Hello everyone! As promised, I have done some game testing with the new macbook. As of now, I have only tested oblivion, but I plan to expand into the source games and a few other requests. I'm giving Oblivion its own review because it is such an expansive game and what you get in one area may not necessarily be what you get in another. I'm going to break it down by area and tell you what worked for me and what didn't. Hopefully, this will give us an idea of what to expect on these new fangled macbooks!
First off, I have the stock 2.4Ghz Aluminum Macbook using the 9400m chipset. I am running Windows Vista via bootcamp. For what it's worth, Vista gave this system a 5.2:
Processor: 5.3
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 5.5
Gaming Graphics: 5.3
Primary Hard Disk: 5.2
I thought this was pretty impressive! This was actually a higher rating than what my macbook pro had, mainly because of the memory. The new macbook is using DDR3 memory and is therefore, much faster!
Now onto the good stuff. Here are my settings for Oblivion. I set them high thinking I'd need to scale back a bit. To some extent I was correct, but to others, I was completely wrong and suprised!
Resolution: 1280x800
Textures: Medium
Tree Fade: Max
Actor Fade: Max
Item Fade: Max
Object Fade: Max
Grass Distance: Max
View Distance: Max
Distant Land: On
Distant Buildings: On
Distant Trees: On
Interior Shadows: Max
Exterior Shadows: Half
Self Shadows: Off
Shadows on Grass: On
Canopy Shadows: On
Shadow Filtering: High
Specular Distrophy: Max
HDR: On
Bloom: Off (you can't have both HDR and bloom on at once)
Water Detail: High
Reflections: On
Ripples: On
Blood: High
AA: off
This isn't entirely different from how I ran it on my old macbook pro with 512MB 8600M GT graphics!
Results:
Outside the Imperial City (on the larger island): Hovers between 20 and 30 fps however it stays nearer to 24. Everything looks gorgeous however. One of the biggest issues is grass. This drops the fps almost instantly.
Weynon Priory (and surrounding forest): Stays at around 22fps. One of the big kickers here is once again, grass!
Cheydinhal (my favorite city): Once again, hovers between 20 and 30 fps, however this time it stays closer to 28. There isn't much grass around here, however there is a lady in a red dress that absolutely destroys fps. I'm not sure what her problem is. Looking at everyone else causes no issue. She, however, can drop the fps as low as 14. Looking away from her causes it to go right back up...you can make your own assumptions about this one.
Outside Anvil (on the gold road): This is possibly one of the most graphically intensive areas of the game. If you veer off the gold road into the golden fields, you are instantly met with fps as low as 8. On my old MBP, I got an fps of around 16. This is just an overall bad area. This is where I decided to try the togglegrass command in the console. I was instantly met with 35-40fps! Grass is simply the worst catalyst fps wise on this game.
Imperial City Market: 25-40 fps. Looking at people seem to cause an fps drop here. With one or two people however, you can easily get 30-35fps. I reached as high as 40 with no people while walking around the different doors to shops. Awesome!
Every interior in the game (pretty much): Solid 35-50fps. There's so little going on in interiors that it is easy to get good fps. Very impressive.
Conclusion: I am pleasantly suprised with the outcome of this test. I aimed high and the macbook responded really well! There is room for improvement, but that's what scaling is for. You could easily cut back the view distances on grass and such and gain better fps. Water does not seem to affect us at all, but as I said before, grass is the culprit here. Using the command "togglegrass" in the console remedies this, but then you have no grass! Overall, I'm going to give this game a B-/B for playability on the new macbook.
I'm going to mess around with the Nvidia driver some and see what else I can get out of it. I wouldn't reccomend this to any inexperienced users, however I will post my results at a later date. I hope this helps everyone! Expect reviews of other games within the weekend/upcoming week. My next stop is Team Fortress 2 and then trickle down into other source engine games because they are so similar. I'm also going to visit Sim City games (including Societies) as well as the ever famous Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. You just never know...
Feel free to post your own results as well! Maybe we can get a more official thread going (moderators willing). I'll take requests, but I'm a college student and my school work has to come first. However I'm on break this weekend, so party on!
Trent out
Note to Moderators: I realize that this is a hardware only forum, but I posted here because I thought this related more to hardware (9400m graphics) than anything else. I'll let you guys make the final call, but I just wanted you to know my reasoning. Thanks!
