World of Warcraft and Mac

[gattis07]

Hey everyone. Long time follower of the forums and finally decided to join :). Go me! Anyway, I am STRONGLY considering moving over to the light and purchasing a macbook pro. I was just wondering who, if anyone, plays WoW on their mac and how their experience has been. I have a pretty beefy windows rig right now and am able to enjoy all settings maxed out and the eye candy all turned on. Any idea on if I will be able to do this on a MacBook pro...and if so...how it would work? Im looking at the 15inch 2.16 model. Any input would rock! Thanks!

[Shuu]

plays fine on my 17" 2ghz imac. max resolution. might want to turn down a setting or two. turn off the "full screen glow effect" thing.. but it's not by any means unplayable.

it plays much better under windows, though.

woot!

[Hell-In-A-Handbasket]

17 MBP C2D 2GB memory, runs everything max, including teh glow, no issues.

[gigapixels Veteran]

Hell, it played excellent (albeit with a low framerate) on my iBook G4. So you shouldn't have any issues on a current Mac.

[crazzy88ss]

i have a 2.16ghz 20" iMac and a 15" MBP and I have had the settings on 90% on both systems. They run great. 30-50 FPS. For a laptop, that's damn good.

[gattis07]

Thank you to everyone who responded. Hopefully I will be picking up one of these bad boys this week!

[benplace]

Bought a Macnook pro last week, I returned it for the simple fact, WOW does not look nor play as smoothly as on a PC. I'm an Avid WOW player, and couldnt handle this. Returned after 3 days, and now I'm putting together a new PC gaming rig.

[TurboTuna]

Bought a Macnook pro last week, I returned it for the simple fact, WOW does not look nor play as smoothly as on a PC. I'm an Avid WOW player, and couldnt handle this. Returned after 3 days, and now I'm putting together a new PC gaming rig.

You returned a MPB Just because you couldn't play WoW? Thats lame.

[benplace]

You returned a MPB Just because you couldn't play WoW? Thats lame.

I play WOW more then anything else I do, so why is that lame?

[crazzy88ss]

why would you buy a mac, if all you ever do is play a video game?

[benplace]

Because I heard good things, and I heard it runs WOW. Thats pretty much the only game I play.

[SMELTN]

I have a bunch of buddies that play wow on their mac's. Only problem they have is with Ventrilo (voice chat program), you have to use a special codec for vent to get it to work. But as far as just playing WoW, they have 0 problems and love it

[Klethron]

I have a 13" MacBook with 2Ghz and 2 Gigs of Ram, runs like a charm. No problems whatsoever.

[+orgitnized Subscriber¹]

Um yeah, benplace...what was wrong with WoW on your MBP? My wife just bought the MBP a month ago, (15 inch display, beefed with everything they had to offer with best proc, 2 GB RAM, etc.) and WoW has never been smoother.

It's simply untouchable by any PC that I've ever played WoW on. She can have 15 apps open and play WoW with background tasks, etc. and never experience a glitch in game play.

Now, I'm not saying that a PC can't beat the config but her screen never skips, she can go in raids with a ton of people and her fps is awesome with no faults whatsoever. While she is battling with 5 people, her fps is normally around 70-80 fps and that's not an exaggeration. Sure, it'll go down to 50 depending on what's going on with the environment, but it's smooth-as-silk gameplay. Hell, if you have money to burn, I'd recommend a MBP for WoW action any day.

Playing WoW on her machine is like fluid in motion. I'm totally envious of her machine.

[cosine]

I think some of you are exaggerating. At 1680x1050 on my 17" Macbook Pro (when I was playing for a short time), I topped out at about 40 FPS out in the actual world with a pretty low draw distance (maybe 1/3 of the way across the bar), no AF, and no AA. I had glow/pixel shaders on, and more or less everything else set to high. Particle effects seemed to drop my FPS a ton when they were close up.

Turning up draw distance or AF more or less killed my frames, I have no idea how you guys are getting double what I was. And I'm really curious how the guy playing on a regular Macbook with integrated video is getting this game to run like a charm unless he's running the game with the lowest settings possible.

[ritsuke Veteran]

I think some of you are exaggerating. At 1680x1050 on my 17" Macbook Pro (when I was playing for a short time), I topped out at about 40 FPS out in the actual world with a pretty low draw distance (maybe 1/3 of the way across the bar), no AF, and no AA. I had glow/pixel shaders on, and more or less everything else set to high. Particle effects seemed to drop my FPS a ton when they were close up.

Turning up draw distance or AF more or less killed my frames, I have no idea how you guys are getting double what I was. And I'm really curious how the guy playing on a regular Macbook with integrated video is getting this game to run like a charm unless he's running the game with the lowest settings possible.

