World of Warcraft on Air

[thsalvo]

WoW on 1.6 GHz model with HD

I tested WoW a little bit this morning after buying my Air yesterday.

The first run seemed worse than my original Core Duo MacBook 2GHz with the GMA950. I lowered all of the settings except the 1280x800 resolution, and I was getting 8fps to 15fps outdoors.

However, things were very different once I rebooted the computer, and relaunched the game. Some of the lowered settings must not have taken effect immediately, and I may have had something running in the background that was using up a lot of CPU.

After the reboot, I was getting 19-29fps outdoors, even after moving some of the settings back up a little bit. Indoors, I was getting 25-38fps. I think the trick is to have draw distance turned down as much as you can tolerate, since that seems to affect performance more than anything else.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it performs. I wasn't expecting much, and this should be more than adequate for soloing and light group stuff.

**Edit: I think I'm experiencing the same thing as some other Air users. After I've been playing a little while, the framerate drops considerably. Apparently, the CPU either shuts down a core or throttles down the clock speed in order to prevent overheating. I get closer to 8-15fps outdoors when this happens, so it's a pretty significant drop. It's still playable, and I can understand why this happens, but it's still a little disappointing.

 

[purplewarlock]

Thanks for the feedback!

I ordered MBA from Amazon a few days ago.. it has shipped with a scheduled delivery date of Tuesday.

After a few weeks (once I've 100% migrated from MBP to MBA), I'll post a follow-up with my experiences on how it is working out. The framerate drop issue would I think be a showstopper for a hard-core gamer with MBA as their only computer. I don't fall into that situation exactly, though I do spend some time gaming obviously .

Anyone try out a 20-man Raid yet?

 

[koloo]

I play FFXI on my last gen MB with 2 windowers open and settings to be moderate. So for MBA, im sure it will run games fine. But i dun want to bootcamp it since the HD is small.

 

[raremage]

Thanks again for the help. Looks like MBA can run WoW for sure.

I'm on the fence still to switch, though this answers a key question for me. At this point I've decided I definitely want to go MBA, it's a question of when (between now and 3 years).

I have a single computer: a 5 month old 15" MBP 2.4Ghz. At home, I have it hooked to a 20" widescreen Dell about half the time too. I play WoW, have Logic Studio installed though haven't had time to use it in a while (I might downgrade back to Garageband, which works well enough for my purposes though it isn't nearly as powerful). I have some programming stuff installed (MySQL database, requires about 5GB), and Parallels with XP which I use maybe twice a week just for a few minutes to test things in IE for my job.
...At this point, I think the only thing holding me back is the hard disk space. Already for my MBP, I don't have any songs or movies on my local hard disk -- they are on my wireless network and my iPhone. I'm using about 133GB.. ... Btw I went to an Apple Store a couple of days ago and the Apple employee went on a 5-minute tirade about how I would be really a fool if I downgraded my MBP to MBA. It was kind of interesting, he really had a strong opinion that I would be making a colossal mistake. But looking at which applications I use, how much CPU/GPU power they take, etc (and that 90% of them run fine even when I had a Mac Mini), I think I would take only a very minimal hit there, and come out ahead hugely in terms of weight/convenience switching to MBA as my sole computer.

Probably I will switch to MBA pretty soon, just thinking it over for a few more days (and of course I need to go through my disk space usage extremely carefully to be sure this will work..)

Still weighing the pros and cons on this decision.. thanks again for the valuable feedback.

While I love my MBA, based on all of your statements, I think you woul dbe disappointed. The graphics capabilities of the MBA just can't compare to the MBP (I now have both, although my MBP is a first gen, the 2.0 Ghz) and is it really realistic for you to think you're going to want to operate with 50% less drive capacity? You're already 50% higher in USED space than the MBA has available.

Look, the MBA is a great machine, but it is not everything for everyone. In your case it sounds like you need to stick with the MBP, for a while at least (read while=1 or more years)

 

[larryj]

I copied my WoW folder from my iMac to my MacBook Air the other day. I haven't had to time to really play with it, but last night I logged in just to see what it was like.

I turned all of the video options down as far as they would go. It didn't look as bad as I thought it would. In fact, I thought it looked pretty good (maybe my iMac video settings aren't that high).

I was in Winterspring. My 'test' was to leave the inn (Everlook), walk out of town, walk around out in the wilderness a bit, and then walk back to the inn. This took less than a minute.

