Macbook Pro Retina Review (Running Windows 7 FTW)

So I went out and purchased a Macbook Pro Retina to use as my new gaming rig. I thought I would share my experience here.

1. Source a Macbook Pro Retina (getting easier now)
2. Bootcamp Windows 7 onto it
3. Install updates endlessly
3.5 Realise you installed 32bit Win7 so start again at step 2
4. Install POE
5. Win

So that is pretty much what I did. What do I think of running Path of Exile at 2880 x 1800 on a GT650M? Well the game looks and runs absolutely amazing. The UI scales perfectly and it is a real credit to GGG that POE looks awesome at this resolution. Many other games I have since installed on it have unreadable GUI elements due to poor scaling to this resolution.

So as a mobile gaming rig: Awesome


I have read on some websites that people prefer to run games such as Diablo 3 at 1920 x 1080 to improve frame rates. As a side note I would suggest you do your math first and find a 16:10 resolution, as the 2880 x 1800 display is a 16:10 ratio. Games at 1920 x 1200 still look very sharp, however if it runs at 2880 then run it at 2880!!

The build of the laptop is extremely solid. You can pick up the 2kg laptop from the corner and it doesn't flex at all. This is replacing my series 9 Samsung (900X3A) that was build very solidly itself however that laptop now feels as though it has some flex in it in comparison.

Build quality: Excellent (but see below)


The only compromise on the build quality seems to be a lack of foresight with how the machine is used. My Samsung laptop had a nice curved hinge at the rear that supported the screen. I could hold it in my hand, rest it on my lap etc and it was comfortable. The rear of the screen on the MBPr where the hinge is has a squared edge, this digs into your hand, leg or whatever you are resting the laptop on.

So it performs well and it is build well. The last thing to discuss is the display. I don't know exactly how to describe how the display is on this thing. I am trying this in Firefox which scales beautifully. I have the UI scaling in Win7 at 250% and default scaling in Firefox at 250%. Absolutely everything is clear and sharp. Images on websites, though scaled are as sharp as they would appear on any other laptop at 100% scale. The screen holds up extremely well. As a plus the thumbnails in Speed Dial are readable, I can actually read the websites in Speed Dial without the need to load them. The screen itself is amazingly thin and as you have probably read in other MBPr reviews it has significantly reduced the glare. The colours are brilliant and the blacks are very true and dark. The screen is housed behind an edge to edge gorilla class panel making for easy cleaning.

Screen quality: Phenomenal


So in conclusion is the unit worth what you are paying for it? Probably. It is expensive, it is a macbook but it is a quad core i7 with a very powerful mobile graphics card in such a thin and light(ish) unit. Battery life in Windows is 5-6 hours at min brightness and WLAN on. Not quite as good as in OS X due to the disabling of optimus in Win7 (so you wont use the intel HD4000 at all if you bootcamp). When I am web browsing or watching movies on the unit I can't hear the fan at all, there is a little warmth from the bottom rear of the unit but it is otherwise silent. When using the machine under load the fan noise is noticable but not as intrusive as I had experienced on machines in the past.

FYI the frame rates achieved at 2880 x 1800 in POE are 25-60 with the occasional drops to 7-15 fps that exist no matter the resolution (these last less than a second and I assume are when the game is in resync with the servers as it is always when there is some rubber banding in the game.

I hope you find this unbiased and helpful if you are considering a purchase.

Other game experiences thus far tested on the unit:
League of Legends (all settings at max): 50+fps but names, chat, health bars and shop are very small and hard to read.
Dawn of War 2 (all settings at max): 25-50fps with all elements bar the cursor scaling well. In the last stand I was losing the cursor altogether in the action, which was a little annoying from time to time.
World of Warcraft (all settings at max): 25-60+fps (110 without vsync). Everything scales well but the game is old and dated, and I only put the free to play version on.
DC Universe Online (all setting at max): 50+fps but nobody I know plays the game and my purchase of the MBPr doesn't seem to have changed that.

Nice, I was curious how an M would handle that many pixels. It'll be interesting to see how it keeps up with the heat. I've got a 560M in my laptop, and it is like having a little furnace on my lap, I basically can't game with it unless I have it sitting on one of those laptop cooler wedge things.

You bought a mac as a gaming rig?

You must be really rich or really misinformed...

Nice review. I use my Mac solely for work purposes. I use a PC for gaming so that I could just skimp and do a few upgrades now and then, this saves me from buying a whole machine just to play a game.

But if you have the money... why not, eh? Congrats on your new toy. :)

"

Tagek wrote:

You bought a mac as a gaming rig?

You must be really rich or really misinformed...

I weighed up the options and I have had the 5kg 2 inch thick gaming laptops before. I prefer laptops for mobility and the MBPr suits what I need. I can game on it and use it for work. Yeah it's expensive but for me it does the trick.

"

auLansalot wrote:

What do I think of running Path of Exile at 2880 x 1800 on a GT650M? Well the game looks and runs absolutely amazing.

"

FYI the frame rates achieved at 2880 x 1800 in POE are 25-60 with the occasional drops to 7-15 fps that exist no matter the resolution (these last less than a second and I assume are when the game is in resync with the servers as it is always when there is some rubber banding in the game.

How did you measure those FPS?

Except for full parties with witches and skellies and zombie minions, the game usually runs 50+ FPS here on a late 2009 iMac with 4850M at 2560x1440 (no full anti aliasing though).

If you don't get a stable 40+ FPS at native, disable antialiasing. There is no FPS drop here when rubber banding. Rubber banding is just latency and discrepancy between client/server representation of where the character and enemies are.

