Posted 18 December 2007 - 11:18 AM
i play WoW a LOT on three machines:
* my original black macbook pro 2.0 Ghz, with 1.5 GB of RAM, which i bought new for $1500 and is my main computer
* my iBook G4 1.25 Ghz, with 756 Mb of RAM, which i bought factory refurbished years ago for $1100, and
* my son's dell inspiron 9300 2.0 Ghz, with 1 GB of RAM and an nVidia 6800 go video card with a 256 MB cache, running XP media edition, which i bought used for $700 from ebay in october.
forget the iBook: it's practically useless about 50% of time. it never achieves more than 25 fps and typically spends its time around 5 to 10 fps. i can use the auction house ok, but questing is a huge pain, and pvp is simply not going to happen.
but the comparison between the dell and the macbook is instructive. i not only play both computers frequently, my son and i often sit side by side at the dining room table with them, so i watch them in action against each other constantly. on the macbook, all the video and sound options in the game are reduced to the lowest values possible to maximize performance. on the dell, it's the opposite. all the options (shaders, lighting effects, texture effects, reverb, sound channels, etc.) are pushed out to the max.
even so, the $1500 macbook is simply AWFUL in comparison with the $700 dell.
after 2 months of playing on these machines next to each other, neither of us still can resist commenting with incredulity on, and laughing at, how utterly abysmal the macbook's performance is, when judged against the dell. (i say that as an apple loyalist since my 1979 [apple II]. my main computer has always been a mac, since they were invented, and still is.) "your macbook can't even see that building in the distance? OMG! you can't even tell that its RAINING!!! and i'm seeing the individual water drops bouncing off the ground!!"
playing with the dell is like playing with glasses on. playing with the macbook is like playing with uncorrected 20/200 vision. the macbook, even with all settings minimized, has never gotten more than 35 fps. it usually gets in the mid 20s. last night, though, and this is not uncommon, it spent most of the night between 15 and 20 fps, a frame rate which most pc gamers would consider unplayable, though i play acceptably all the time.
the dell, even with all 3D-rendering settings maxed out, rarely falls below 50 fps and usually plays around 70 fps.
if i increase only one or two of the 3D-rendering settings for the macbook even slightly, then the frame rate drops to truly unplayable levels (below 10 fps). the idea of maxing them out, as i always do with the dell, is laughable.
i would LOVE to have a new macbook pro for WoW. i'm sure its performance would match the dell's. but frankly, i can't afford the $2000. i guarantee you that i'll be buying myself another used dell (or hp or asus) laptop for $700 or so, just for WoW purposes, as soon as i can afford it. (i can't keep borrowing my son's.)
if your choice is between the macbook and the macbook pro, and you want to play WoW (let alone any other GPU-intensive games), definitely buy the pro. you won't regret it. but if money is tight, buy a used pc with a good graphics processor for a few hundred bucks from ebay. you won't regret that either.
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