Review: Apple's 17-in. MacBook Pro a gamer's delight?

Computerworld - Is the new 17-in. MacBook Pro the ultimate gaming laptop Mac users have long been waiting for? That was the question put to me by Computerworld's Ken Mingis after he recently reviewed Apple Inc.'s top-of-the-line laptop.

In stock form, this MacBook Pro goes for $2,799. But the review unit sent to us by Apple was stuffed with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state disk drive and the faster 2.93-GHz Core 2 Duo processor, shooting the price to $4,849. (That's actually $200 less than it cost a few weeks back, now that Apple is charging $1,000 for the extra RAM.) Even so, we're talking Alienware levels of cash for a laptop.

Is the MacBook Pro worth that much to gamers? It could be, depending on what you expect from your gaming laptop. I spent last weekend running the new 17-incher side by side with my older MacBook Pro -- it has the 2.33-GHz Core 2 Duo, and I have to tell you, I'm impressed. I've never seen frame rates like this on a Mac!

I pulled the Apple's MacBook Pro out of the box and installed fresh clients for three massively multiplayer online (MMO) games -- World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Eve Online -- on both the new MacBook Pro and my own laptop. I didn't want any tweaking I'd done to my own versions to affect the outcome.

I also made sure to set up each client exactly the same, from graphics to audio, to make this as much an apples-to-apples comparison as possible. (Yes, I know, apples and Apple. Go ahead. Chuckle.)

For nongamers, World of Warcraft is a sword-and-sorcery game. City of Heroes is an MMO in which players create superheroes to do battle against villains. And Eve Online is a space-based game where you control spaceships, work in manufacturing and collect resources while battling other players and nonplayer characters.

For this quick gamer's review, I used the same character in the same setting and whenever possible repeated the same mission to get the best match-up possible. With flashy, graphic-intensive games, frames per second (fps) can tell a lot about your hardware, so I focused on that as the easiest way to offer up a sense of how well or poorly the MacBook Pro would perform.

For the record, all the frame rates I cite below are raw and show the average range. They don't take into account the fact that at least one of the game clients has a built-in frame-rate rendering cap.

Of the three game clients I tried out, World of Warcraft is the only one with a native Mac version. City of Heroes and Eve Online rely on a version built by TransGaming Technologies Inc. It uses the Windows client and a Cider and Wine wrapper to create an emulated environment in which the client can run on Mac OS X. This allows it to be sold to the Mac community without the developer having to create a native Mac version.