It has been a long-running joke amongst gamers that Mac users tend to wallow in a dearth of gaming options. While that perception may have been true in the past, the tides are definitely turning for the gaming Mac user. This post is a preview of our upcoming in-depth MacBook Pro review, and highlights the impressive performance that these machines have achieved in several popular PC games.

One of the most distinctive features of the new MacBook Pro is the inclusion of both an integrated and discrete mobile graphics card. The former is the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM and the latter is an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM.



The MacBook Pro's NVIDIA 9600M GT, photo courtesy of The MacBook Pro's NVIDIA 9600M GT, photo courtesy of iFixit

In Mac OS X, the two units can be switched back and forth (albeit with a log-out in between) for a tradeoff between performance and battery life. In Windows Vista, though, you're stuck in the better of the two video cards and with the corresponding disadvantage when it comes to battery life. With the introduction of this substantial video hardware in these professional-level notebooks, we found it important to quantify the level of power Apple has packed in.

Methodology



To benchmark the MacBook Pro's PC gaming performance, we installed Windows Vista Home Premium under Apple's Boot Camp and two popular games, BioShock and Portal, and ran them through their paces at various resolutions and quality levels. We recorded the frame rate in a series of samples using a software tool called Fraps. We calculated the percentage of samples where the frame rate had dropped below 30 frames per second, the percentage of samples where the frame rate exceeded 60 frames per second, and the percentage of frames that fell in between.



Playing BioShock on the MacBook Pro in Windows Vista Playing BioShock on the MacBook Pro in Windows Vista

The general idea is that in shooter games of this nature, gaming will be most enjoyable when frame rates are between 30 and 60 frames per second. Being above 60 is not so bad, and below 30 is not desirable.

BioShock

In BioShock, the horizontal frame locking (where the frame rate is locked to multiples of 30 frames per second) was disabled and all quality settings were maximized. We allowed the game to control the anti-aliasing settings as there were no in-game controls. We ran through the opening "Crash Site" scene to the point where the character submerged in the Bathysphere—about two minutes of moderately complex scenes. We tested under three resolutions and the above settings: 1024x768, 1280x720 (wide screen), and 1440x900 (widescreen and native resolution of the LCD).

BioShock - Highest Quality 1024x768 1280x720 (ws) 1440x900 (ws) Lowest Acceptable Frame Rate 30 30 30 Highest Acceptable Frame Rate 60 60 60 Percent of Frames < 30 0% 12% 49% Percent of Frames between 30 and 60 63% 76% 48% Percent of Frames > 60 37% 11% 3% Average Frame Rate 58.4 45.0 32.3

Playing BioShock on a new MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro performed excellently in this fairly-demanding game, playing best under the 1280x720 resolution, but not doing so bad under the native resolution of the LCD. Game play under all conditions was very pleasurable and the few instances of "hiccups" or frame tearing was minor. Locking the horizontal frame rate rendered the game very enjoyable to play. BioShock runs in the Unreal 3 engine, and performance is somewhat indicative of many modern PC games like Unreal Tournament 3.

Portal

While not the most demanding of games, Portal represents a fun and extremely popular game released late last year. We ran through the first two levels of the game; about two minutes of fairly simple scenes. We ran these tests at 1024x768 with no anti-aliasing, 1152x720 with no anti-aliasing, 1152x720 with 4xMSAA, and 1152x720 with 8xMSAA. All tests were run with all detail settings at their highest values.

Portal - Highest Quality 1024x768 1152x720 1152x720 4x 1152x720 8x Lowest Acceptable Frame Rate 30 30 30 30 Highest Acceptable Frame Rate 60 60 60 60 Percent of Frames < 30 0% 0% 0% 0% Percent of Frames between 30 and 60 0% 0% 2% 25% Percent of Frames > 60 100% 100% 98% 75% Average Frame Rate 149.4 118.3 92.4 71.0

It's fairly evident that games such as Portal pose no real challenge to the hardware in the new MacBook Pro. Portal runs on Valve's Source engine, but due to its simple nature, is not directly comparable to its big brother Half-Life 2. However, good performance in the Source engine should directly translate to good performance in one of the this year's more hotly anticipated PC games, Left 4 Dead.

It's important to note here that, while no serious gamer is going to be trading in his or her main gaming machine for a MacBook Pro any time soon, this level of performance in such a compact form-factor and at this price-point is pretty impressive. The new MacBook Pro is definitely up to the task of gaming on the road or for use at LAN parties when lugging around a desktop machine finally starts making your back hurt. Hey, we all age at some point.

In our full review of the MacBook Pro coming in a few days, we'll be exploring many more facets of the machine, including benchmarks in OS X and more games (including Half-Life 2, episode 2) in Windows Vista. Stay tuned!