Based on Diablo 3 and PoE performance on my 4850M I would have imagine the game can handle 2880. However it may be more expensive than Diablo 3 because of the Post Process filters, and the way shadows are handled in forests doesn't seem to be very efficient (since they don't move).

How's the heat? Is it much cooler than the old Macbook pros using Nvidia?

Honestly though it's certainly a decent laptop for gaming, there's simply no use at all to running that high res. You're wasting performance. I think safe to guess at that DPI, that you can set a lower res without seeing any artifacts, something I can't do on my iMac (anything else than 2560x1440 looks slightly blurry, which is cool for racing games, but no go for MMOs and such).

"

Tagek wrote:

You bought a mac as a gaming rig?

You must be really rich or really misinformed...

What is a "gaming rig"? All latest Mac models have a decent graphics card. A "mobility" version, yes, which is largely sufficient for gaming.

PoE runs just fine here on an old 4850M late 2009 iMac at 2560. Granted, it's not the most power hungry game. Battlefield 3 would crawl on my old iMac.

PoE must obviously run beautifully on the 2011 iMac with the 6970M.

For gaming purposes only, granted, there's no use to buying a Mac. Of course, you buy a Mac because you also want to use OS X...

For me it's the best of both worlds. I enjoy the unibody design, I have OS X which is incredibe for web development and programming, with a Terminal that is so much nicer than the one in Windows. Then I reboot and I have essentially a PC when I boot natively under Windows 7, with a GPU that's more than capable for gaming.

Upgrade is often cited as an issue, but it's more of a shift of mentality: 1) always backup 2) resale price is very good for Apple products. So you backup your stuff, resell, buy the new one. If you game like me anyway, otherwise you can keep it for longer.

I can't wait to upgrae my late 2009 to the newer models, coming between now and September. They are rumored to come with the 680M or a 7970M, both very capable cards. You can overclock the card in an iMac, there are tools that increase the fan a little bit. My 4850M is overclocked to the desktop 4850 shader and memory speeds and is always just under 80 C.

"

DeF46 wrote:

"

auLansalot wrote:

What do I think of running Path of Exile at 2880 x 1800 on a GT650M? Well the game looks and runs absolutely amazing.

"

FYI the frame rates achieved at 2880 x 1800 in POE are 25-60 with the occasional drops to 7-15 fps that exist no matter the resolution (these last less than a second and I assume are when the game is in resync with the servers as it is always when there is some rubber banding in the game.

How did you measure those FPS?

Except for full parties with witches and skellies and zombie minions, the game usually runs 50+ FPS here on a late 2009 iMac with 4850M at 2560x1440 (no full anti aliasing though).

If you don't get a stable 40+ FPS at native, disable antialiasing. There is no FPS drop here when rubber banding. Rubber banding is just latency and discrepancy between client/server representation of where the character and enemies are.

Based on Diablo 3 and PoE performance on my 4850M I would have imagine the game can handle 2880. However it may be more expensive than Diablo 3 because of the Post Process filters, and the way shadows are handled in forests doesn't seem to be very efficient (since they don't move).

How's the heat? Is it much cooler than the old Macbook pros using Nvidia?

Honestly though it's certainly a decent laptop for gaming, there's simply no use at all to running that high res. You're wasting performance. I think safe to guess at that DPI, that you can set a lower res without seeing any artifacts, something I can't do on my iMac (anything else than 2560x1440 looks slightly blurry, which is cool for racing games, but no go for MMOs and such).

Fraps or in game meters for FPS.

Heat isn't too bad. I think in comparison to your 4850M the performance is similar. The 650M performs slightly better when comparing on notebookcheck.net

The advantage of running at native resolution is you don't need AA at all, so the lack of multisampling can mean you achieve higher fps at the native resolution.

Interestingly I just finished downloading Blacklight Retribution as my friends play this a fair bit (F2P FTW!). I thought it had automatically detected the display as the images were very good in the menu and game but when I looked into it the game was running at 1680 x 1050. I was amazed how clear the game still looked at this resolution. The screen scales extremely well. I did notice a performance hit between 1680 and 2880, with the multisampling at 1680 performing much better than the native resolution without multisampling.

In regards to pricing... well look at the direct competition in the market at the moment. You have the Asus UX32VD but that only has a 620M (which I was suprised is quite capable) and the yet to arrive on market Gigabyte U2442 with a 640M. The machines with 650M either have 1366 x 768 screens and/or are also much thicker and heavier. As this is also my daily use computer I needed something mobile and a high dpi display was a must. I need to be able to work with 'side-by-side' just like a dual screen setup and the only other display that let me do this efficiently was the 1080p displays I have had on laptops in the past. I purchased my MBPr in Australia so price wise the US32VD will be coming in about $1,599 and the U2442 I'd be guessing about the same. So for an extra $600 i get an SSD in comparison to the Asus, a better screen and a much better graphics card. I also have a machine that will resell at about 60% of its original purchase price for up to 3 years (or more) whereas when I take one of those Asus or Gigabyte machines home I have immediately dropped to a 60% resale, with 20-40% being realistically achievable after 3 years or so.

You just saved me a lot of headache. Thaks for the report.

I am just planning to replace my mid2009 MBP 13 with an Nvidia 9400M (which i can tell you handles PoE fairly under OSX), and since there isn't a capable card in any of the 13" versions I seriously consider buying a 15" rMBP. I had doubts regarding casual gaming but now it's gone. Great news!

Wait WHAT? you can run it at retina resolution and it is smooth? I run mine at 1600x900 with everything on low and I get absolutely terrible performance.

I've changed thermal paste, zapped PRAM, reset SMC, cleaned fans, updated drivers, run win 7... I'm starting to get frustrated. It rann D3 on ultra, now I can barely run any games.

Any suggestions?