Gaming on your MacBook
 

Just wondering what the highest-end games (graphically) people have managed to squeeze onto a MacBook with no (or at least bearable) loss in performance.

As it is, I'm running a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM, best I've pushed myself to so far is running Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (with no persistent bodies and low lighting effects, medium texture settings).

I tried installing Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, and though it installs fine on Boot Camp, it just won't run on my GMA 950 chipset.

The new Mac Book Pros are much better for gaming...

Yeah, but I'm just a poor art student who can't afford one :P

So the question still stands - what have people managed to successfully run on a budget MacBook?

Are we talking OSX or BootCamped Windows here?

im gonna guess hes bootcamping..... i would say that it has a 128mb gpu? if so its pretty much the same as my imac (maybe the imac is more suited to the task) As far as mac games, the only one i ever bought that was graphically intense was Star wars battle front. As far as windows games, i did get crysis running at an ok frame rate on the lowest settings. Im sure you would be able to get UT 3 working well (it supports really low end pc's)

Actually, since he is on a budget, I was going to assume OSX, and since the GPU in a MB is dependent on system RAM, I would say it's rather not like an iMac. You need to do a bit more fact checking kel ;).

I also wanted to ask if you want the latest and greatest, or what not. I have a lot of games I play that are from the late 90's that I really like. Granted, you did say "push the system" if you will. You might try UT 2004, if you can get your hands on a demo, and see how that runs. It would be a good baseline... Just see how far you can pump it up before you system says 'NO MORE'! Another good one might be Knights of the Old Republic. Just make sure you get the latest patch (1.04d), or it will not function in the slightest.

:o well since he didnt say which macbook he has, whether it was a new or old one. Anyway I have ut 04 and it is really good :) And would recommend it

Ah, does KotoR run on Mac OS? That would be an awesome buy :)

As it is I am running on bootcamp, I have a friend who had a few users left on his multi-user XP license, so I essentially got a legitimate free copy ^_^

Yeah, I should have listed the graphics chipset in the initial post, don't know how I missed it :P it's an intel GMA 950

Ah, the old GMA 950's eh? Not so good, to be honest. I've never tried running windows games on that chipset, so I won't be much help for bootcamp games.

For MAC OSX games, I would highly recommend KOTOR (which should run fine if you patch it, but you must patch it.) I think you should be fine with the original Star Wars Battlefields as well. And also, give UT 2004 a shot, it should be fine as well.

Any other genre's you are interested in? Civ 3 & 4 are both good, and should work. Age of Mythology should be fine. Basically anything from three years ago and before should be fine (and there are a lot of good games from back then. "The latest" doesn't necessarily mean "The greatest" you know...

I was just looking at wikepidia and it said this about the GMA 950

"Intel GMA 950 graphics processor using 64 MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared by main memory
(up to 224 MB in Windows through Boot Camp)"

Obviously that bit caught my eye. Granted its not a separate gpu, but still... correct me if im wrong but in bootcamp, it could run slightly more graphical games? On my old pc, i had gta San andreas running of 1ghz, and only 64mb gpu. So surly something like that would run? And thats a real graphical game. (also why dont you try some demos for games, like UT 3, if you were slightly crazy, you could even try crysis's demo, but then again it may make your MB explode.....

You missed the "shared" part of the statement. I don't care if you have a gig of shared RAM going to the GPU, it still won't stack up. Don't forget that games us a lot of normal RAM to begin with, if you throw video requirements into the mix...things get bad. Plus, the RAM is significantly farther away, and in order to address the RAM you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

And that's just the beginning. The GMA 950 isn't going to have all the calls you might want in order to make a game run efficiently. And if those calls can't be run by the hardware, they have to be software emulated. And that's going to eat up a lot of CPU time and a lot of RAM. Which, as you might recall, will already be in short supply because you are running a game.

That being said, yeah, in Windows you might be able to run GTA San Andreas (though I'd argue with the "real graphics" part, at least if you're going to follow it up with UT3 and Crysis). And I do agree that you probably should just grab some demos and see what happens. Again, my general guidelines are any games that are more than two years old. But you never know...

The more system memory you put in a MacBook, the more it will allocate for graphics. I have 3GiB RAM, and last time I ran it, the Apple Hardware test showed well over 200MiB (don't recall the exact number) being allocated to video. (System Profiler has always showed only 64 MiB).

I thought this too, but unfortunately I can't get Vampire:The Masquerade: Bloodlines to even load, and that's from 2004...

Still, it's nice to know that I'll be able to play some of the older games (I've been eyeing up the original Half-Life series, as I never had the game the first time around, and it's nice and cheap on Steam :) ).

Looks like I've got less chance of running HL2 or Portal though, as V:TM:B uses the source engine... unless of course it's a problem specific to some inherent setting within the game which is preventing it from loading (although I had no trouble installing and running the game on my girlfriend's PC, so meh).

Not just into FPS games mind, those are just the ones I've had my eye on recently. Particularly eyeing up Warhammer Online when that comes out this summer (if it comes out this summer...) - I'm hoping that they make it as compatible as possible with older machines (much like Blizzard did with WoW, which runs fine until I start getting into high-demand areas, like 50-man battlefields and the like, which are sorta choppy, but still playable).

I guess as far as PC gaming goes I am looking more at games which are a few years old now, so I guess as long as I keep the graphics settings turned low enough I should be ok :)

Hmm, so far as I'm aware my MacBook will only take 2GB RAM maximum... still, I've only just maxed it out, maybe I should try re-installing Vampire and see if it runs :P

Another option you may (or may not) be interested in is to watch eBay to see how much MacBooks equipped like yours are selling for. You might be able to sell yours and purchase a new one for not very much difference.

I would really like to get ahold of a copy of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 (or even 2005) to try out on my MacBook before buying a copy. It's officially unsupported, but then, so is 3 GiB of RAM.

I've gotten reasonable performance out of:

Halo
Half-Life and it's mods.
UT2k4
Diablo II

I'm going to try HL2 soon.

Well, after another install of VTMB last night, the thing still won't run, so I'm pretty sure my chances of running HL2/Portal just got shot down (Anti might still manage it, it seems the 2GHz MacBook has a better onboard graphics chip).

And J-Chris, thanks for the tip - I might well go for that. One question I'd ask would be what would be the best way to go about backing up all my user-data before selling? I have an external HDD already which I could dump files onto, but I'm not how to store/restore system prefs etc on/from there. Also I don't much fancy re-formatting it as a boot disk, as all my music and movie files live on there already (no room on the MacBook for them)

Edit: The price for older MacBooks on eBay is quite laughable, and that's after you get through the hordes of people using it as a place to refer people for real-incentives.com... myself now included (call me crazy if you want, but it costs me nothing, so why not? :P )

I guess I failed to mention one thing:

"Reasonable" in my case is smooth performance with all the visuals knocked down and 800x600 resolution.

(UT99 is a different story. If it didn't run smooth completely maxed out, something's not right.)

your best bet to back it up (if you dont have time machine) is to use either carbon copy cloner, or superduper to make a disk image of your hd
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html

I'm sorry to hear that.