I am in awe.

My macbook, is about 2 months old runs, Call of Duty 2 Flawlessly. Really Really well.

Halo runs okay.
Doom 3 ran so bad I had to give it back.
But, CoD runs just fine!


What is the deal?

What GPU do you have? The 8600 or the x1600? And is it the 128MB version or the 256?

Geeky1 said:

What GPU do you have? The 8600 or the x1600? And is it the 128MB version or the 256?

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I don't know. I got the high-end White one.

It's a MacBook and not a MacBook Pro, so it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card but the Intel GMA 950 graphics 64MB instead.

Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

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If memory serves me correctly, neither Halo nor Doom3 are Universal Binaries. Call of Duty 2 is.

Whoah! If that is true, that would give the gameplay another kink by having to run Halo and Doom3 under Rosetta.

MacHeadCase said:

It's a MacBook and not a MacBook Pro, so it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card but the Intel GMA 950 graphics 64MB instead.

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And in case you don't know, what this means to you, is basically no 3d support. Am really surprised that CoD2 runs that well. Any 3d intensive games yu try will be hit and miss (mostly miss) with that graphics card.

You should have no problem though, with even the most recent 2d games.

Whoops. I misread. Just kept right on reading and tacked "Pro" on where there wasn't any. >_<

Initially I was somewhat surprised that a MacBook would handle CoD2 as well... But it may not actually be all that surprising. Apparently CoD2 (like some other games) has the capability to drop from DX9 to 8 or 7 as dictated by the capabilities of the GPU. And the GMA950, though not a performance chip by any means, is not as completely useless as one might think. I checked Futuremark's Online Results Browser for 3DMark 2001SE and 2003. It looks like 6-7.5k in 2001SE is pretty normal, though you probably won't see 2000 points in 2003. That's not bad, really. It's useless for DX9-only games, but for older games and newer games like HL2 and (apparently) CoD2 that can back down to a less demanding instruction set, it won't necessarily do badly at all.

As for Doom 3... Doom 3 brings dedicated GPUs that are, while old, still a good bit faster than the GMA950 to their knees. It's supposedly more-or-less playable on a Radeon 8500 or a GeForce 4Ti, but it probably wouldn't be pleasant.