Games on the MacBook C2D
 

I've been thinking of picking up a game or three for my MacBook. I'm not a big gamer, so I don't need the latest and greatest in 3D graphics to be satisfied. A little bit of research found some sources claiming that even with the intefrated graphics card, MacBooks can play some older 3D games at acceptable resolution and framerates. For example, Rob Griffiths found that on a MacBook Core Duo (not C2D) w/2 GB RAM, he was able to play Quake 3 at 98 fps at 1024 x 768.

I've found other forums with members playing other 3D games satisfactorily. Unfortunately the user reviews I have found seem to be pre-Core 2 Duo, and usually light on system info, such as RAM and whether they were playing in OS X or XP. (I don't have XP, and honestly have no desire to install it if I can avoid it.)

So, has anyone here had good experiences playing games on their MacBooks? If so, what games? What kind of resolution were you playing at, and were there enough frames per second to be playable and enjoyable?

I'm interested in a golf game, a 3D shooter, and maybe a simulation game or two, and will consider about anything, since I'm not familiar with many/any games. I have 3 GB of memory, so RAM should not be a problem.

I play Call of Duty 2 on my macbook at the default display settings in the game. I am running a C2D @ 2.0 Ghz with 2 Gigs of Ram. Visuals are great, no noticeable lag. -DC

Forgot to mention that I am playing within OS X.

i play on bootcamp, all though unreal is good on osx, but on windows, get gta san andreas, scareface, and other games like that they'll keep you occupied, also the orange box

Thanks. I downloaded the demo, and at 1024 x 768 (the highest COD2 resolution available on my built in screen), with the highest settings available, it was very playable, without noticeable lag.

I might consider installing XP if there is a way to keep it from recognizing the existence of my wired and wireless ethernet, so I can keep it off the internet and only have to worry about securing it locally. There are more games available for Windows, but I don't want to have to deal with Windows security issues again.

If you aren't really stressed about recent releases there is no real reason to get XP on your computer.

Shooter:
No One Lives Forever 2 (Funny game, decent pacing)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (Best Polish, lots of well balanced and fun weapons)
Sauerbraten (Free, super fast paced, good community)
Rainbow Six 3 (Tactics based shooter)

Simulation:
X-Plane (Best Flight Sim on the Market)
F1 2000 (it sounds older than it is, good Racing Sim)
Civilization 4 (Simulates civilization? One of the best Games ever though)
Need For Speed (Very Arcady, but some people like that in a racing game)
Colin McRae Rally (Very realistic off road racing game, lots of cars, lots of tracks. Highly recommend this one).

Golf:
Tiger Woods 2008 (and there is no competition for that one, it's just the best)

And all of those are on Mac, most of them should run on your computer.

Also try browsing around MacGameFiles and Apples own Games Download Page, if our suggestions aren't enough.

I'd really like this one, but it specifically states that the Intel 950 GMA is not supported. I'd like a chance to try it before I buy it to see if I can run it at playable speeds.

Honestly, I'd probably be happy if TW 2005 is playable on my machine.

Well, Parallels desktop is supposed to be working fine for gaming. They seem to have a better 3d support than it has been announced here. A lsit of supported games is included there.
The only game I can play is Football Manager. Fortunately it works fine in Mac OS without Parallels or dual-booting. The only thing you need - more and more RAM. a very good game!

BTW, I heard that the Ornage Box now works in Parallels - this must mean that somehow they have DX 9 support - but it turns to be unofficial

yeah but would it run well, on my imac, i tried playing half life 2 and hl deathmatch in parallels and because parallels limits my memory to 1gb and my video memory is at 64mb, it will start uo the games, but the then the game itself wont play. And if you think about it, it wouldnt play that much better on a mb

Maybe it will change for the better as soon as they make DX 9 support official, don't know. But HL 2 is a big pain in Parallels, unfortunately - due to the RAM allocation. Boot Camp will work better than any virtual machine - I just dislike dual-booting a lot

Well they better get a move on, because soon dx10 is going to be in all new games, so they are gonna have to make parallels dx10 capable, that would be some feat

I used to run Tiger Woods 2004 on my old PB12", no problems...wish I had that one back. I have no idea why golf is such fun on the computer, but hey, why argue?

Actually when your ONLY using windows for games, theres only really one thing you need and thats avg anti virus, free and updated daily, and it doesnt bug you like other apps.

I'd rather just prevent Windows from accessing the internet, if I install it. If I can't do that, I won't install it at all.

As I have already said, Parallels have unofficial DX 9 support, but they don't make it public. even on their site the information is scarce. I think that the following version must throw light upon this problem

DX 10 support on a VM such as Parallels will really break new grounds for the whole industry. Lets just wait and see who'll be the first to announce it!

getting direct x
 

hi was just wondering if any one knows about runing games on macs, i would like to run games such as devistation but when the programs loads it quits and asks for direct ??? how do i get that :confused::confused::confused: any website you can download it from ??

I assume you are running something under Parallels? Parallels only runs games up to DX8.1 last I checked, and that means any game made in the last 5 years won't run on your system. If you want to run games on your Mac install Boot Camp (with Windows XP) on a seperate partition and boot into that whenever you want to play games.

As for DirextX on Mac, I think Microsoft would sooner die than allow OSX to have DX on it, so don't hold your breath. You need to be using Windows, preferably in Boot Camp, in order to run DX games.

Well, if you look at their homepage,it says:
They don't name certain supported version of DX. I heard people run Oblivion in Parallels and this game is pretty heavy.
If you need evidence, I'll search for the threads on some other forum where I saw that

But again, DX support, unfortunately, is not very stable yet... And DX 9 support remains unofficial, so we can say that there's no DX 9 support in Parallels.

I failed to find 'Destruction' in the net. I assume this game is pretty old - I remember playing it a couple of years ago... It must require a version of DX not higher than 8.0, I think. Hence, theoretically it should work fine in Parallels - theoretically:)

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had heard for DX9 as well. The thing is that there is some overlap between functionality in 8 and 9, so a game that says it needs DX9 probably uses a majority of DX8 functions, right? So, theoretically, if the game you are playing doesn't use much DX9 it just might work.

But what I will say: With a MacBook C2D, which doesn't have dedicated graphics card, is going to have a hard time running any "semi supported" DX9 games. First off, Parallels is running in OSX, which is hogging a bunch of RAM. Second, though Parallels isn't really an emulator, it does consume a lot of resources, so there's more RAM being eaten up. Plus, you have no dedicated vRAM, so there's more RAM out the window... And the list goes on.

At least if the game is run in windows you can get ride of a couple of layers of RAM eaters. And if you want to run Windows games from the last few years, you really ought to do it in BootCamp. Especially if you want to do it on a MacBook.

But, and I reiterate, if you don't care to run games from the last 3 years or so, then go look at games built for the Mac. They work much better in OSX than any Windows game will in parallels.

Yes, this overlap must be present. This is the reason I'm sure.
Agreed. Moreover, there are few good games that are older.
RAM issue can be fixed a bit by allocating little RAM to MacOs and lots to Windows. But it only brings inconvenience.
I like it when developers make a double-supported version of their game.
Football Manager 2008, for example, works fine on Macs - natively.