Guild Wars 2

It’s about time for this thread to go up I suppose, given that people are receiving theirs.

This time around we have the 13" with Iris 5100 and dual core i5 or i7 variants, and the 15" in quad-core i7 and either the Iris Pro 5200 or Nvidia’s GT 750M. Graphics cards are likely to be the main differentiator here, although GW2 is pretty heavily CPU-bound so we’ll see.

This thread is to post thoughts on performance, graphics quality, and overall impressions. My own 13" looks to be arriving tomorrow, so I’ll contribute when it does.

Tomorrow I will go to the nearby apple store and see if they have the rmbp 13" 8gb ram 256gb ssd 2.4ghz.
I hope they do ahah
Last week I was about to by the 13" air with 8gb ram. Good thing I didn’t ahah. I will surely be more well served with this rmbp and play the game even better I think

Runs extremely good. Although after 1-2min the f=game is launched the fan starts to spin at max speed. It heats a bit as well.

@Gintokikun: what resolution do you play at, and how is the performance in wvw, can you name the frames?
cheers,
ronkar

Haven’t played yet wvwvw. I was out of the game 2 months because I moved to another country.
I don’t play in the best resolution because it would be too small for the size of the screen. I play in the third best resolution (if it helps, can’t remember which).
Actually, I played more intensively, and I have to say the rmbp doesn’t heat that much. You practically don’t even feel it. It reaches a certain temperature and remains there, it’s quite cool I have to say. If you stop like for 1/2min the heat goes down right away. I have to say I’m quite amazed

Thanks for your answer! it really might be an option.

May I ask you that which model you tested on? 15" or 13"? If you tested on 15" model, is it the model that has only Intel Iris Pro’s GPU or Nvidia’s GT 750M? I’m going to buy the 15" model which has only Intel Iris Pro’s GPU soon but not sure that It can play GW2 smooth or not

//Sorry my English isn’t good :P

hienvan.7824:

May I ask you that which model you tested on? 15" or 13"? If you tested on 15" model, is it the model that has only Intel Iris Pro’s GPU or Nvidia’s GT 750M? I’m going to buy the 15" model which has only Intel Iris Pro’s GPU soon but not sure that It can play GW2 smooth or not

//Sorry my English isn’t good :P

If you look at the beginning of the thread I said I bought the 13" .
8Gb RAM, 256Gb ssd 2.4ghz i5

Thanks for your answer

I just got the 15" Macbook Pro without the Nvidia GT750 (I couldn’t justify the extra $400 for the higher model). It doesn’t look as nice as the Radeon 6870 in my desktop, but then the lights in my neighborhood don’t dim when I turn it on either. Mostly I’ve been running it in Windows, but I have tried it on the Mac client and it runs beautifully. I’ll try and collect some fps data for both the Mac and Windows clients when I get a free moment.

Haven’t tried it in WvW yet, but I’ve had no trouble with WvW on my Lenovo with its i5 (Intel HD 3000) so I’m not expecting any. Worse case scenario, I’ll have to turn the settings down.

I recorded some frames per second values. Bear in mind that this is very unscientific (and not very thorough), but hopefully it will give an idea of what to expect.

The killing boar was done on the Queensdale train. That poor sucker didn’t stand a chance. WvW was full but the train had a good crowd of people. I also went into Lion’s Arch and ran back and forth across the Halloween crowd and even did the cauldron puzzle.

I repeated the tests while booted into Windows to compare the results.

This is on a 15" Macbook Pro Late 2013, 2.0GHz, 16G RAM, Iris Pro.

GW Mac Client

Resolution: 1680×1050

Auto detect (selected in options)
16 – 34 fps, LA Halloween
55 – 60 fps running from Ojun’s Lumbermill waypoint to boar
20 fps killing boar with crowd

Best Performance (selected in options)
45 – 55 fps in LA
83 – 111 fps running from Ojun’s Lumbermill waypoint to boar
35 – 40 fps killing boar with crowd

GW Windows Client

Resolution: 1680×1050

Auto detect (selected in options)
40 – 50 fps, LA Halloween
77 – 95 fps from Ojun’s Lumbermill waypoint to boar
20 – 30 fps killing boar with crowd

Best Performance (selected in options)
76 – 88 fps in LA
110 – 136 fps from Ojun’s Lumbermill waypoint to boar
42 – 60 fps killing boar with crowd

It’s no surprise that the Windows client performs better since the Mac client has the cider wrapper adding overhead. But even in crowds the Mac client is playable. Best Performance might not look as pretty, but it appears playable even in crowds. But if you’re already dual booting into Windows it’s the way to go.