quite a bit zippier. Although with a 64GB drive (I assume that's what you have since you said "standard" configuration) you won't have a lot of extra room to play with, you could leave a small partition for Mac OS X and have the machine running Windows 7 as the primary OS. I know that for a lot of people that defeats the purpose of buying a Mac, but if FarmVille is important to your girlfriend, this would make the machine more useful to her. And it's still a hell of a sexy piece of hardware.

If running the game in Windows works out better and you decide to go so far as to completely remove Mac OS X to make best use of the small drive, here's an article about running Windows 7 as the only OS on a MacBook Air:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/windows-7-on-the-macbook-air-dont-go-there/14714

The title is misleading--the author not only goes there, he loves it. Also, he spends some time tinkering with different installation procedures, so rather than diving in, read the article all the way through because the method that actually worked is near the end.

Hope you find a way to make the machine work for your girlfriend.

 

[solowmodel]

Unfortunately, Farmville and other Facebook games are fairly flash intensive, leading to increased CPU usage. The processor on the Air is quite weak, which is what I'm suspecting is causing the problem (I also have a base 11").

Upgrading to Flash 10.2 helped a lot with flash heavy websites, but there is no miracle cure

 

[macaddict3]

I think the main problem is with flash b/c you could play Call of Duty 4 which is a fps game on a base model mba but you cant play farmville which is kinda sad.

 

[mwayne85]

but...

for this to happen in a laptop that can play games such as COD and all that?

i mean, farmville could be played with a p4 cpu or maybe lower ( hell, even atom chip could play it )

Games like COD use the GPU more effectively. Flash bogs down the CPU, especially when you have too many flash elements. If you open someone's loaded farm on Farmville, and open Activity Monitor/CPU Usage, you'll see what I mean.

 

[marcusmacman99]

Update

Hello everyone,

The latest chapter of this issue is that we returned the MBA 11. We then went to the local Apple store and she was working Farmville on the MBA 13. It turns out my better half went on her own to the Apple store on Friday and was talking to someone there. So, we went to see what options they could offer.

She test drove the 13. She ran into some of the same delay issues on 13 as she did on the 11. However, the very nice and patient Apple person took a lot of time to explain to her how Flash takes a lot of resources and unless we went to a different model with a much faster processor, we would have issues with Flash on Farmville. She looked at the 13" Mac but didn't like the size or weight. After about 30 minutes and doing a full harvest right there in the store, she decided she liked the smaller and lighter 11. So, this time we bought the high end 11, a bit faster processor, 4G of memory and I bought the training package so one of us can attend a class there at the store and learn much more on how to use the machine and software package more efficiently.

The time the Apple folks took to explain and let her use the machines was the key to her getting more comfortable with the 11. Plus, I bought the best processor version of the 11 which should help a little with it comes to Flash.

All in all the experience at the Apple store was great and we fully expect to move forward with Apple products. She is happy so life is good.

Cheers,