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Your MBA

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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
Hey guys. I just recently ordered a 11" mba ultimate, still waiting for it to be shipped... Anyways, I saw some people played small games on their mba's and wanted to make a thread for all those that play games on their mba.
I was curious to which games can be played, which games you already play, in OSX or Windows, which settings, and how well it ran.

I plan on playing some SC2 and other steam games, I've heard they run great so im very excited. It would be great to see what everyone else's experiences have been with different games on the mba's. Thanks for reading and helpful posts. :cool:
 
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SR71

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2011
1,604
372
Boston, MA
13.3", 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD here. I've played Portal 2 so far at native resolution (1440x900), 2xMSAA, trilinear filtering, and everything on high settings and getting 45+ FPS. :)
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
SR71 said:
13.3", 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD here. I've played Portal 2 so far at native resolution (1440x900), 2xMSAA, trilinear filtering, and everything on high settings and getting 45+ FPS. :)
Click to expand...

That's awesome to hear. My friend showed me Portal 2 and I have never played Portal before. So after seeing him play it I on Steam and bought it and beat it the following day, it was awesome! I'm planning on getting Portal 2 when I get my mba, so glad to hear it ran amazingly.
 
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SR71

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2011
1,604
372
Boston, MA
Poisoned1 said:
That's awesome to hear. My friend showed me Portal 2 and I have never played Portal before. So after seeing him play it I on Steam and bought it and beat it the following day, it was awesome! I'm planning on getting Portal 2 when I get my mba, so glad to hear it ran amazingly.
Click to expand...

Yeah it runs great and I was really surprised. I love this Mac haha.

Just remember, when you get your MBA in the mail, DO NOT UPDATE USING SOFTWARE UPDATE! This will kill your FPS in games. No one knows why, but it does. To get around this, just follow the directions in the link below to avoid having bad FPS.

By the way, you can skip step 1 and go straight to step 2 in the post below because when you get your MBA, it will already be loaded with Mac OS X 10.6.5.

Link: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12361225/
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
Awesome, thank you. You have probably just saved me soooo much time and other peoples' time lol.
 
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SR71

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2011
1,604
372
Boston, MA
Poisoned1 said:
Awesome, thank you. You have probably just saved me soooo much time and other peoples' time lol.
Click to expand...

Lol, sadly, I didn't find that thread until 2 weeks had past since I'd received my MBA. The good part, though, was that I just had to plug in my software reinstall stick that came with the MBA and then just restored back to 10.6.5. None of my programs were erased. Nothing changed other than me downgrading from 10.6.7 to 10.6.5. The reason why I ended up downgrading? When I first downloaded Portal 2 and attempted to play it, I was getting 17 FPS. Awful, if you ask me. So, I did the restore, rebooted, applied the updates one by one like that post that I linked to says, and finally launched Portal 2 and was amazed to see that I was getting 45+ FPS. :)
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
UniPro said:
Been playing Fallout New Vegas via Bootcamp and it runs surprisingly well at Medium settings. Very happy about this. :D
Click to expand...

Wow, and fallout new vegas isnt that old of a game. Has anyone tried BF:BC2 on their air? I play it at low settings anyways on my current laptop but if i could play that on the air that would be amazing.
 
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rookiezzz

macrumors regular
Mar 21, 2011
116
1
WA,USA
cool..

assassin's creed 2 & brotherhood runs well.. :cool:

1280 x 720 res, med settings, via boot camp..
very playable i guess, i don't know how to check the fps anyway :D

MBA 13" 1.86/4g/128g 15/40gb free for win7
 
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iNeko

macrumors regular
May 13, 2007
222
0
England
Portal 2 runs like a champ on high (11" 1.4, 2gb ram, 128gb ssd), the only thing that runs poorly is Dragon Age 2 (cider, ugh), but it's still highly playable on high settings (just some slowdown in big fights), there's no difference in frames between high and low, so I assume it's the processor bottlenecking.

The only game I've had to dial down to medium is Civ V, but I think that's quite processor intensive as well, still runs great.