I agree. It plays well but it's not super amazing. Hell, we only have Mobile X1600's... That's not a bad thing, but honestly. Come now! =) That said, WoW does run very well - You just have to make a few compromises. Not a big deal. But, really. If all you do is play games, get something with a better vid card. The fact that it's a Mac is irrelavant and more thought should be put into a purchase <-- Not directed at the OP

Now, if you only want this laptop to play WoW 10-20-30% of your time? Not a bad idea - it works and it works well - the Mac experience is positively lucid, IMO. Otherwise, definately look at a gaming laptop, with upgradable, higher performing video cards.

BTW, (and you probably noticed) if you go the 2.16 route, you'll only get 128MB RAM on the card.

Good luck! =)

[+orgitnized Subscriber¹]

I think some of you are exaggerating. At 1680x1050 on my 17" Macbook Pro (when I was playing for a short time), I topped out at about 40 FPS out in the actual world with a pretty low draw distance (maybe 1/3 of the way across the bar), no AF, and no AA. I had glow/pixel shaders on, and more or less everything else set to high. Particle effects seemed to drop my FPS a ton when they were close up.

Turning up draw distance or AF more or less killed my frames, I have no idea how you guys are getting double what I was. And I'm really curious how the guy playing on a regular Macbook with integrated video is getting this game to run like a charm unless he's running the game with the lowest settings possible.

Hey, just tell me how I can make a movie on my fps with the mac and I'll look at publishing it right here on Neowin. I'm not exaggerating with my wife's framerate at all. Her screen is not at your resolution however. It's at 1440x900 and yes, the framerate is steady at 70 fps with fluid-like gameplay. It's as smooth of a game as I've ever seen on any machine in my life.

WoW plays like you're watching a movie - there's no skips, glitches, delays, etc. Titan Panel will also prove me right, as it'll calculate all the averages for her fps and not just the highs. (and of course you guys already know that if you have TP) Still, I hear people talking of broken stats for TP and what-not so someone always wants to discredit plugins.

So I'd be happy to use the built-in fps calculator present in WoW and show you the real-time stats. I've just never made movies in WoW so ... what can I say? Neither of us know much about Mac's but we wanted to get away from Windows and go with a mac for a hundred different reasons.

I'll note that this is a machine right out of the box with the original WoW loaded, then the BC add-on. We have loaded various other apps, keep things loaded in the background, (on occasion, though we don't make it a habit...cuz what's the point?) and have yet to see one single glitch in the WoW gameplay. I simply can't say enough about it. We haven't messed with any interface settings, changed color depth, etc. All are defaults, with the exception of add-ons that have been added (only TP and Auctioneer)

If someone asked me if the gameplay was "super amazing" I wouldn't hesitate to say yes immediately. There's no compromises at all, so I don't know what you are referring to. And it's not that it's super amazing compared to a generic setup. It plays it with perfection. I've never seen a PC play WoW better than this mac so far.

Now, you can call me out all you want, but I've seen people play it on dual 256's in a PC, and cards with 512 by themselves, and I still see glitchy behavior from time to time on them. Blame the video card, blame the drivers, blame whatever you want. But I have yet to see any of the problems PC's have had with WoW on a mac. And I guess that's what has made the experience so great so far. We haven't had to mess with 1 setting period; we installed it and it worked absolutely fantastic and impresses the hell out of us to this day. She can't get enough of playing WoW on her mac. I don't see why this is so surprising to people. Macs have always excelled in their graphics capabilities, not to mention that they have their own dedicated kernel. You can't make clean comparisons based on PC's setting the bar all the time. Different drivers, different kernel, different memory management, different efficiencies, different capabilities. Agree to disagree if you want, but I personally think WoW runs flawlessly on our mac and have had plenty of PC players stop by and leave in disbelief at how well it runs.

[ritsuke Veteran]

I quit before this last patch in April:

-Improved memory usage and stability under Mac OS X 10.4.9 using multi-threaded OpenGL

http://www.macobserver.com/gamingnews/2007/04/03.1.shtml

So, great. :)

Before, it didn't match my X1900, on my PC tower, and turning on the glow effect killed the fps on my laptop (though, it still ran very well - but, not amazingly well) I still find it hard to believe that it could, but -shrug- Not trying to be negative to be negative..I have the top of the line MBP, after all! :) Just trying to be realistic, as I'm pretty picky over how my games perform.

Most people will think it runs flawlessly and that's great.

BUY MORE MACS, DAMMIT!!

[dagamer34]

I've played WoW on my MBP for about a week on medium settings. Runs pretty well. No problems at all. I highly recommend it.

[altermind]

on macbook pro 17 inch core duo.... runs maxed out... 45 / 60 fps.. even in lagforge

[joe90]

I tried WoW on a brand new MacPro (unfortunately with the Nvidia 7300GT) and was getting upto 25fps. Which isnt bad but when I compare that with my PC ( Athlon 64 3000 + ATI 1950) for the same location I was getting 50-60fps at much higher settings.

To those of you that are getting 45-60fps what settings are you using? i.e screen res etc

[tomasarson]

n/m didn't realize it was notebook specific.

Edited June 4, 2007 by tomasarson