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MBP 15" Runs SC2 WELL NATIVELY

K

Killery96

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 20, 2011
281
0
I made a post about this earlier, and for some of you experienced people this'll be a time-waster, but for blizzard-fans or gamers in general, this is probably the best SC2 demonstration on the new MBP 15" on Youtube as of now, cause it actually shows something other than the mineral line. It shows specs, and settings.

E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W-v3EgTw1U
 
I'm still on the fence about SC2, I really want to get it but just don't have high hopes for my 13" MBP with the Nvidia 320m

I've upgraded my HDD and bought an 8GB kit but wish I had a friend nearby with the game so I could try it out before buying. I just got that feeling that my 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo doesn't have the horsepower to push the game along at a decent pace.

On a side note, I'm awaiting delivery of a new 27" ACD for use with my MacBook, I have a feeling that my cooling fan will never stop spinning at full speed. :confused:
 
Ungibbed said:
I'm still on the fence about SC2, I really want to get it but just don't have high hopes for my 13" MBP with the Nvidia 320m

I've upgraded my HDD and bought an 8GB kit but wish I had a friend nearby with the game so I could try it out before buying. I just got that feeling that my 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo doesn't have the horsepower to push the game along at a decent pace.

On a side note, I'm awaiting delivery of a new 27" ACD for use with my MacBook, I have a feeling that my cooling fan will never stop spinning at full speed. :confused:
Click to expand...

Okay. Natively you should run it well on medium settings. I am on a 2009 MBP with 4 gigs, a 2.26Ghz Duo, and a 9400m 256, with 1280x800. With that hardware, I receive ultra settings minus shaders (on low) and an avg of ~30-35FPS...

E.
 
Killery96 said:
Okay. Natively you should run it well on medium settings. I am on a 2009 MBP with 4 gigs, a 2.26Ghz Duo, and a 9400m 256, with 1280x800. With that hardware, I receive ultra settings minus shaders (on low) and an avg of ~30-35FPS...

E.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip, I will end up picking it up soon. :eek:
 
Ungibbed said:
I'm still on the fence about SC2, I really want to get it but just don't have high hopes for my 13" MBP with the Nvidia 320m

I've upgraded my HDD and bought an 8GB kit but wish I had a friend nearby with the game so I could try it out before buying. I just got that feeling that my 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo doesn't have the horsepower to push the game along at a decent pace.

On a side note, I'm awaiting delivery of a new 27" ACD for use with my MacBook, I have a feeling that my cooling fan will never stop spinning at full speed. :confused:
Click to expand...

I thought Blizzard now have a demo available for download
 
Killery96 said:
Okay. Natively you should run it well on medium settings. I am on a 2009 MBP with 4 gigs, a 2.26Ghz Duo, and a 9400m 256, with 1280x800. With that hardware, I receive ultra settings minus shaders (on low) and an avg of ~30-35FPS...

E.
Click to expand...

You run it on ultra minus shaders on a 9400m???? I run it on low-medium on a macbook air 2.13 with 4 GB and nvidea 320, which is a LOT better than a 9400m, and get the same fps. Are you sure about the specs of that MBP, because that seems almost impossible.
 
QCassidy352 said:
You run it on ultra minus shaders on a 9400m???? I run it on low-medium on a macbook air 2.13 with 4 GB and nvidea 320, which is a LOT better than a 9400m, and get the same fps. Are you sure about the specs of that MBP, because that seems almost impossible.
Click to expand...

If you are running 10.6.7 you may experience a bit worse performance. I am on 10.6.6 and I have exactly those numbers. I play the game alot :)
 
QCassidy352 said:
You run it on ultra minus shaders on a 9400m???? I run it on low-medium on a macbook air 2.13 with 4 GB and nvidea 320, which is a LOT better than a 9400m, and get the same fps. Are you sure about the specs of that MBP, because that seems almost impossible.
Click to expand...

On 2010 MBP I set everything to high, textures on ultra, shaders on medium and reflections off, I get about 40-50 fps unless it gets busy, it will occasionally drop to about 20, but i can life with that. Dunno about the 9400m, i believe it would work, but not under load:confused:
 
Killery96 said:
If you are running 10.6.7 you may experience a bit worse performance. I am on 10.6.6 and I have exactly those numbers. I play the game alot :)
Click to expand...

You're better off playing everything on medium. It will play the same and look better.

SC2 on low shaders looks worse than Warcraft III.
 
Cougarcat said:
You're better off playing everything on medium. It will play the same and look better.

SC2 on low shaders looks worse than Warcraft III.
Click to expand...

Even with everything possible including low-res turned down to the most humble of graphics, medium shaders will give me a max FPS of about 28. Even mineral lines get an average of 18, and I think I might kill my 9400m with even a 3v3 battle. My computer has no trouble handling any other aspect of the game. The processor and RAM is perfect at running the stuff. The GPU, with 256mb of VRAM on a 9400m, is, I suppose, using Apple Nvidia drivers, unable to utilize its shader cores efficiently enough to get solid performance with medium shaders.
 
To MBP 13" owners...

To the Macbook Air user: yes: while your graphics card is superior to mine, My processor, even though it's from two years ago, is still at a higher technical clock speed. This may not determine the genuine quality of the processor, however it's capable of holding more up. I think that ultra settings such as physics and landscape require a powerful processor, and I seem to be handling it well. The different between my "low shaders ultra everything" setup vs "low everything", is around 7-8 FPS average difference. And, as a random tip, native resolutions work better than out-of-ration resolutions or other setups, even if their resolution is higher and encompasses more pixels.

E.
 
QCassidy352 said:
You run it on ultra minus shaders on a 9400m???? I run it on low-medium on a macbook air 2.13 with 4 GB and nvidea 320, which is a LOT better than a 9400m, and get the same fps. Are you sure about the specs of that MBP, because that seems almost impossible.
Click to expand...

I also considered the probability that you have shaders set to 'medium'. I have mine on low. Shaders tax the GPU a lot and demand a significant clock speed/power of the graphics card to drive high settings. The difference between low and medium graphics is astounding.

E.
 
Yikes

I also have the 9400m, 4 gigs of ram, 2.26 GHz processor and I recently just lowered just about all my settings to low (including shaders), in response to the Performance Guide for Macs on the SC2 forums. Of course, with this I've been getting like 70 fps in 1v1s. It looks pretty bad though, so perhaps I should play with the settings some more. Of course, I've been tweaking them since beta for God's sake.

Ultra with low shaders?? That may be worth trying.
 
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