I can honestly say, this little Mac runs games on par with my late 08 Macbook Pro when it's set to the 512mb 9600gt (15" 2.53, 6gb ram, 500gb 7200rpm hdd), obviously there's a gap in screen res (not a lot between 1366x768 and 1440x900, though, well, 300k pixels, but :rolleyes: ) but the air runs cooler and is under half the weight, no contest, the 320m is a monster.

I don't have Windows on here, just Mac OS, updated through the stepping method as mentioned earlier! :)
 
K

kthielen

macrumors newbie
Mar 10, 2011
4
0
Hl2

I bought the Macbook Air not intending to play any games on it. I installed Steam on a lark one day though, and it noticed that I'd purchased Half Life 2 several years ago (I never actually played far enough to get the crowbar before I abandoned it originally).

So I've been playing that, and the episodes that came later (strangely, Half Life 2 seems to make my machine run hotter than HL2 Ep1-2).

I can run it with all settings turned up to 11, granted that's not very impressive since HL2 is pretty old at this point.
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
Has anyone tried Rift?... I made a new thread just for it hoping some Rift players would respond but no one has replied to my thread to that. Maybe someone will see it here. lol :rolleyes:
 
zap2

zap2

macrumors 604
Mar 8, 2005
7,252
8
Washington D.C
Wouldn't trade my Air for any laptop in the world. 11'' is a perfect size for me, the resolution is great and its the fastest computer I've ever owned(thank you SSD!)

(That said, I plan to grab a desktop for heavy lifting.)
 
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SR71

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2011
1,604
372
Boston, MA
Poisoned1 said:
Has anyone tried Rift?... I made a new thread just for it hoping some Rift players would respond but no one has replied to my thread to that. Maybe someone will see it here. lol :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I'd test it out for you, but I don't have windows on this. :(

Sorry, bro!

Actually, now that I think about it, I might be able to get Windows 7 on this... I'll be right back and will update this post in a little while.
 
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Xgm541

macrumors 65816
May 3, 2011
1,098
818
wow works fine in 5 mans. Did 1 10man and fps was at 60 the whole time. I cannot say anything about 25m but maybe i will try one today.

this is on low settings, view distance on good.
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
On your macbook air,
1. Do you run windows?
2. How much of your memory goes to partitioning for windows?
3. I wanted to actually use win xp if i use bootcamp, any advice of where i can get a copy if i don't end up finding an old disk of it somewhere around my house? And would you suggest xp over win 7. I read that xp takes up less space so that's why i was going to use xp, any comments regarding which windows to use via bootcamp would be helpful.
Thanks for any helpful responses.:)
 
TheMacBookPro

TheMacBookPro

macrumors 68020
May 9, 2008
2,133
3
Gaming on my air is solely on Windows. From the 128GB SSD, I partitioned 50GB for Windows and 70 for OS X. My W7 Ultimate installation is around 12GB so 40GB isn't really enough.

Boot Camp drivers are not available for XP any more. Your only option is 7.

MW2 at Ultra settings and native res runs very smoothly (more than I can say for my 13" i7 Pro). TDU2 at native res and medium settings is also quite smooth.

I only have Portal (1) but can say that it runs at native res and high settings smoothly.

If you read through some other gaming-related threads on this forum, you'll see that some people think that since the Air isn't a dedicated gaming machine you cannot game on it. I suggest you ignore them :)
 
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Poisoned1

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2011
67
1
TheMacBookPro said:
Gaming on my air is solely on Windows. From the 128GB SSD, I partitioned 50GB for Windows and 70 for OS X. My W7 Ultimate installation is around 12GB so 40GB isn't really enough.

Boot Camp drivers are not available for XP any more. Your only option is 7.

MW2 at Ultra settings and native res runs very smoothly (more than I can say for my 13" i7 Pro). TDU2 at native res and medium settings is also quite smooth.

I only have Portal (1) but can say that it runs at native res and high settings smoothly.

If you read through some other gaming-related threads on this forum, you'll see that some people think that since the Air isn't a dedicated gaming machine you cannot game on it. I suggest you ignore them :)
Click to expand...


Okay thanks, I guess i'll have to use win7 then. Also, thanks for your input.
 
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