Average FPS: 25
Lowest FPS: 11.5
Max FPS: 55

I'm a pretty casual WoW player. I never do raids and hardly ever do instances. For the most part, I play in a group of 2 or 4 questing. I don't anticipate needing to play on my MBA, but if I had to, I think it's playable.

 

[anothermacaddic]

Plays much worse than on my 10.4.11 2ghz c2d with similar settings. Distance is much lower, and latency is much higher even with a very good signal. Experiencing disconnects and very high latency as well as low fps. Very similar issues from early generation 10.4 and the blackbook. Im assuming its drivers/firmware as was the case with the BB. Currently deemed unplayable, but i think it has the potential to play better in the future. Battery life is doomed to be shorter. 1.5 hours max playtime unplugged.

 

[CaptainCannabis]

I've been just been playing for 45 min on my 1.8/sdd.

The game runs between 15-23 frames, and I had an average of 19fps.

The fan will go up to 6200rpm, and the CPU temp increase to 70 and gradually drop to 65 celsius.

I've also been watching the activity of the cores. They run all the time, but I experienced three 1-2 seconds shutdowns on one of them, where I had a big lag and the fps went down to 11.

Pic with the specs and frame rate.

Pic showing one of the core shutdowns.

Edit ---

Overall, I think the performance is much better than my old powerbook G4 17" 1.67ghz 1GBram Ati Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB

 

[roykim]

edited

 

[purplewarlock]

My hardware: Macbook Air 1.6/80.

I tried a lot of things and could only get it to play consistently at 5 fps for extended durations for PvP. This is on the lowest graphics settings with all detail turned to off or lowest. For less CPU/GPU intensive areas such as leveling outdoors, I could usually get 8-10 fps.

You get this by issuing this command:

/console maxfps 5

If you don't throttle maxfps, it will run at 8-15 for me typically but then 20 minutes later heat hits 80 C and it throttles to 0.2 fps (not a typo.. I frame per 5 seconds) and often halts the computer.

A cooling pad can help.. that usually gets you an extra 3 fps or so. (eg go from 5 to 8 with the maxfps command and you have stability).

*however*

I recently put in Bootcamp and installed WoW on an external Windows XP USB drive. I also undervolt and slightly underclock using the free Windows RMClock program. When I run WoW under Windows XP Bootcamp, I can get 10 fps without the cooling pad, and with the cooling pad I can get 20 fps outdoors and usually 12-15 fps in PvP consistently, and this is with a few graphics settings turned up a little bit. So it runs awesome in this mode.

This lets me conclude that the hardware (CPU/GPU/cooling) of the Air are easily adequate to play WoW (at least with graphics at low levels) comfortably for extended time periods-- however there is an issue in OS X software that causes video to take up far more CPU/GPU than on Windows even on the identical hardware. The good news is if Apple can figure this out and fix it, a software update doesn't cost any money or require the next generation of Air. The reason I believe this is an issue with OS X, as opposed to Blizzard's WoW software for Mac, is I've read reports of people seeing similiar heat issues even for other videos. I get much, much (2-5x better) performance on Windows XP on the same hardware..

Believe me I look forward to the day when I don't have Bootcamp and Parallels and I'm 100% Mac OS X on Air but that is probably 1-2 years off.

 

[jont1967]

Seems really odd that some are having issues, I played it for about 20 mins on my 1.8 / SSD yesterday, got an average of 20ish FPS with all the settings on low, but it was quite playable for a bit of casual grinding. I'll give it a longer run this week and see how it works out.

 

[yellow]

[Moved to Games forum]

 

[luffytubby]

this is very very strange.

WoWs minimum requirements is like... 800 MHz, 512 MBRam and 64 MB graphics card.


the Air has a freaking dual core!!! I wonder if it just lacks optimization.




How does WoW Run on the new Macbooks with 2,4 processors? do they run significantly better than on airs?


also.. is there a performance difference in wow between HDD and SSD?

 

[ezekielrage_99]

Well it's pretty clearly not a "gaming notebook"! No MacBooks are really meant to be gaming notebooks, anyway, but that certainly doesn't mean people won't play games on them

Well it isn't built as a gamer's notebook but I'm guessing that it runs on my Macbook fairly well so I'm guess you'd get the roughly the same performance out of a MBA.

 

[purplewarlock]

I've read other reports from people with other combinations (1.8/SSD) that have hit the exact same issue as me too.

My roommate has a 1-year old Macbook (lowest-end model, not the black one) and WoW runs great on it. She gets 30 fps with decent graphics settings out of the box, no slowdowns. It is easily playable.

