Guild Wars 2

So I’ve bee playing for almost 2 year on my 13" macbook pro from earlly 2011. I’ve always played on low setting with a few things turned up to medium, and I’ve enjoyed it just fine. I have pretty low frame rate at those setting, usually around 16-18. I play 90% pvp and a little WvW, so that’s kind of rough, but I have plenty of fun.

anyway, I recently bought the HoT pre purchase, and have been playing with the beta a bit. I’ve always kind of ignored the silverwates because it doesn’t run very well on my computer, but it definitely seems the the new maps are simply too vast, and my frames drop to about 5. I simply won’t be able to enjoy the new content like this, and on top of that, i’d lik eto at least have 20+ frames in pvp.

this is the kicker though, I will not be able to buy a windows PC. I simply will not do it and it’s out of the question. I know they are vastly superior in price to quality ratio for a use such as video games, but I will still be needed to own a macbook for my personal life.

So I’ve decided the most likely option I’ll be pursuing will be the 15" macbook pro that has the AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics card. Does anyone have any experience with the model macbook, specifically playing on the OSX client, because I’d rather not bootcamp my computer. If so, will you share your graphical settings and performance experience?

Thanks for your time!

Sigh.. No one playing on a 15" Mac with a dedicated graphics card?

I don’t have a macbook pro though I believe they are lovely machines

I play on an IMac i7 with Nvidia graphics card:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB. The graphics are gorgeous and it mostly does a good job except I have to lower my graphics setting to Best Performance whenever there are a lot of players at an event or it crashes. The game also crashes at other times too and this is a fairly recent thing. This can be when I am swapping characters or maps or sometimes just looking at the map. It is infuriating but I am stubborn and love my Mac and don’t want to turn it into a PC so I put up with the crashes.

I have a Windows laptop I can use but I hate playing on a small screen after the big one on my Mac.

I don’t know if that will be of use as the IMac and Macbook are two different beasts. At a guess, I imagine you will be able to play fairly well but maybe with some quirks along the way similar to how it is for me.

Actually the iMac is built out of laptop components and is essentially very very similar to the MBP. The AMD card on the new 15" MBP’s is a bit more powerful than the NVIDIA card on Figlilly’s iMac. You should get quite good performance playing the game. I use a late 2011 MBP and get alright performance with all graphics set to high (if I turn things down it runs smoothly).

Playing in OSX is going to limit how well the game runs though. It will crash. You will not get as good performance as you would running the game in bootcamp. Nonetheless it should still be very pretty

GinghamLion.3614:

Sigh.. No one playing on a 15" Mac with a dedicated graphics card?

The problem is that laptops themselves are horrible for gaming (source, I use one) but by forcing yourself to only use a macbook for it is just asking for trouble :/

What I can tell you is that you need to have a powerful CPU to have an acceptable framerate on GW2. If you have a low end graphics card you can make do with lower graphic settings ingame and still get an acceptable framerate but otherwise they aren’t that important.

Whatever you decide to do, just prioritise the processor.

Purple Miku.7032:

GinghamLion.3614:

Sigh.. No one playing on a 15" Mac with a dedicated graphics card?

The problem is that laptops themselves are horrible for gaming (source, I use one) but by forcing yourself to only use a macbook for it is just asking for trouble :/

What I can tell you is that you need to have a powerful CPU to have an acceptable framerate on GW2. If you have a low end graphics card you can make do with lower graphic settings ingame and still get an acceptable framerate but otherwise they aren’t that important.

Whatever you decide to do, just prioritise the processor.

I really don’t think laptops are terrible for gaming.. There are wonderful gaming laptops out there, but they are more expensive than a desktop. Anyway.. That’s not what this topic is for.

The 15" MBP I mentioned has a 2.5ghz quad core i7. That, with the more than decent graphics card, should run this game extremely well. Right?

The 15" MBP I mentioned has a 2.5ghz quad core i7. That, with the more than decent graphics card, should run this game extremely well. Right?[/quote]

On Windows yes it would run the game extremely well. On OSX you’re going to come across the standard performance drop and frequent crashes that everyone experiences on the Mac Beta client. Those issues can’t be solved by a more powerful machine, they’re due to the client being a cider wrapper and aren’t just going to go away. The game still runs in 32bit so it can only make use of 4GB of RAM and both the CPU and GPU are being forced to run both the wrapper and the client itself – which is emulating DirectX in an OS that only has OpenGL.

GinghamLion.3614:

I really don’t think laptops are terrible for gaming.. There are wonderful gaming laptops out there, but they are more expensive than a desktop. Anyway.. That’s not what this topic is for.

The 15" MBP I mentioned has a 2.5ghz quad core i7. That, with the more than decent graphics card, should run this game extremely well. Right?

Yeah you need to pay a ton of money to have a laptop that will run games well, but in the end you are basically always taking a performance loss comparatively to desktop counterparts.

Anyways, as for what you said… while that processor isn’t exactly bad, it’s kind of “meh” these days. 2.5ghz clockspeed isn’t too bad and should be able to run GW2 well enough but I suggest you read FlamingFoxx’s post above for a detailed explanation as to why no matter how hard you try you’re going to have lower performance results.

Generally speaking, laptops are usually worse for gaming but in addition to that so are macs. That doesn’t mean you absolutely can’t play them, but what it means is that you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot in multiple different ways. Even if you buy the best macbook out there you’re still going to be having issues while having paid more.