Assassins creed 2 lacks on macbook pro?

Hi Skovbak,

Your experience sounds pretty normal. Note Book Check ranks those three GPUs as follows:

ATI Radeon 4850 - #54

NVIDIA GeForce GT 8800 - #83

NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M - #155

It comes in much lower across multiple benchmarks than the recommended requirements. So if your experience in playing the game is suboptimal, this is to be expected. Personally, if you're going to be doing any sorts of "real gaming" and playing more modern games on newer engines the shared GPU (9400M, 320M, 3000 HD) just isn't going to cut it. It'll handle games, no doubt, but with the rich textures, landscapes and scenery of Assassin's Creed 2 you're going to get less than ideal performance out of your machine.

I'd recommend you look at the 15" MBP (either model) or one of the iMacs. You can also keep an eye on the refurbished 15" MacBook Pros, the previous generation machines will be cheaper than the current generation and are perfectly capable of handling a wider selection of games.

From my experience a good rule of thumb with shared GPUs is that they're comparable to 2-3 year old discrete GPUs. While your mileage may vary, thus far that's usually about how they benchmark.

But would you recommend a graphic card which can actually play such games if i would like to upgrade my macbook pro? I see that the ATI radeon HD 5770 seems to be okay.

It is not possible to replace or upgrade the GPU in any Apple notebook, nor in most other notebooks.

If you take a look at the Radeon 5770 on any online vendor's website, you'll find that it is approximately as large, if not larger, than the entire interior of your MacBook Pro after the battery, hard drive and optical drive are accounted for. It's made for use in large desktop computers. The integrated CPU and GPU in your MBP are less than 1% of its size.

The system requirements on the UbiSoft site:

Minimum Requirements for Assassin's Creed 2 Mac

suggest the game may not be suitable for notebook computers.

However, as the full sysreqs and that advice is not on the App Store screen, you may want to call Apple and negotiable a refund.

Many games say that they cannot use integrated graphics, of which the 320M is one.

Your problem is being caused by the integrated graphics in your 13" MBP. It seems that alot of people do not know the difference and get upset when they find out that their graphics card in the brand new MBP 13" is pretty bad. The 13" model is not a gaming machine and I think Apple should make sure people know the difference before they plop down the money for a 13" when they can spend a few hundred more for a far more capable machine. The upgraded 15" and 17" models can handle most games. I have a mid 2010 15" MBP and it handles Assassin's Creed 2 quite well. I've only had it slow down once when there were alot of guards around and I was next to one of the unaccessible areas. I am playing the game under Mac OS 10.6.7. I heard that if you play under Bootcamp in Windows you might get better performance, but I have the Mac only version and have not had a chance to try it in Bootcamp. Has anyone here tried it on both the Mac side and Windows via Bootcamp on the same machine?

Yeah I'm not sure. I've got a mid 2010 Macbook Pro 13" and it seems to work fine for me... At what point in the game did your problems start?

mrlegoboy092,

As this discussion is almost three years old, I wouldn't be expecting any responses from the original poster.

Clinton