Quote:
Originally Posted by jesh
I see a lot of misinformation in this thread..
Macs will run gw buttery smooth if you just use WINE. You don't even need to waste money on crossover. WINE comes with a preset just for guildwars and is free software. Open source. My brother uses it all the time.
There's also the obvious option of buying a copy of windows 7, installing it onto the mac with bootcamp and using software (open source too) to run windows 7 without having to reboot. Yeah. Lots of people have done it.
This would also ensure gw2 compatibility without experimenting with settings in WINE or waiting for a preset to be made or bothering to restart your computer to run windows.
Keep in mind the new macbook will give you 10 hours of battery life, (less when gaming, obviously), weighs less than most laptops by a good pound, and will be a lot more dependable than anything else you're looking at.
The new macbook base model comes with the geforce 320m, which is an integreated chip and will share memory with your laptop's ram. Generally this would be a bad thing, but the 320m is brand new and has been designed fairly well. It is replacing the 9400m and is quite a bit faster as you can see from apple's website.
There's a lot of controversy over the 320m, but in general you can compare it to the 9600m ddr2 gpu.
9600M:
Pavilion dv7-1050eg ( 1280x800)
T9400
4096 MB
500 / 400MHz
512MB GDDR2 175.53
3dmark: 4419
320M:
MacBook Pro 13" 2010
P8600
4096 MB
3dmark: 4754
Lots of people have reported playing starcraft 2 and bad company 2 very easily on this card as well, so I wouldn't worry about gw2 performance. ANet has stated they are designing gw2 to run on a wide range of machines, just as gw1 did.
What I want you to get out of this is to not rule out the macbook. OSX is hands down designed better than any other OS for actually get stuff done fast, and apple is extremely well known for making dependable hardware.
You're looking at qosmios.. which is the exact opposite. Huge, clunky, unstable things, just to get ~10 more fps out of gw2?
Well I guess the choice is yours in the end.
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Misinformation indeed....
The MBP uses a GeForce 330M as it's dGPU. It is not a gaming grade GPU, but it can play many games on low to medium settings. It should be noted, however, that the 330M will struggle with Guild Wars 2 on anything over a mix of medium/low settings at resolutions over 1440x900.
In addition, Apple makes NONE of the hardware in their notebooks. The only thing they produce are the aesthetics (the frame and fashion design) The hardware is all standard, run of the mill x86 hardware from Intel and nVidia. I believe they use either Samsung or LG drives for their disk drive supplier. This may have changed.
Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a Toshiba. 2 of my friends have the large Qosmio notebooks, one of which is 3 years old and still perfect. The other is about a year old, and fast as hell even now.
10 FPS? This will beat a Macbook pro in GW2 by at LEAST 30 FPS. I do mean
AT LEAST.
Buy this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834214050
And slaughter Guild Wars 2 like it was Pacman. Also, it's at an excellent price.
It has nVidia's new 460M, which features Optimus. That means the GPU can completely shut itself down when gaming, consuming 0W of power, therefore increasing battery life substantially. Yes, it's big, but... it gets nearly 4 hours of battery life when you aren't gaming, and even while gaming, you'll still get at least and hour and half.