Will the New MacBook Pros be Decent Gaming PCs?

The word on the street is that Apple's new high-end MacBook Pro is set to ship with an NVIDIA 9600M GT, arguably the most underwhelming GPU upgrade to Apple's "pro" part in years. Don't quote me on that, but the rumor sites have long speculated that the MacBook Pro, which currently uses NVIDIA's 8600M GT mobile GPU, would transition to the shave-and-a-haircut 9600M GT -- effectively an up-clocked 8600M GT built on a smaller nanometer process -- experiencing the sort of modest performance leap that flatters even single digit percentages.

Why so hard on the 9600M GT? Because there's simply nothing exciting about it. Same number of vertex/pixel shaders as the 8600M GT, same poky 128-bit memory bus, slightly faster clocks, slightly cooler due to its smaller manufacturing process -- a benefit obviously neutralized by its running at said slightly higher clocks.

Let's get one thing straight before I continue slapping the 9600M around: I'm talking about the MacBook Pro here, not the new MacBook. You want the scoop on the MacBook with its rumored Intel-GMA-killing integrated NVIDIA GPU? Have a look at Peter Cohen's "Will the next MacBooks be better gaming systems?"

Okay. Let's have a look at some actual numbers, here compiled by Notebookcheck, a kind of mobile GPU data cube you can slice and dice to find rough analogues between parts, one that offers a crude but durable means of getting a ballpark feel for performance metrics. All detail settings in F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 were cranked to maximum here, and the MacBook Pro's numbers were pulled out of Boot Camp.

MacBook Pro 15" (Intel 2.4GHz T7700, 8600M GT w/512MB)

F.E.A.R. - 37 fps
Doom 3 - 86.5 fps
3DMark 06 - 3900

HP Pavilion dv7-1050eg (Intel 2.53GHz T9400, 9600M GT w/512MB)

F.E.A.R. - 40 fps
Doom 3 - 85 fps
3DMark 06 - 4419

Like I said, great big lung-sucking mouthful of yawn, if in fact I and pretty much everyone else in rumor-ville haven't missed the boat (the dock, the entire body of water) on the 9600M as discrete heir apparent in the high-end Pro parts.

Now you can throw a faster Intel processor into the mix for a sliver of an uptick, argue for a frame here and there out of an integrated NVIDIA mainboard chipset (PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout thinks it's NVIDIA's MCP79), you can boost the memory to 3 or 4 GB, you can tuck a zippy 7200 RPM hard drive in, but in the end, you're still talking performance crumbs that frankly wouldn't feed a mouse, if, say, that mouse was a mainstream/enthusiast gamer.

Of course I realize there's a certain contingent of you who buy the MacBook Pro, then go back a year or two to play all the stuff you haven't yet. Fair enough. There's certainly a galaxy of older PC games out there that run swell as can be on today's MacBook Pros, not a dropped frame or stutter in sight. What's more, lots of you are increasingly looking from your PCs (laptops, desktops, whatever) then over at your Xbox 360s or PS3s and saying "Heck with it, I'll just buy the console version."

But let's talk here and now for a second. What you're not seeing from numbers like the ones above, is anything relevant to what you might want to play on a MacBook Pro in Boot Camp mode today or down the road a bit. Namely: Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Red Alert 3, and Grand Theft Auto IV. Oh, Crysis runs...if you're willing to gag every detail on "low" and drop the resolution (blurry interpolation, hooray!) and, you know, basically eradicate one of the most compelling reasons to play the game at all. Crysis has been out nearly a year now, and while I wouldn't expect an Apple part to jump up and become the definitive experience for that sort of edge-bleeder, I'm well within the bounds of reason to expect a little more intrepidness out of a GPU update to a part we've been living with since July 2007.

There's simply no way to get around the 9600M GT's lackluster numbers without dropping a faster GPU into the matrix. Which GPU? Why not an NVIDIA 9800M GT, which actually shifts the architecture in a manner becoming of a part dubbed "pro"? The 9800M GT has 96 pixel and vertex shaders (versus the 8600's 32) and in a T9400 Intel Core 2 Duo turns in a much more robust 3DMark 06 score of 9228, not to mention a F.E.A.R. score of 118 frames per second.

When it comes to sugar and spice and everything nice, Apple has my vote neatly wrapped and ribboned. I love working in OS X and mostly dig the MacBook Pro's physical layout. But as a mainstream gaming machine... Let's put it this way: If the 9600M GT really is the anointed part and the benchmark differences after everything's said and accounted for look roughly like the ones above, I'm probably through with the MacBook Pro. It'll be down to a MacBook or MacBook Air for me, and back to dedicated PC hardware for PC gaming.

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Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/007916.html

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