Gaming on MBP 13"

I own the baseline Early 2011 model of the MacBook Pro 13".

Long story short, I want to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I know the game isn't that demanding, but I'm worried that that the Intel integrated graphics just won't cut it. I'd be playing this game through Windows 7.

I was wondering if there were any ways to improve gaming performance. Upgrading from 4GB RAM to 8GB?

I'd like to find out if the game will be enjoyable before I spend $200 on a genuine copy of Windows and $60 on the game.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can help

-fr0styable

 

may be playable on minimal settings, my daughter does it on rare occasions. and no, extra ram wont help the GPU is the limiting factor.

fyi W7 hp should be about $100 not 200, if your in school you can sometimes get it as cheap as $10

 

I own a mid range MacBook air early 2011 as well

GeForce 320m
4GB ram

I play SWTOR in low/mid settings

It gets choppy in high population areas like cities, but doesn't affect actual gameplay. Definitely playable

Though I don't know how it would run without a dedicated video card

 

Didn't know that
but I imagine It would still perform much better right?

Trying to give some perspective to the OP

 

I've referred to this page many times in this forum. It's a gaming comparison of the 2010 (GeForce 320) and 2011 (Intel HD) MBP 13 models, with benchmarks done in both OS X and Windows. The 2011 model is consistently faster in OS X while the 2010 model is much faster in Windows.

MacBook Pro (2010) vs MacBook Pro (2011)

 

This game is not that demanding at all, so I think you'd be able to run it.

Just for the Info... i play SWTOR using Parallels.

MBP 17" i7 quad 2.2, 8gb ram, Radeon 6750 1gb, OSX 10.7
Parallels 7, running Win7 Pro 64 bit, with 2 CPUs and 3.5 gb of ram to it... vram set to 512mb... Aero and such disabled in Win7 to help performance.
I Run SWTOR at 1280x800, with Bloom and Shadows off, everything else maxed... and depending where i am and whats going on in game I get from 30 to 65 fps.

If I can run it in a virtual machine good, I think it'll run decently on lower end machines with a directly installed Windows (aka Bootcamp) version as well.

Once some networking issues in Wine is fixed... I'll try to get it working with Wineskin so Windows isn't needed... but eventually they'll port the game to Mac anyways, since they said recently they will look into porting it after launch and everything is done and things are going smooth, and Mac will be the first thing they look at... and the creators of the game engine are already finishing up a OpenGL version of the Engine with Mac support. Eventually we should have a native version, but it might be a year or so.

 

yeah, the bottom line is that you will be able to play it as long as you don't care too much for playing with high quality and stuttering in certain places.

I think this game demands alot from your CPU,
I can play Skyrim, Batman Arkham City, Star Craft 2, Deus Ex 2
all with medium quality with no problem and they all look awesome

All in BootCamp partition, definitely no virtualization

Macbook Air are awesome

Btw SWTOR doesn't include free months, so you have to buy a subscription right away, so it ends up more than just $60 for the game

 

thats not true.. the initial purchase includes the first 30 days of subscription. It makes you sign up for a subscription which you can cancel at any time... but it won't charge you any for that subscription until the first 30 days are up.

 

I don't know how well SWTOR will run with a Core i5, but on my old Toshiba L745-S4210 with a 2.1GHz Core i3, 4GB DDR3, Windows 7 HP, and Intel HD 3000, the game ran worse than I had hoped. While turning everything down to minimum helped, it still didn't run as I wished. Now as I said, the Core i5 may help the game's performance, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

 

Hey all, thanks for your help.

I pulled the trigger and installed Windows 7. It's kind of a trip to run Windows on a Mac. Just feels...weird.

Long story short, SWTOR is installed and runs very well. On low settings, the game plays smooth and the FPS is always 28+.

My fan does get extremely loud, but most Mac fans do when running games or other demanding software.

Thanks!