Can the MacBook play World of Warcraft? Warcraft 3? Counter Strike 1.6? Oh and Civ 4? How playable are these games on a 2Ghz MacBook with 2 GB of ram?

One more thing, how big is the MacBook's battery? Is it a standard 6 cell battery? Reason I'm asking is I have an XPS m1210 using a nine cell battery and I wanna compare how efficiently the MacBook runs. Additionally, how big is the MacBook Pro battery and how long does it last? How many cells does it have?

1. World of Warcraft = No
2. Warcraft 3 = Yes, but on lowest graphics settings incl resolution
3. Counter Strike 1.6 = Yes
4. Civ 4 = Hell No

The Macbook has integrated graphics....which spells out no gaming litereally. I said yes to counterstrike (1.6), because I've seen it being played perfectly on old Dell Opterons with integrated graphics, so it should play flawlessly on a Macbook under bootcamp. Warcraft 3 is also not that bad when it comes to graphics power, you can get away with having good frames if you set everything to low. If you want to play all the other games you listed, plus many, many more at maxed out resolutions and maxed out grapihcs settings....you've got to get a Macbook Pro, which has a dedicated mobility Radeon X1600. I can play Civ4 on mine with everything maxed out and at 1440x900 at 62 fps. I dont like Civ4 though...I'd rather stick with Civ3, which was much more fun IMO.

I'm not sure about the size and how many cells the MB battery has (becuase I own a MBP), but the average life per charge should be around 2hrs, if you are fully doing graphics intensive things, such as playing a game.

Do you know this from personal experience with the macbook or are you assuming based on previous experience with integrated graphics?

Even the MacBook Pro card is aging now, won't be very good with new games coming out like Crysis.

However, something that might be of interest is the ASUS XG Station.

It's basically like an external graphics card for laptops, and hooks up via a laptop express port. I doubt that OS X drivers will be made though (if they are needed) but it might work with Bootcamp.

I heard it was possible to play WoW on a MacBook as it seems to be a memory intensive game instead of a graphic intensive game. Have u actually ever tried WoW on a MacBook?

Also, why do u need to run CS 1.6 under bootcamp? Isn't bootcamp booting Windows XP on a Mac? Unless CS 1.6 isn't supported under Mac?

Both. My friend has a Macbook, which has the integrated graphics, and my old Dell had integrated graphics as well.





The X1600 on the Macbook Pro will be able to play Crysis no doubt...but just not at maxed out settings thats all. The only downside to the MBP Gpu, or the vast majority of the video cards out there is that they are not DX10 capable, so unless Apple fits a Dx10 graphics card onto the next revision of the MBP, performance on Dx10 games (like Crysis) wont be as good.

The Asus XG Station is a good option, but currently not worth the effort. Its more in a prototype stage than anything. I have heard of it though, a while back. You dont need to play the game on OS X. Play the game under windows XP, through bootcamp, thats the best option.



World of warcraft needs both loads of memory, and a decent graphics card to play. It runs at an easy 60fps with everything maxed out on my MBP under windows in bootcamp, however online play is a tad lower at 54fps. I think the lowest its ever gotten was 43fps, and that was with a crapload, like literally a crapload of action on the screen. Even then at 43fps it was very smooth and no lag. My friend tried World of Warcraft on his Macbook through bootcamp, and it plays really, really laggy, especially online play. Most strategy games coming out nowadays are believe or not more power hungry than fps shooter games.

Counterstrike 1.6 (which is fairly old), does not have a mac version, let alone a universal binary version. So in order to play this game, your gonna have to play it in Windows through bootcamp only. But the graphics on CS1.6 will run fine and over 30 fps even on integrated graphics, so you should have no problems.

I've only had this MacBook for about a week, but naturally I tried some windows games on it through Parallels. Although I assume it won't support OGL or D3D; it ran some old school software-rendered games like Theme Hospital and Final Fantasy VIII perfectly. I'm interested to see how much it can run -- either natively or not.

But your friend tried wow through boot camp, hmmm, I bet the mac version will handle a little better. Also the card scales its Vram based on how much system ram you have. From what I understand if you have 2gb it will scale upto 224MB if needed. I wouldnt expect fantastic performance thats why I have a desktop, but it would nice to be able to somewhat portable from time to time.

I used the GMA 950 in my previous desktop, before adding an ATI X1600XT.
Playing games, even the least demanding, was a royal PITA.

If playing games is important for you, do one of the following;

1)Forget OS X and buy a laptop from Alienware
2)Look for the most OS X compatible laptop with a decent graphics card. Here in Europe you'll save a lot of money in the process.

Alienware's have the most overpriced laptops out there. They're completely not worth it (being an Alienware Area-51 owner 4 years ago), they're nothing but rebranded Dell XPS M1710's. Nothing more, nothing less.

I would say if you honestly want to game hardcore, just build your own gaming PC. Laptops have never been favoured for gaming since day 1, atleast when compared to desktops (although that might be debatable in the future).

