How well will I be able to play Crysis?

I just purchased a 2.2 macbook pro and soon I'm going to buy a copy of vista home prem and install it using bootcamp. I'm not using the laptop primarily for gaming and, while I would have loved to have the 256mb 8600 gt, I just couldn't bring myself to spend 500 extra bucks for 128mb of extra vram (the extra 200mhz wasn't a big deal to me and I custom ordered mine with the 160bg hard drive already).

I was just wondering if anyone had played games like Bioshock on a 2.2 mpb and what kind of performance I could expect out of Crysis. Obviously, I'm not going to be able to play it at max or high settings, but will I be able to get decent visuals and frame rates?

 

There's a bunch of Bioshock and Crysis threads out there. You might try searching for one.

Generally, you should be able to run the two decently, but there are documented issues with Vista. Your hardware should not be an issue.

Congrats on the MBP purchase.

 

yes and yes, very low probably looks exquisite. but med-low or med for that

 

I'd say medium performance would probably run acceptable. Hopefully in DX10 - you bought a DX10 card so you'd better use those fancy features!

 

Bioshock runs great, but I dont know about Crysis. I decided to pay to get into the beta, and the game doesn't run good at al. I have a 2.2 MBP with 128 8600, and it cant do high or mediuem(1280x800) and with XP. It actually crashed my mbp. Maybe its just because its beta, maybe its just my computer, but ether way I dont know how the final version will run. And personally it didn't look all that great, but I guess it can change.

 

I have played the beta as well, runs pretty decent for me at 1280x800 with medium quality (shadows at low). It all depends on what you consider acceptable levels though. Right now its running in the 20-40 fps zone I think, I assume once they finish optimizing it will be in the 30-50 zone which I think will be fine. Its pretty good for a laptop I think.

 

kanos, are you using the latest nvidia drivers 163.69....supposedly they are optimized for crysis. I saw a decent improvement for bioshock....running at 25-30 fps at 1280x800 high. I'm assuming you also have the 2.2 MBP.

 

Yea it could just be that I didnt spend enough time tweaking, and I dont have the latest drivers, but for me the only time it was smooth was when i was looking at the ground/corner/other small spaces. So I guess its all about the drivers then.

 

yea drivers are playing a big role especially with all the new "dx10" games

get em at laptopvideo2go

 

Thanks for the answers anyone.

Another question real quick.

I've never had a mac before but I've always heard OS X wasn't that good for gaming.

The first game I tried was Civ 4, which froze the machine during every loading screen. The tech guys said it was because the 8600gt is so new, the game has issues with it.

Since then I have installed Empire Earth 2, Jedi Knight 2 and Jedi Academy and, while they are playable, things get pretty choppy at times at 1024x768.

I'm hoping for a significant increase in performance under Vista but I won't be getting it for awhile and the gaming under OS X is slightly disappointing. Is OS X really that bad for gaming?

I love my new MacBook Pro and I chose it over an Asus G1s gaming notebook because it wasn't my priority, but I was hoping for a decent performance from a Core 2 Duo and a 8600 gt, even if it is only 128mb of vram.

 

If you're gonna game, bootcamp and windows is the way. Even playing a game like second life, on mac it was far worse than in windows because windows xp allocates 512 video ram whereas mac doesn't.