ShiggitySays wrote:
I have the same exact machine specs except I have a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, and I was also in the SC2 beta since mid March. When the Mac beta came out I was eager to try it. I did, and I was disappointed to learn that even with everything on low it ran UNPLAYABLY. I went on the Battle.net Forums to see if the X3100 is supported, and the developers said it is NOT because its chipset is too slow. You would need at least an early model 2008 MacBook (the early unibodies) or anything from there on up that started to have the nVidia 9400m integrated video cards/boards. I doubt this'll change when retail hits the shelves in the next few days..
And second off, with that said, SC2 has a similar engine to WC3 (and WoW to some extent), which both run great on the X3100 on medium to high settings... and I do realize that WC3 is an older title, but it also uses the up-down point of view like SC2 does, including using the scroll-wheel on a mouse to zoom in or out on units and terrain on the map. I don't know nor understand what's changed in SC2's graphics subsystem to make it require more graphics horsepower.... It'd be interested to find out.
I was also in the beta, I mostly played via Bootcamp because the Mac version is simply slower. This is mostly due to Apple not updating their OpenGL drivers to be up to date or optimized. X3100 will be too slow to run SC2. I started out with my old MBP ('07 C2D w/ ATI x1600) and it ran under Bootcamp on lowest setting at ~20fps. In OS X is was basically unplayable and too slow. So yeah you'll need an updated machine to really get anything out of it.
As for SC2 vs WoW, etc, SC2 is a huge resource hog compared to those other games. The thing about SC2 is it's not just about the graphics card it's also about the CPU. It is a highly demanding CPU game. Graphics wise, it kills WoW, WoW really isn't demanding graphically at all and never has been. The issue with WoW and fps is when you get into cities with tons of other toons. Then the framerate drops. Similarly, in SC2 you're fighting battles with upwards of 50+ units at a time. There's a ton of processing and rendering power that has to go into all of that even on low settings. Even on my shiny new pimped out MBP that I just got last week, I can only get 65fps in medium under Bootcamp (and 40 fps in OS X). It's simply a more demanding game.