So I've been looking around to see how I can play the secret world under boot camp. The boot camp driver is too old to run the secret world, and nvidia drivers don't seem to support this card.
It turns out the nvidia 650m in the retina macbook pro is not an ordinary 650m and will probably never be driver compatible with nvidia.
There's a reason for this, accroding to this anandtech article:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-r eview/8
Apple have designed a custom gpu to power the retina screen. The reason for this is that a normal 650m would not easily support the high resolution of the retina screen due to design contraints. This means only apple will probably ever provide a driver for this gpu, and as we know they often lag behind the nvidia drivers enough to make playing new games hassle. SWTOR works pretty well for me with just a few minor glitches.
As I understand it (I have only speed read the article and may have some deatails incorrect) in order to scale to various non native resolutions effectively (like, say 1650x1080) the custom hardware scales the screen image up to a common multiplier and then scales back down using super sampling. This allows the retina gpu to display non native resolutions more attractively. This also puts a huge load on the hardware and things like memory bandwidth. At these resolutions that's a **** of a lot of data, and it's a bit of a 'hack' to get round the 650m's limitations. This certainly affects desktop UI performance, although I'm unclear if this will also affect gaming performance. Apparently mountain lion will improve this a lot with the new core animation libraries.
The downside of all this is that they tinkered with the nvidia 650m gpu enough to make it need custom drivers. I'm guessing that this is the reason why nvidia drivers don't (and probably never will) work with the retina's 650m.
This is a shame, but I can see why they did it. If apple can keep up with more recent driver versions for boot camp then it might not be so bad. As the article says, they have hired a lot of ex nvidia & amd gpu gurus, so it's possible. However, they are not being very forthcoming about their intentions.
So far it looks like OSX will perform well, but win7 boot camp performance will lag behind. Currently the win7 boot camp dirver for the 650m is something like 2.5, but should ideally be 2.9 or 3.0 (I think, am in osx now so would have to reboot to check) in order to run recent games like the secret world.
If more people made games for osx it wouldn't be an issue, but they dont.
Right now, if you want a gaming laptop with the power of the 650m for gaming, you might have to buy a pc if you want to be certain it will be supported by nvidia.