4 links tagged “apple”

Excellent Mac gaming blog.

Since the day after the new 2008 MacBooks were introduced, I've been using a MacBook running a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MBs of L2 cache and a bus speed of 1.07GHz. The MacBook features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display with a 1280x800 pixel resolution, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card, a 250GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, and 2GBs of RAM. This is the standard top of the line model running for $1599 in the Apple Store.

One of the questions that has been on everyone's minds since Apple announced their new laptops on Tuesday has been whether the improved NVIDIA graphics cards that Steve Jobs spent so much time discussing on stage would mean that Apple's newer laptops would make good gaming machines. While it's unlikely that Apple is going to make any large moves towards becoming a new gaming platform to rival the current PC market, these new graphics cards combined with OS X's Boot Camp, which allows you to install Windows XP or Vista on a separate partition on your Mac's hard drive, allow Mac owners to install all the PC games they want on that partition. The big question is: can the MacBook really handle the graphics required by graphic-intensive games built for PC gaming machines?

Last week we posted a first test video running Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning on the new 2.4GHz MacBook via a Windows XP Professional installation using Boot Camp. This weekend, I sacrificed many hours of my personal time installing and playing numerous games, including Half Life 2 (pictured above), on the MacBook to bring you this report. In short, the new MacBook has the horsepower to hold its own as a gaming laptop for the casual gamer.