iBook vs x86 Laptops in PREFORMANCE - I wanna see real evidence

The WoW thing kinda sucks... that it won't play at all. Think anyone could CONFIRM that though? Just for fun. Like someone with WoW and an iBook.
I wouldn't get it for games, but it would be nice if I could play one of the few games from time to time... The chances of me ever actually playing it are really pretty low though

Supaiku said:

The WoW thing kinda sucks... that it won't play at all. Think anyone could CONFIRM that though? Just for fun. Like someone with WoW and an iBook.
I wouldn't get it for games, but it would be nice if I could play one of the few games from time to time... The chances of me ever actually playing it are really pretty low though

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Requirements for Mac (Off the Blizzard Site):

Mac® System OS X 10.3.5 OS:
933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor
512 MB RAM or higher; DDR RAM recommended
ATI or NVIDIA video hardware with 32 MB VRAM or more
4 GB or more of available hard drive space
MacOS X 10.3.5 or newer
56k or higher modem with an Internet connection

Game is VERY SLOW on the iBook

Oh ya... lol forgot about sys. Reqs lol
Silly me.

Well running at all is good enough. After all it's not actually FOR gaming.

Roughly speaking a 1.2GHz G4 is about equivalent to a 1.4 GHz Pentium M. It's still apples and oranges though. Speed is meaningless if it's not useable. Also consider the many problems that PC notebooks are plagued with the powerbook is seemingly immune to. Think qualitative not quantitative. You'll have a better experience with a Mac notebook and you'll look cooler too.

I can run WoW acceptably, I get about 8-20 fps (flyings reallly laggy, always get 8-10fps when flyin), though WoW uses huge game files so if anything else acceses the slow laptop drive you can get pauses of like 30 secs and then be dead or something, just make sure nothing else is running that uses hdd. Thats with most settings on high except for terrain distance, as stuff like terrain detail just uses video ram, and on an iBooks low res the difference between low detail an high detail is not much.

Supaiku said:

Feel free to post about you experiences w/ the speed and anything else about the iBook that makes it great. I'm curious about hte battery life while say: Watching a movie, playing games (say WC3 and WoW - and how well they might run on an iBook), music, and using wireless.

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As a recent switcher (and therefore current Mac user), I can't give you a totally unbiased opinion about speed. I can, however, give you an example from personal experience, with no analysis involved. Just the other day, a friend of mine, who owns a fairly new laptop running Windows XP, with a 2.0 P4 processor, and he was showing some of our friends Photoshop CS, and its cooler features. I have a 1.33 GHz iBook, and also have CS. Well, with almost every single action, he had to spend around 5-7 seconds minimum rendering each one. I have yet to have to wait on an effect. I haven't even SEEN any indication of waiting in CS. Additionally, I noticed he had an almost comically large amount of peripherals just to get everything to work, and his battery life was about half mine (he had to get double batteries to even approach it.)

OK I'll chip in (again) here.

I currently work on the worlds largest air traffic control system, we are currently upgrading to PPC (basically 1G G3's although they are slightly more "beefed up" than the G3's that Apple uses) based systems.

The systems have other goodies like hot-swappable SATA HD's, Hardware RAID, extreme I/O buses and redundant power supplies but basically as far as single user performance goes they are the same as the OLD Powermacs.

The G4 is far better than the G3 and the G5 is just out there on another planet at present.

So basically if they are good enough for a 365-24/7 air traffic control system then the better version should be more than sufficient for Joe Smith!

Amen-Moses

I had problems running UT2004 on a dell laptop... 2.8GHZ p4 512 ram 64mb radeon 9200 Winxp & a 10000rpm 16mb cache HDD... it ran perfectly (higher settings) on my pb 12" 1.25ghz G4 768mb ram 32mb nvidea

SAME FOR HALO, STARWARS KOTOR & XIII

just my 2c

There was something obviously wrong with that Dell laptop, as it is a much more powerful system. There is also no such thing as a 10000rpm HD for laptops....They don't have 16MB Cache drives either. You'd have to be looking at an SCSI drive to get specs like that.

jmujica said:

I had problems running UT2004 on a dell laptop... 2.8GHZ p4 512 ram 64mb radeon 9200 Winxp & a 10000rpm 16mb cache HDD... it ran perfectly (higher settings) on my pb 12" 1.25ghz G4 768mb ram 32mb nvidea

SAME FOR HALO, STARWARS KOTOR & XIII

just my 2c

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flonejek said:

I can run WoW acceptably, I get about 8-20 fps (flyings reallly laggy, always get 8-10fps when flyin), though WoW uses huge game files so if anything else acceses the slow laptop drive you can get pauses of like 30 secs and then be dead or something, just make sure nothing else is running that uses hdd. Thats with most settings on high except for terrain distance, as stuff like terrain detail just uses video ram, and on an iBooks low res the difference between low detail an high detail is not much.

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I'm with you on this - There is a thread under "ibook" Discussions that talks about my findings with the iBook and World of Warcraft testing. I plan on posting further updates this weekend after some thorough testing, across 2 different servers (a high pop vs low pop) to give as accurate information as possible.

First and foremost, the iBook is not a gaming machine. That being said, on an iBook with at least 512MEg of RAM, no other programs running in the background and all the settings set to "low" you should experience "okay" playing with World of Warcraft. I've hit higher than 30FPS on mine, with 768K of memory, though as a previous poster mentioned, the game drops during flights or heavily populated areas (in town). Beautiful looking game nontheless. Fun too!

WC3 ran fine, with most settings at med to high. No slowdown at all. Looks great too.

Ya, my friend put WoW on his iBook the other day and it ran acceptably... slow but bearable.

Opps. did not check the date. Me bad!