Bootcamp gaming with rMBP

Hey there. I have a 15" rMBP. I have bootcamp running with Windows 7 x64. I keep seeing various posts around the internet about gaming with the discrete card (GeForce GT 650M) in this laptop. I realize this isn't a gaming laptop and such, but my home PC has a GeForce 8800GT and from benchmarks I'm seeing, this laptop should beat my PC with the 8800GT, right? Instead what I'm finding is really poor gaming on this laptop. I've tried Witcher 1, Witcher 2, Starcraft 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, etc. I've had to turn each of the previous games down to 1280x800 with the lowest possible settings to pull 30FPS. For instance, looking here, I'd expect to have great graphic performance in Deus Ex: Deus Ex Human Revolution Benchmarks - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Are my experienced to be expected? Again, I don't expect this to be a great gaming laptop or anything, but shouldn't it beat my 8800GT desktop PC?

 

No, the 8800 GT should be about 50% faster than a 650m. Remember, no matter what they tell you, notebook GPUs are much slower than the equivalent desktop GPU. The 15" rMacbook Pro does suffer from throttling in Windows too so that could also be an issue. They really haven't licked the thinness vs performance issue. Thin computers are still not good performing. I'd save they'll have it licked 2-3 generations from now.

Also, the native resolution of the rMacbook Pros is too high for their GPUs to handle. 1280x800 is half res so that's your best bet.

 

have you tried getting decent drivers installed? Its not a top end gaming machine, but your results sound a bit lower than it should be.

 

This might the "2.0 update" rearing its head. Try resetting the SMC and see if your performance increases.

 

no the 8800 is indeed slower than the 650m.

s/he is probably needing to reset the smc.

 

I'll try the SMC reset. That's a bummer if it's a mere throttling issue. If the SMC reset doesn't work, I'm guessing I'll just have to wait for Apple to fix this?

Benchmarks like this PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - Video Card Look Up seem to indicate the GT 650m is some 2 times faster, which inspired my to pack up my PC and stick it in the closet.

 

Even if the SMC reset does work, the problem will come back again. Apple should release a fix for it, but this has been going on for some time with nothing out of them as yet.

 

That's pretty par for the course for Apple lately, IMO. And reseting the SMC did the trick. The GPU is now able to reach 900 MHz after being stuck around 270 MHz previously. What a difference that makes! I can play Starcraft II at 1920x1200 on ultra settings now and stay around 30 FPS. Thanks for helping me find a solution while I wait for Apple to address this!

 

actually this should have been fixed on the latest updates.

 

I'm as updated as can be. We'll see if it returns. I'm running EFI 1.0 which I am finding caused this problem to begin with. Won't a future EFI update be required to fix this issue?

 

there was a small patch made by apple couple of weeks ago that should have solved that, we know it in the EFI, but we dont know where or how to trigger it

 

Where are you seeing that? There's an EFI update for the Retina 13-inch model and a WiFi update for other 2012 Macs but nothing else that would resemble a fix for this specific issue.

 

do you remember that small update for lion and ml that was launched some weeks ago? that usually solved the issue, only once or twice you would need to reset the smc, after that it was all good
will try to find a link for ye

 

I'd appreciate that.

 

thats something i ve been wondering about as well — i am thinking about upgrading my mbp 2011 (considering next update) and screen resolution is depressing me.
Would it be right to assume that rmbp is worse for gaming than normal mbp? But what if next line of mbp will be full retina? I am afraid that those mobile gpus will fry itself on such a resolution and turning down native resolution is never a good thing to do.

 

The thing about the Retina display is that pretty much all resolutions look native. At the very least, 1280x800 will look native.

 

so if i set 1440 on it and put it against my 1440x900 macbook pro i wont notice the difference?

 

in something with great levels of precision? probably... in a game... most likely not.

 

Ah, you're right on that. I had the benchmarks backwards 11kish for the 8800 GT and 15kish for the 650m (GDDR5) on 3Dmark06. I wouldn't put much stock in Passmark's numbers, they're biased towards compute performance which is not the entire story when it comes to GPUs.