Hi there...

Ok, so after spending another 4 hours in the Regent Street Apple store today, and more mental trauma in choosing between the 15" and 12", I think it will be the 12"...

But although I took my own DVD in to the store to see what that would be like, NO store will let me try games on the new 12inch powerbook....

So can anyone tell me what game performance will be really like on it? I've read forums where people have been using lower spec Powerbooks, and some commented that games played pants, and others commented that games were great... so please can anyone who has a 1.5Ghz 512MB 12inch Powerbook tell me what I should expect...

I'm not a huge gamer, but I'd probably buy a couple of first person games, i.e. along the lines of Return to Castle Wolfenstien, Doom x, Unreal Tournament x....

So what would these games play like? Will they jerk? Will I need to run in wireframe mode, or could I have eye-candy set to max? And are their multiplayer over net performance ok?

Cheers :-)


Usefulmatt

Anything based on the Quake III engine will be fine, even with fairly high settings. Anything that likes serious grunt, eg: Halo, will be less happy. Doom III would probably only run at the lowest settings possible.

Something to note, game performance is supposedly far better in Tiger.

To get best results, "hide" all applications before running games - each individual window in OSX takes up VRAM, so the less visible the better.

Gaming will be generally acceptable on the 12" but the 15" will be better as it has a better graphics chipset, not to mention a bigger screen to view :-).

I've done gaming on the 12" 1.0ghz powerbook and it manages okay with Halo, RTCW, CoD/CoD:UO. UT2k4 is a little choppy though, but the extra grunt in the current 12" would probably be okay.

Everyone has their reasons for picking their powerbook size, but I would certainly consider the extra money for the 15". The screen has more real estate and is nicer quality and the machine has better specs. (I've owned 12", 15" and 17" powerbooks, and have come full circle at this point, deciding on the 15" as the best one of the lot for me in regards to power vs size tradeoff)