WoW / Multitasking performance

[Laes]

Hey there,

Pretty new around these forums - Bought my first Mac last week and I'm still waiting for delivery at my house. I ended up going with an Air 13" "Ultimate".

The Air will just be a secondary PC for me as I have an i7 Windows desktop as my main, I'm mainly going to be using this for iTunes, web browsing, email, movies as well as for playing WoW / other Steam games.

I haven't been able to find many Youtube videos or reviews of the 13" Ultimate when it comes to things like this, I'm basically just trying to get an idea of the framerate I could expect from WoW as well as how it would perform with iTunes running at the same time

If anyone has any idea about this I'd appreciate it, cheers

 

[vaderhater245]

11.6 Ultimate here. Avid Player as well. I've got everything set to low, distance high with itunes and ventrillo in the background. Max res at 1366x768. FPS is capped at 30 to save power. Runs perfectly fine for me. Dailies, 5mans, Arena, 10 player BG's run with no issues. Turning around quickly will drop your frame rate but thats normal with something like this machine. Load times are excellent and the only real pain for me was the starting of an AV before the gates drop. You'll probably be able to squeeze a bit more of settings up with your machine but the 1440x900 res might bring that down to the 11" performance anyway.

 

[Laes]

11.6 Ultimate here. Avid Player as well. I've got everything set to low, distance high with itunes and ventrillo in the background. Max res at 1366x768. FPS is capped at 30 to save power. Runs perfectly fine for me. Dailies, 5mans, Arena, 10 player BG's run with no issues. Turning around quickly will drop your frame rate but thats normal with something like this machine. Load times are excellent and the only real pain for me was the starting of an AV before the gates drop. You'll probably be able to squeeze a bit more of settings up with your machine but the 1440x900 res might bring that down to the 11" performance anyway.

That's pretty much the same as what I'll be running in the background on mine as well, cheers for that

 

[Stingray454]

I got the 11.6" Ultimate (whoever came up with that name?) too. I also have a main desktop computer (iMac 27" i7) that I use to play WoW, but the 11" can handle WoW surprisingly well too.

As the above poster I have set most settings to low, with View Distance set to high/ultra. Water effects and Sunshafts (or whatever it was called) was real performance killers, turn those offs or to minimum. I also noticed that playing in Fullscreen Windowed mode gave a huge fps boost versus running in windowed mode.

Standing in Org during busy times my fps is quite low, 20:ish perhaps. Can go even lower when lots of stuff is happening at once. However, questing, 5-mans, farming herbs/mining/archaeology and so on is no problem at all. I haven't capped my FPS, and I usually see about 50-100 fps when doing those things. I can imagine that raiding is out of the question, and that bg's could be a slight problem since tons of spell effects and movement takes its toll.. But for casual gaming it's perfect. Even though I havne't FPS-capped it the CPU tops out at about 75° Celcius.

As Vaderhater245 said, a 13" should handle it better, but with the higher resolution I'm not sure how big a difference you'll see. But it will be playable for sure

EDIT: As for your question about running apps at the same time, I usually run Firefox 4 with a few tabs and VLC with some TV show, and use any of those two while traveling or waiting. I haven't noticed any decrease in FPS or laggy playback / scrolling with WoW running, so you should be fine.

 

[Alvesang]

The bottleneck for WoW seems to be the 320M graphics chip. I get almost identical results from my MBP and my MBA, meaning the game runs smoothly with water effects at a minimum and sunbeams turned off, everything else is set between medium and good. And I always keep iTunes running in the background. So, even with a 1.4 GHz core2duo processor and 2 GB of RAM it's running fine.