WoW/Gaming on a 12 inch powerbook.

This is my first apple and I'm in love. I'd tried windows notebooks and had been disappointed by both the design quality and the support so I figured I'd have to wait until notebook prices changed to where I could get what I want with the money I had.

However I stopped in my school store and saw that they had the 1.5ghz powerbook G4 with the 60 gig HD/Combo drive on sale for 999 so, after some test driving, I purchased one and it's sitting on my desk now all pretty and functional.

After doing some reading I found that the videocard in the 12 inch powerbook (Geforce go 5200 64megs of VRAM) is considered somewhat "substandard" and I was wondering if I'd be able to run World of Warcraft on this baby with any sort of success. Does anyone here have any experience that they can share with me? I'm planning on dropping a gig of ram in here if that helps any.

 

WoW is not all that graphically intense as far as games go. Your powerbook should be more than a match for it. It is largely the First Person Shooters (Doom 3, Quake 4, etc) that need more graphics, though other games like Civ 4 are catching up. But for Mac games, you should be fine for now.

 

Hmm, that's good to know I suppose. Do you have any direct experience with the card in question? I'm not expecting desktop level of performance out of this guy but I'd like to get a decent set of FPS and have the game be playable under most situations (even at reduced graphic levels).

 

if WoW is anything like starcraft (i haven't played WoW), then it should be fine. My friends powerbook can handle quake 3 (maybe 4, not sure) and unreal tournament 4 fine. It is quite fluid with little lag.

 

I don't doubt for a second that any of the 15 or 17 inch powerbooks could handle it smoothly. My biggest worry is the 12 incher with the previously mentioned videocard. As far as I can find on the web the 5200 is the lowest form of core-image capable video that mac has to offer. Would I have been better purchasing the ibook with the radeon 9550 with only 32 megs of vram?

 

nope, i think the radeon 9550 is the lowest core-image capable video
so that would make the Geforce go 5200 64megs of VRAM a bttr graphics card than the one in ibook.. i would keep the pbook.. or u cud always trade with me =) my new ibooks coming in 2 days.. haha jk but yea the gpu in urs is better

 

supposedly the 9550 is faster, but the one in the pb is better imo. jugding from the somewhat compartive performance between my ibook and my friends pbook. the extra 32 megs of vram makes a large difference.

 

i second that

 

I also third that. However, I believe its the other way around - the Nvidia is slightly faster than the 9550.

 

No, the 9550 (downclocked 9600) is by far a more powerful GPU, but the 32MB difference in VRAM and 8x vs. 4x AGP bus are significant in modern games, which tend to have large textures and models.

 

Thanks for the correction

 

Back to the topic. Will it play, yes. Will it be pretty, no. WoW will play on anything all the way down to GEFORCE-2 (i tested that with my GF MX4400 64MB), that is if you turn all the graphic option to low. It's designed for that. Just steer clear from LAG FORGE.

 

I have a 12" Powerbook and it runs pretty well at a low resolution with a lot of the graphical features turned on. I was surprised by the computer's ability to handle all the lighting and glow effects. I do have some slow down in heavily populated areas and towns when I am first entering them. However, I think they might be caused by lag more than anything else. Overall, I find that WoW is very playable and enjoyable on a 12" Powerbook.

 

Ive played WoW on my brothers 15" powerbook. It works very well. Much of the intense graphics are stored on the game servers themselves. If you have a fine GPU, you are set.

 

I have a 12" Powerbook G4 1.33. I have played WoW a number of times on it (though I usually use my windows desktop for gaming). I was quite suprised at how well it did run. Yes, there can be some stuttering in more crowded areas, but really not much more than the normal server lag, and even with lower graphic settings, WoW still looks great. I pretty much play on the default settings without really any trouble.

 

If you plan on gaming, I suggest adding more RAM to your system to help performance.