Re:Best use for an SKS stock yet...
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Tactical Camera
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· Score: 1
Although the combination of the SKS stock and the AR15 handgrip is odd, and wouldn't have been my first choice.
I'm friends with the guy who put that together, and it's not an SKS stock. It's the rear half of a Czech Vz24 stock that he had left over after I had him cut the fore-end off to provide me with raw materials for a K98k stock restoration project I was working on.
Mmmmm.... well, if you'll look at my post above you'll see I'm using Bootcamp, not parallels. I seriously doubt it would run at all in parallels, due to the fact that it has no meaningful (at least from a gamer's standpoint) hardware support.
As to what settings I use in Bootcamp, I've got it at 1280x768 resolution, Large texture size, all of the actor fade settings right in the middle, outside view distance maxed, HDR on, and all of the little effects (water detail, reflections on water and glass, etc) turned to either on (for the on/off ones) or high (for stuff like blood decals, water detail, etc, with multiple settings).
The only real sacrifice I make is in toning down the self-shadows (because I think they looks stupid, not for performance reasons) and taking the shadows from trees and the shadows on grass down to about 1/4 the way up the slider.
I get good, strong performance. I get the occasional chug, but that is usually related to something else, like me being an idiot and playing until 4 AM. It's time to go to bed when then AV scanner starts eating up your performance.
Have I seen better? Heck yes, usually from my friends' massive gaming towers. Do I get an enjoyable experiance from a VERY portable laptop that is running an OS that it was never designed for? Oh yeah.
I'm really getting tired of reading all these comments to the effect that "Bootcamp sucks, it won't run games, it isn't designed for a gamer crowd, etc."
I have no idea if it was built for gamers or not. All I know is that I own a Macbook Pro, have bootcamp installed on it, and find that it works absolutly fine for gaming.
Does it run every last game at tip-top resolutions and graphics levels? No, it's a laptop with an X1600 mobile card in it. It runs newer games (Oblivion is a prime example) WELL, even with all of the default drivers and such that Apple gives you with the bootcamp disk, but it isn't a desktop uber-rig, and never will be.
The ONLY real difference that I've noticed with XP on my mac is that some of the mac-specific hardware (the built in camera, for example) dosn't respond the way it should, and the Windows clock is wonky as all hell (it never holds a time if it's not connected to the net - I think this has something to do with the lack of a true BIOS, since I've had friends with older Macs that did the same thing when a battery on their motherboard died on them).
Can you tweek it to get even better performance (new drivers, software overclocking software, remapping keys to better emulate a "windows standard" keyboard, etc.)? Yes, and I believe that the majority of gamers who would bother installing bootcamp to play games are fully capable of such relativly minor optimizations. Even so, even assuming the person booting into windows is the most casual of casual gamers and utterly incapable of even installing a driver, the experiance you get using windows on a Macbook isn't radically different from what you would get on any other machine with equivilant hardware.
I really don't see why people can't just take the Bootcamp software for what it is. Between the Mac forum zealots claiming that it will destroy your computer for the sole reason that Windows is an abomination in the eyes of the Holy Prophet Jobs and the Windows nutjobs claiming that it will never be a "true gaming rig" (I suspect that these same people don't consdier it a true gaming rig unless it has the newest gear as of last weekend) I really sometimes wonder why have to wonder. . .
Ah well, you can all go on complaining about it and talking about how much it sucks, and I'll keep on playing Oblivion while on my lunchbreak at work.
I own a new MacBook Pro. I dual boot it between OSX and XP and use it for gaming all the time. I have yet to find a game that dosn't work under XP on it and dosn't work well.
Yes, the underclocked video card was an annoyance. There are any number of software utilities to re-clock it to the correct speed, however. With the video card performing where it should I can run newer games like Oblivion at higher graphics settings with good performance.
And how annoying would it be to have to reboot to "jump online and kick some ass?" You must have the attention span of a mayfly. It takes 3 minutes, tops, for me to shut down OSX and reboot into Windows. If I get up to do something (get a drink, make a run to the bathroom, etc) it's finished before I'm back.
So. . . yeah. I'm a gamer. I bought a mac a few months ago. And I have to say, I love it.
