BF2 / CS:S Vids on MBP.....droool

[bboucher790]

Well. To be honest, all these "3dmark scores" bore me. WhoTF cares about #'s. What i've been looking for, and successfuly found, is ACTUAL video footage of current state-of-the-art games. While 3DM is a good guideline, the real question is: Can we play games like CS:S / Warcraft / Farcry / BF2 on our new Intel Macs? I found some great vids showing off what the MBP can do with a X1600, equipped with 256vram. You should see similar results on the IMac versions as well. Looks like BF2 / CS:S run great. See u guys on the "battlefield". Thank Gordy for the vids.

Battlefield 2:
http://www.gordyhand.co.uk/files/mbp-bf2b.avi
http://www.gordyhand.co.uk/files/mbp-bf2.avi

CS:S
http://www.gordyhand.co.uk/files/mbp-css-stress.avi
http://www.gordyhand.co.uk/files/mbp-css-play.avi

Dell's New Slogan: Dude, why'd you get a Dell? Get a Mac! :)

[bboucher790]

Quick question to my own post: Has anyone tried playing Oblivion on either the iMac or the MBP? What kind of frames do you get? What settings can you use? I'm curious to find this out as I have heard rumors it plays really well...

[NeoRicen]

I read someones post somewhere who said they played Oblivion on a MacBookPro (2ghz i Think) with the native screen resolution and everything on high and it ran fine but they pointed out that they were only at the beginning and hadn't gotten outside yet which might result in a performence hit.

So good news, the iMac and MBPs are practically identical specs wise so that performence will likely cross over to the iMac,however I doubt Oblivion will work on a Mini as the graphics card is probably not good enough.

By the way do you know what graphics settings BF2 was set at on those videos?

When I get my copy of Windows (tomorrow) I'll probably post a detailed topic outlining my experience with some games (BF2, HL2, Rome: Total War, Far Cry Demo, Doom3 but I'll probably start with BF2) and give people a better idea of how they run because so far peoples 'reports' have been limited to "Yeah it runs good" or an 'average' FPS which doesn't help much because it doesn't go into detail about performence hits or anything.

[bboucher790]

Well based on playing BF2 on windows all the time, those settings are at least medium settings. IMO, when it's medium + in BF2, the game looks great. No clue on the actual settings though, all I can tell you is you should be able to run the game and have it look nice :).

[nylock10]

How do you think the performance with BF2 on medium detail would be on an iMac 1.83GHz, 128MB ATi x1600 and 1GB of RAM?

Hopefully I wont need the 2GHz model.

[bboucher790]

Should be very similar. I'm not sure if there is a clock difference between the 128 / 256 cards. If there is, you will see a hit in gaming performance. I can't seem to find any info regarding the differences between the 128 + 256 versions. Anyone know the clock #'s for each? If the same clocks, go ahead and get the 1.8 as it will run BF2 just as well...

[mutle]

i tested oblivion, and it works fine. i am playing it on my 20" cinema display (1680x1050), and i think it runs with 25-40 fps outside and even better inside. i can't say for sure how much fps i am actually getting, cause the game lacks a fps display (or i just didn't find it), but i can say, the mbp works fine to play this game.
edit: forgot my specs, 2ghz mbp, 2gig ram

[gygysamurai]

I have the 2ghz iMac with 2 gigs of ram and 256 megs of vram. don't be fooled by "beta". Bootcamp runs awesome, and the drivers are awesome, just like any other ATI drivers, with the catalyst control panel. I haven't OC'ed my video card at all and i'm running all of my games maxed right out. Fable, Battlefield Vietnam, Call of Duty 2, etc. It's a mean gaming machine, and it's EASILY keeping up to all of my PC friends' "modded high performance uber machines". I can't wait until the intel powermacs come out. now THAT will be some serious gaming

[DarthOverlord]

i tested oblivion, and it works fine. i am playing it on my 20" cinema display (1680x1050), and i think it runs with 25-40 fps outside and even better inside. i can't say for sure how much fps i am actually getting, cause the game lacks a fps display (or i just didn't find it), but i can say, the mbp works fine to play this game.
edit: forgot my specs, 2ghz mbp, 2gig ram

Download http://www.fraps.com/

[entro]

Quick question to my own post: Has anyone tried playing Oblivion on either the iMac or the MBP? What kind of frames do you get? What settings can you use? I'm curious to find this out as I have heard rumors it plays really well...

The long and the short of it and forgive me if its been beat to death in another thread is... it runs.

I'm running it on the 1.83 dual with 128 meg x1600 with 2 gigs of ram. Its taken a considerable amount of tweaking to get it to run at a stable workable framerate (25-40) all around the game. That said I'm anyone with a PC would have the same issues.

http://www.tweakguides.com/

as probably already mentioned has an exhaustive resource for all the oblivion.ini settings. I followed them pretty much to a tee... I did get rid of specular lighting on all objects and the grass. I also enabled multithreading on everything that I could. That said its playable at a 1152x864 and looks great.

Like with anything that high end... you've gotta spend some time milking and tweaking. I guess thats part of the fun :)

Nice blurb about the intel business on tweak guides as well :)

[DarthOverlord]

Can you folks post your settings and MBP configuration, so we can get an idea of the ideal optimized settings for BF2.

I currently am running MBP with 1 GB of Ram and the 128 x1600 card. I want to know what will give the best performance/eye candy ratio.