My wife has a 1-year old MBP and gets about 70-90 fps on maximum settings.

Then again some people seem to be getting decent (as in Macbook-like, maybe just a tad bit less) performance on their Air's which is great. So at first I thought maybe I had a bad model (I got one of the first batches). But then when I saw how well it ran under Bootcamp/Windows XP I don't think there isn't necessarily a hardware issue at least in my case.

The issue is clearly related to temperature imo. When you first start the game, it plays really well-- around 25 fps or so. But the temperature starts to rise. It is when heat hits somewhere between 80 C and 90 C, usually after 5-15 minutes for me, that it basically throttles the CPU/GPU to virtually nothing to reduce heat. Again.. under Windows it performs far better-- at least double the performance while using less heat. Thus I think the main issue is operating system software related and possibly a bug. Then again for some people it might be hardware related. Maybe it's a combination. I am tempted to ask Apple if I can get a new one but I use my Air for work and don't know how long that would take (assuming they would let me replace my Air for this reason). That said, since WoW runs well under Bootcamp/Windows XP I'm happy with the current situation.

 

[dpaanlka]

WoWs minimum requirements is like...64 MB graphics card.

The MacBook Air features 0 MB of dedicated graphics card memory. This *may* be part of the problem. Perhaps the users experiencing a strange "slow down" after a while of playing are maxing out the "shared" memory, and thats when virtual memory page swapping starts kicking in.

I don't really know anything about video games though.

 

[luffytubby]

The MacBook Air features 0 MB of dedicated graphics card memory. This *may* be part of the problem. Perhaps the users experiencing a strange "slow down" after a while of playing are maxing out the "shared" memory, and thats when virtual memory page swapping starts kicking in.

I don't really know anything about video games though.

true,m but shared memory means it just takes it from the system ram right? and air has 2 GB of ram, so it should be plenty.

at any rate its insane... and really sad.


PSP has some games that look better than wow, and that is just such a tiny and little machine, and its 3 years old now. and its priced like 200 bucks.

so many people dream of having wow/guild wars/counter-strike on the go...

 

[dizastor]

you won't be raiding on a MBA, but questing from 1-70 should work fine.

I play on a MacBook with an older integrated chip than the MBA and it runs fine.

 

[luffytubby]

how much is driver related?


does wow run better in boot camp on xp/vista than natively?

 

[chaosbunny]

If you get 15-20 fps outdoors questing that will drop to about 5 during raids. At least that's what happens on my powerbook.

 

[jjahshik32]

I dont even want to imagine how LOUD the mba's fan of 6000+ it will be running WoW.

You just dont run Wow on a air.. not made for that kinda stuff..

 

[jjahshik32]

you won't be raiding on a MBA, but questing from 1-70 should work fine.

I play on a MacBook with an older integrated chip than the MBA and it runs fine.

But keep in mind the Air is actually even slower than the 1.83GHZ core duo macbooks, significantly slower.

 

[miniConvert]

Looking forward to trying WoW on my 1.8/SSD Air when it arrives. Just out of curiosity really - I appreciate the tiny dimensions of the thing probably wont be able to deal with all that heat, hell my MBP practically melts my legs off

It's a powerful enough spec, I can only imagine heat being the issue.

 

[cluthz]

It think the reason why people gives so different numbers on performance in WoW is in which part of the game they are.

MY old Powerbook g4 pushed 60 FPS in old world wow (kalimdor/eastern kingdom), in cities i had 25 FPS, in outlands i had 20 FPS and in 25 man raiding i had 4-6 fps.. On some encounters in SSC i had less than 2 FPS, but the computer still manages 60 fps in elwynn forrest..

Can a Macbook Air play WoW decent? yes, unless you plan raiding, because if you are you'll have to raid @ 10 FPS.

Even my macbook pro has problems keeping 20-30 fps in raids, unless i reboot it in windows xp where i get 80-100 fps in raids (with modified drivers)

 

[NorCalLights]

My concern would be heat, as my Macbook used to get quite hot while playing WoW. So, if I had an MBA and wanted to attempt to play WoW I would install something like Temperature Monitor, have it set to display in the menu bar and then run WoW in windowed mode at least until I got a feel for how hot the MBA would get under intensive graphical loads.

My skepticism may be unfounded, but it's best to be safe.

Yes, your skepticism is unfounded. These laptops are designed to dissipate enough heat to keep them running at their highest performance levels forever. That's what engineers do.

They might burn your legs, but they certainly won't hurt themselves.