I have a {censored} uber gaming machine running Windows Vista, but want a MacBook laptop because of the awesome operating system and the awesome design. I'm running Mac OS X on my XPS m1210 and have fallen in love with it. I'll prolly wait and see what the new inbuilt graphics coming with Intels new platform Santa Rosa will be able to do though. I'm sure Steve Jobs will announce the new Santa Rosa macs next month so lets wait and see.....

Very well, then buy Dell XPS M1710's

This thread is full of lies.

You can play Warcraft 3 with high quality and it runs well.

WoW can run on a Macbook with 2gbs of ram, check out youtube videos. The graphics will have to be lowered but it's still doable.

most of the kids at my school hve macbooks, and most of them play wow

There are a ton videos on YouTube of regular macbooks running Half Life, Call of Duty, and other games. As long as one doesn't expect a full blown graphics experience then you might be pleased. One of the videos I saw was playing Doom3, it wasnt fantastic I know but it was doing as well as my Alienware Area 51m was doing when Doom came out. It had a GeForce 5600 with 128 MB of RAM. That wasnt to shabby for doing 3d work in maya, which is the main thing I was using it for.

Most games that work with older mid-range graphics cards.

Well I bought a MacBook base model, I will upgrade the ram to 2gigs and will post a review that covers 3d, video editing, compositing in shake, and some heavy photoshop work.


And I dont imagine it will play any new games but thats why I have a desktop anyway.

Just to let you know. Even through parallels which supports no 3d rendering at all, Half-Life (sven co-op mod to be exact) worked perfectly under software drawing and didn't look half bad considering. CS 1.6 should have no troubles through that (might have to tone the graphics down a bit with a bit of config hacking to prevent any small life-saving lag). If I was any more of a gamer, I'd definitely bootcamp XP on here for games like that just for the direct rendering.

In fact, I may do that anyway just so I can play PKR away from my desktop!

No one said Warcraft 3 wont run. Warcraft 3 will run good on a Macbook...but were talking about World of Warcraft, which is different, and needs more power than the normal warcraft 3. There is no locked feature that prevents heavy games from playing on the Macbook....its just that they'll run like crap.

Alright I have just recieved my MacBook in the mail yesterday, so I will experiment with this as soon as my 2gigs of RAM gets here.... no suprise that I dont want to spend $350 for apple ram. But from all accounts 2gb of ram is needed from most of the gaming videos on you tube. I will run some test with some fairly recent games in bootcamp and some 3d natively in maya 8.5, as well as some professional app stuff in photoshop, shake, and final cut. I will the post a comprehensive review of what a decently configured macbook is capable of.

So with that said does anybody have any games that want to see?

are you nuts? my old imac g3 with 400 mhz and 8mb video can run warcraft 3, ofcourse can the macbook run warcraft on full res and it can run WOW good. Man, do you really think apple would sell that {censored} that can't run an old game?

It would be very much appreciated if you can run games like Counter-Strike Source, Age of Empires 3, half life 2, and dare I say it, F.E.A.R. Thanks for offering! This will decide if I purchase the Macbook or not.

I have Half Life 2 and CS Source so I can give those a whirl, I might have to try the demos for the others, I also have Battlefield 2, Need for Speed Underground 2, and World of Warcraft but my account is inactive right now. I will say that I have run some Maya tests to see what kind of opengl performance I am getting, 20 fps rotating around a 120,000 polygon object which is more then acceptable for animation apps on a $800 refurbished laptop.

I will let you guys know when I ge the RAM and do my tests in parts as Im working on projects, unfortunately I do have alot of Shake, Maya, and Photoshop work to do first before I can go game crazy.

Take your time. It is VERY much appreciated that your even doing this for us. Can't wait for the results.

I had FEAR on my mac mini with 2 gb of RAM, overall it ran ok with some of the settings lowered. The only time it would start to lag a bit was if there was a lot going on.

Awesome! Thanks for the help

i got my ram and will start doimg some intensive burn ins soon, for the record i will cover apps for visual fx and film production as well as games.

Apps I will cover will be these;

Final Cut Pro 5.1
Shake 4.1
Photoshop CS3
Autodesk Maya 8.5

Games
Half Life 2 Based Games
Counter Strike Condition Zero old modified engine
Quake III mac and windows
Battlefield 2
NFS Underground 2
Starwars Battlefront

these should range the OpenGL and DirectX performance of game in windows while quake will compare XP to OSX

I dont think the MacBookPro's x1600 will even be that better either

The difference between the two cards are that the ATI has dedicated VRAM which doesnt matter a whole lot when you have two gigs in Macbook since the intel will expand the VRAM to 244MBs, but the other which is important as games go is the programmable gpu. This gives ability for the ATI to support DirectX Pixel Shader Models on the fly and intel will have to use a cpu to process it or to display what shader it can perform. Also from what I understand is that Intel Chip cant do Transform and Lighting processing, which is a 3d to 2d conversion of the game (more complicated then that but thats basically it) which again a CPU has to pick up. But the main falacy in everyone thinking that the GMA950 is not capable is the fact that they only consider the GPU. When in all reality the game will probably use one core to focus on the game engine and the other to focus on the GPU instructions the GMA cannot do, which means alot of the dependancy in the game test will be in the Core Duo chips that support the GPU. This means in theory that the macbook can do games up until they have a need for specific instruction sets that are required for the game to function and the CPU cant pick up the slack. For example Spiderman 3 that just came out has a large number of DirectX 9 Specific GPU Instructions that require a card with some horsepower. The minimum requirements are actually pretty steep with limited amount of cards able to work, say nothing made before 2005, even so my desktop has a 6800 Ultra and I have to play with the settings on low and at 800 x 600 for decent frame rate above 30fps.

