Will a MBA 13" Ultimate run Portal 2?

[n8c]

I recently bought a 13" Ultimate MBA and am wondering whether anyone thinks it will be able to run Portal 2 when it comes out later this month, or whether I should hang onto my Early 2008 15" MBP before selling it just to play the game.

Note that I am not a picky gamer. I just want it to run smoothly at medium (perhaps even low-ish) settings.

System reqs. from Steam are:

OS: MAC OS X 10.6.6 or higher
Processor: Intel Core Duo Processor (2GHz or better)
Memory: 2GB
Hard Disk Space: At least 7.6 GB of Space
Video: ATI Radeon 2400 or higher / NVIDIA 8600M or higher

...so I guess the question is whether the 320M in the Air is considered as good as or higher than the 8600M?

 

[2IS]

It's still based on the Source engine which isn't very intensive at all. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to run the game smoothly, at least under Windows. Not sure how well OSX will run it but it generally does worse in games than Windows.

 

[NZed]

An interesting thread on 320M vs 8600M...

have a read first

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/897409/

 

[wisty]

Resolution may be an issue. The MBA has the same res as a 15" MBP, and a much wimpier video card.

 

[n8c]

I guess I'll run it below native if I have to. Like I said, I just want to make sure I can play the game at all. From reading the 320M v. 8600M threads, it looks like the MBA at least meets the minimum system requirements, right?

 

[Beau10]

An interesting thread on 320M vs 8600M...

have a read first

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/897409/

"Video: ATI Radeon 2400 or higher / NVIDIA 8600M or higher"

Granted for the desktop, but it appears the 2400 is in a lower class.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2161080,00.asp

 

[NZed]

"Video: ATI Radeon 2400 or higher / NVIDIA 8600M or higher"

Granted for the desktop, but it appears the 2400 is in a lower class.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2161080,00.asp

what im trying to say is that from the 8600 GT in the 2008/2007? MBP's to the 320M is not that big of an improvement. But from 9400M from the 2009 MBP its a huge different

 

[Beau10]

what im trying to say is that from the 8600 GT in the 2008/2007? MBP's to the 320M is not that big of an improvement. But from 9400M from the 2009 MBP its a huge different

Oh. The OP in that thread was making the case that the 8600 in the MBP was faster than the 320M, which is what the OP in this thread is asking.

 

[fs454]

Portal 1 runs perfect on my MBA 11" ultimate, at native res on high settings. 2 should be similar. I hope.

 

[Shattentor]

I think it shouldn't be a problem. I run HL2 (Episode 1&2) and Portal 1 on my Macbooks GF 9400m pretty well (though not in the ultra setting) but definitly in the native resolution. The 320m is about 2x faster, so except Valve really pushes the texture resolution with Portal 2 it's gonna run fine, even in your native resolution of 1440x900 (at least in medium settings).

If you don't own any Source games, try installing the HL2 Demo, it should give you a hint on the performance.

 

[johnhalsted]

I think its pretty safe to say that it should run quite nicely on medium settings when running under windows.

I origionally played portal on my old old macbook pro (2.2ghz c2d, x1600 128mb dedicated 2gb of ram ddr2 667) your processor is practically the same, graphics card although shared will most likely be better do to new tech and the fact that its not ATI (lol ati fail) and the ssd will make it really nippy

Also the ram! macbook air ddr3 !!!

However personally i think it will be unplayable under osx, my experiance with the origional portal and other games with the steam engine run terrible.

hope this helps!

P.S i currently have 13" with 4gb of ram and the origional portal still runs badly!

 

[n8c]

Portal 1 runs perfect on my MBA 11" ultimate, at native res on high settings. 2 should be similar. I hope.

Really? I have to put my on a lower resolution setting *and* bump the settings down to medium/low in order to get smooth Portal 1 gameplay on my 13" Ultimate. I got it right after the 10.6.7 update came out, though, so maybe that's why?

 

[NZed]

Oh. The OP in that thread was making the case that the 8600 in the MBP was faster than the 320M, which is what the OP in this thread is asking.

I think some benchmarks says that its just about the same and even better. But i dont know about real user experiences.

 

[Nachos]

I have Portal 1 set om high and native res. It runs perfectly. No problems at all.

 

[n8c]

I have Portal 1 set om high and native res. It runs perfectly. No problems at all.

Nachos, are you running 10.6.7?

 

[Nachos]

Nachos, are you running 10.6.7?

Yes i am.

 

[n8c]

Yes i am.

Yeah, I finally had enough, and can confirm that the performance hit was dispensed with by reverting back to 10.6.5. I can now play Portal 1 on high settings at native res. (Thank goodness it's not hardware-related--I just recently bought my MBA and combo updated immediately to 10.6.7!)

I am installing the incremental updates to 10.6.7, and expect (based on the posts in the 10.6.7 gaming performance thread) that to prevent the hit I was seeing before.