Performance on PowerBook 1.5Ghz
by BvB · in Marble Blast · 03/11/2005 (7:32 am) · 2 replies
A friend of mine owns a 12" iBook that came with Marble Blast pre-installed, I really liked the game and I can use some distraction from time to time so I downloaded the demo for my 12" 1.5Ghz PowerBook.
This machine should be more powerful than his 12" iBook, especially in the video department. But as soon as I start up the game the CPU jumps to 80% and after a few seconds my PowerBook starts revving up it's fans to top speed :\ Marble Blast is a really cool game but it shouldn't be _that_ graphically/CPU intensive. I didn't notice this guys iBooks fans when I was playing MB on that machine.
Anyway, is it normal that Marble Blast uses close to 100% CPU on a 1.5Ghz machine with an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM?
Oh, almost forgot. The screen fairly often stutters, at some times, especially when looking around the framerate seems to drop _really_ hard. It gets smooth a fraction of a second later but IMO this machine shouldn't have any problems with the visuals of this game?
Anyway, if I can get some more performance out of it I'm bound to buy the full version :) It's a lot of fun (if it would show some decent performance :\).
This machine should be more powerful than his 12" iBook, especially in the video department. But as soon as I start up the game the CPU jumps to 80% and after a few seconds my PowerBook starts revving up it's fans to top speed :\ Marble Blast is a really cool game but it shouldn't be _that_ graphically/CPU intensive. I didn't notice this guys iBooks fans when I was playing MB on that machine.
Anyway, is it normal that Marble Blast uses close to 100% CPU on a 1.5Ghz machine with an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM?
Oh, almost forgot. The screen fairly often stutters, at some times, especially when looking around the framerate seems to drop _really_ hard. It gets smooth a fraction of a second later but IMO this machine shouldn't have any problems with the visuals of this game?
Anyway, if I can get some more performance out of it I'm bound to buy the full version :) It's a lot of fun (if it would show some decent performance :\).
#2
There doesn't happen to be any difference of OS version between the two machines, does there?
Also, check for new drivers... I know that ATI keeps their drivers for mac updated, I am not sure if nVidia does.
04/27/2005 (11:24 am)
That does seem unusual, I have an older 12" powerbook (sub-1ghz) and Marble Blast runs just fine on it. (The fan does run on high, but I get no stuttering).There doesn't happen to be any difference of OS version between the two machines, does there?
Also, check for new drivers... I know that ATI keeps their drivers for mac updated, I am not sure if nVidia does.
Torque Owner Jeremy Alessi