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Although the combination of the SKS stock and the AR15 handgrip is odd, and wouldn't have been my first choice.
I'm friends with the guy who put that together, and it's not an SKS stock. It's the rear half of a Czech Vz24 stock that he had left over after I had him cut the fore-end off to provide me with raw materials for a K98k stock restoration project I was working on.
Mmmmm.... well, if you'll look at my post above you'll see I'm using Bootcamp, not parallels. I seriously doubt it would run at all in parallels, due to the fact that it has no meaningful (at least from a gamer's standpoint) hardware support.
As to what settings I use in Bootcamp, I've got it at 1280x768 resolution, Large texture size, all of the actor fade settings right in the middle, outside view distance maxed, HDR on, and all of the little effects (water detail, reflections on water and glass, etc) turned to either on (for the on/off ones) or high (for stuff like blood decals, water detail, etc, with multiple settings).
The only real sacrifice I make is in toning down the self-shadows (because I think they looks stupid, not for performance reasons) and taking the shadows from trees and the shadows on grass down to about 1/4 the way up the slider.
I get good, strong performance. I get the occasional chug, but that is usually related to something else, like me being an idiot and playing until 4 AM. It's time to go to bed when then AV scanner starts eating up your performance.
Have I seen better? Heck yes, usually from my friends' massive gaming towers. Do I get an enjoyable experiance from a VERY portable laptop that is running an OS that it was never designed for? Oh yeah.
I'm really getting tired of reading all these comments to the effect that "Bootcamp sucks, it won't run games, it isn't designed for a gamer crowd, etc."
I have no idea if it was built for gamers or not. All I know is that I own a Macbook Pro, have bootcamp installed on it, and find that it works absolutly fine for gaming.
Does it run every last game at tip-top resolutions and graphics levels? No, it's a laptop with an X1600 mobile card in it. It runs newer games (Oblivion is a prime example) WELL, even with all of the default drivers and such that Apple gives you with the bootcamp disk, but it isn't a desktop uber-rig, and never will be.
The ONLY real difference that I've noticed with XP on my mac is that some of the mac-specific hardware (the built in camera, for example) dosn't respond the way it should, and the Windows clock is wonky as all hell (it never holds a time if it's not connected to the net - I think this has something to do with the lack of a true BIOS, since I've had friends with older Macs that did the same thing when a battery on their motherboard died on them).
Can you tweek it to get even better performance (new drivers, software overclocking software, remapping keys to better emulate a "windows standard" keyboard, etc.)? Yes, and I believe that the majority of gamers who would bother installing bootcamp to play games are fully capable of such relativly minor optimizations. Even so, even assuming the person booting into windows is the most casual of casual gamers and utterly incapable of even installing a driver, the experiance you get using windows on a Macbook isn't radically different from what you would get on any other machine with equivilant hardware.
I really don't see why people can't just take the Bootcamp software for what it is. Between the Mac forum zealots claiming that it will destroy your computer for the sole reason that Windows is an abomination in the eyes of the Holy Prophet Jobs and the Windows nutjobs claiming that it will never be a "true gaming rig" (I suspect that these same people don't consdier it a true gaming rig unless it has the newest gear as of last weekend) I really sometimes wonder why have to wonder. . .
Ah well, you can all go on complaining about it and talking about how much it sucks, and I'll keep on playing Oblivion while on my lunchbreak at work.
I own a new MacBook Pro. I dual boot it between OSX and XP and use it for gaming all the time. I have yet to find a game that dosn't work under XP on it and dosn't work well. Yes, the underclocked video card was an annoyance. There are any number of software utilities to re-clock it to the correct speed, however. With the video card performing where it should I can run newer games like Oblivion at higher graphics settings with good performance. And how annoying would it be to have to reboot to "jump online and kick some ass?" You must have the attention span of a mayfly. It takes 3 minutes, tops, for me to shut down OSX and reboot into Windows. If I get up to do something (get a drink, make a run to the bathroom, etc) it's finished before I'm back. So. . . yeah. I'm a gamer. I bought a mac a few months ago. And I have to say, I love it.