No ways, the GMA950 is ok, but the x1600 is WAY faster.

I occasionally play Civ IV on my GF's MacBook, it's ok on low graphics settings - meh, it's a strategy game, no biggy. Warlords will give you a warning that your system is below spec, but you can disable that. Still 950 is such a sucky chipset....

Hey guys im in the middle of a production schedule right now and I will conduct the tests as soon as I am able to... I will say that Photoshop is the fastest Ive ever seen, Final Cut Pro 5.1 works fantastic (able to capture, edit, color correct, adjust audio all on battery minutes after the shoot) and shake is quite usable but the interface is a little slugish due to the opengl acceleration, and the Call of Duty 2 Demo is playable at low texture settings. Im sorry this taking long but I will post a review as soon as I can wipe my system with a clean install with boot camp.

Well now with the new MacBook Pro's GeForce 8600M GT cards you should be able to run Crysis ala DirectX 10 just fine!

Bull {censored}. MacBook can run WarCraft 3, WoW on minimum and CS 1.6, too. Who said, that it can't run WoW??????

A little of topic, but have you seen the tech demos for crysis? They recommend Quad Core and QC extreme cpus, and with that engine with so many possible interactions I would be suprised what you can and cant run it on. But again we know pros can do games but the question is how well a vanilla MB can do gaming. And yes MB can run WoW there are countless you tube videos to prove it.

It is not question whether you can do it but if it is still fun to play game in low resolution...
This might be frustarting... Are there no external graphic cards for MB like there are for laptops?

I bet MBP will fully run Crysis. It is made for Crysis. There is no doubt it will. It has got an ultimate great graphics based on 8600 gt.

I play Guild Wars and Need for Speed Most Wanted on my MacBook all the time, and they run perfectly. I know for a fact it runs WoW great, too.

For a fact visit this link. Games for GMA 950

Dude, why do you think 8600gt is so good? It gets caned by a lowly 7900GS. The 8600 series has the makings of a real dog.
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=638&p=5
And that review was for a GTS, the GT version will really blow chunks.

Man, it is a Mobile PC. Wake up. It awesome for a laptop. I perfectly know, that 7900 gs is slightly better, but it doesn't run DX10!!!!

Thats rather audacious of you to say all this considering you don't own a macbook.
You're wrong about 2 atleast:

World of Warcraft, I got my char to lvl 60 with my macbook. i play daily and raid weekly
Civ 4, im a macbook civ 4 expert

-robert

what means do you play games on your macbooks? through bootcamp or parallels? or are you playing mac native games?

I can start doing some testing on my macbook now. Is there any recommendations for UB games natively in OSX before running into Bootcamp and testing windows based games?

Okay, I can confirm that with max settings in Warcraft III, my macbook runs everything smoothly with 2gb of ram.
And running WoW, I set everything to the middle, with the exception of terrain distance (1/4 of bar), spell effects and weather effects, I get 20-40 fps in cities, and pre burning crusade outdoors. Resolution is like 1280 x whatever, its the max resolution I believe. In Burning Crusade outdoors, I get 15-25 fps depending on the detail of the land, but I get like 20-30 fps in pvp battlegrounds. Also, I turned off the terrain lighting, shadows, death effects, filtering, etc. So I believe WoW is completely runnable on a macbook.

I found out on WoW, terrain distance makes a huge difference in fps, like 5-10 fps difference per quarter of a bar. Also, turning on GLFaster 1 on the WTF file also helps too.
The games are all run in mac OS, and not boot camp or parallels.

Hope this helps.

Btw I own the latest version of the macbook, 2.16 ghz. So I can't guarentee anything with the lower models.

IF you are running the simplest game like halo etc on your macbook, don't bother getting one. Get a gaming pc laptop or mbp

Ok, let me try to clear a few things.

YOU CAN GAME WITH THE GMA950 on the Macbook (I have tried with the lowest Core Duo 1.83 Ghz /w 2gb ram).

But don't expect too much of it. For example, I can play counter Strike source on high settings, aslong as the map is small (and doesn't have high detailed textures) Because once you try a map like cs_office, you'll get lag even without high settings. (and a 640 x 480 res lol)

If you want to game on a laptop, get a Dell with a dedicated GPU for like 1500, and if you love Mac so much get that Macbook Pro, its awesome for portable gaming really. (Although I only play Counterstrike Source / Half Life 2:DM and BF2)

Whats the avg fps you get in source? I play cs 1.6 and source sometimes and just ordered my mbp so I'm curious.

dont the new Mac Book Pros have 8600 gt's.

they will probly be a best in gaming.

True, but on a mac not running windows, dx10 means nothing.