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Windows On the mac
- Thread starter BrentonX
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It would work pretty darned well, as I play those games on a MacBook Pro and I'm quite happy with it.
Hi BrentonX
Using BootCamp (which allows you to partition your Mac's hard disk to make room for Windows, and provides you with a set of Windows drivers for your Mac hardware) is the way to go for gaming.
Essentially, you can dual-boot into Windows. Power on the machine, hold the Option key and it'll allow you to choose your Windows XP installation to start up with.
When running XP, the Mac is basically an absolutely standard PC (albeit a very quick one!) Windows will run *exactly* as it would on a regular PC, with the same performance. I dual-boot into XP on my 2GHz MacBook Pro for gaming. It's great to be able to reserve my Windows setup entirely for gaming - tweaked exactly as it needs to be for games and nothing else. I play Battlefield 2142, BF2, Half Life 2, Dawn of War and lots of other games. I can almost always run at high detail levels, although I drop it down a bit for the Battlefield games since the explosions can drag things down a little.
I use an external Firewire hard disk to install all my games to -- so I have a 10GB partition on the internal hard disk for Windows itself, then the 120GB external drive for all the games. Loading times are a tiny bit slower due to the external drive (it's only Firewire-400, not FW-800), but aside from that, performance is great. It'll be 100% compatible with all your Windows-targetted hardware - I use a XBox 360 Controller for Windows as a gamepad, and a Saitek Evo joystick for Flight Simulator X (and flying the aircraft in Battlefield!) Everything works great.
This is little off the topic, but how does Flight Simulator X run on the MBP? I've installed the demo and it seemed a little choppy. I just want to know how it runs before I plop down the $ to get it.
Back on topic: I run Boot Camp regularly to play a few games. I'm a big fan of simulation games and Silent Hunter III runs extremely well (you just have to wear headphones to listen for enemy ships on the hydrophone because the fans on the MBP are so loud, but then headphones make it feel more real anyway). I've seen my friend run Oblivion and HL2 on his 20" iMac with good success.
Not astonishingly well, is the answer! I don't think the engine is optimised in the same way an FPS like Half Life 2 might be. Then again, the emphasis on FSX is on pure detail rather than nice effects. But with some patient tweaking of the endless graphics options, you can get it nicely playable (sim-able?)
Hehe - the fans can get a bit wild during gaming! I also use ATI Tools in Windows to run the ATI x1600's clock speeds up at their rated speeds (470/470) -- the card in a laptop is rather underclocked (down in the 300's) deliberately to preserve battery life (this isn't unique to the MBP -- machines from other companies do this too). Since I'm just running the board at its rated speeds, I can't see any damage being done and I've had none of the odd crashes/freezes you'd see with overclocking.
It's funny that this is the most capable gaming machine I've ever owned... and its a laptop!