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Macbook and Gaming - Change VRAM


sbirkl
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Hello Dudes, is there any way to change the VRAM for intel graphics chip on a macbook? (under OS X and/or under XP).

 

Doom3 @ Mac OS X is working, but only @13fps :angel:

do you know anything about it? i got 1gb of ram, im planning to get 2gb.

 

 

thanks for posts and greetings from germany

sbirkl

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Yeah, the GMA 950 is about as useful for hardcore gaming as trying to kill a person with a nerf gun.... Yeah, it'll fire but you aren't going to get anywhere with it.

 

I was going to pick up a macbook and use it as my sole machine because I'm moving to the city but I am waiting until I can afford that MBP so I can have the x1600 to play games at a respectable speed.

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Did you get the Universal Binary patch for Doom 3? That may be the reason that it is running so slow. I have it running on my Macbook Pro with the 128mb card and it runs alright. I get about 30fps on medium quality. Hope this helps!

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with a laptop you cant really change the graphics card and so there is you're problem, its not a case of "can i put a new one in" the answer is that you cannot unless the card you have is replace able, for example there are some laptops were you can change the bfx card, thse would be like some alienware machines, and then they are a pain in the a** to do.

 

the other option is to look at tweak guides to lower settings so that you get more fps from you're current intel card, the only site i know of is a pc tweak guide link, it's below and for doom, hope it helps

 

Doom 3 Tweak Guide

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Intel's GMA950 dynamically allocates system memory as video memory as it's needed, anywhere from the base of 64MB (actually 80MB per Intel's documentation), to 224MB (the max).

 

If your system needs it, it will give you the extra graphics memory, it's not something *you* can change, it's done automatically.

 

But trying to do any sort of serious gaming on a MacBook is like said above "Like trying to kill someone with a nerf gun."

 

It's not a gaming chip, and only games that scale very well should be attempted. Any Blizzard game is a perfect example of this, but frankly, Doom 3 is definitely NOT; even Halo isn't that smooth.

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on a macbook you cant change vram and even cant change the video card because its built in and no pci-x slot for video cards on that machines... if u need more power get a macbook pro for heavy graphics was designed (not so heavy but much better than gma950)

or better use a hackintoshhhhh with nvidia cards

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Some company are working around external graphic card powered by latest GPU, for mobile market. Now let's see how they will support (if any) a Mac version.

 

I wouldn't count on a Mac version since Asus is a big manufacturer for Apple and such a thing might hurt Apple notebook sales. Many people just buy a new notebook when they can't play some new game on their notebook. The name of the device is XG station BTW. From a design perspective I can't see how such a fast bus speed like pci-e can be achieved. I hope they produce laptops with an external interface as fast as pci-e x4 or x8 so we won't be bottlenecked by the bus when using external graphics.

 

@patkitchen : I think quadroplex is for rendering purposes (non-realtime) so I can't see how it helps with gaming.

 

quoted from vr zone

 

Although XG1 possess some really neat features but it still has its downsides like limited bandwidth and requires external display. Since XG1 is linked up to the notebook through the ExpressCard slot, therefore the graphics card slotted into the PCIe x16 slot inside the XG1 has a reduced bandwidth from full x16 (4GB/s in each direction) to just x1 (250MB/s in each direction). Certainly graphics and video performance will suffer a considerable hit. Also another downside is that XG1 needs to be hooked up to a display monitor since there is no video-in capability in the current notebooks so you can't play games on your notebook screen.
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