Benchmarking the new MacBook Pros

I'm the new guy on staff here at TUAW, and from what I've been told, I get to lay claim to something none of these other guys want to: I'm a die-hard gamer, and while playing games on a Mac might be like performing Shakespeare in Russian, I do it as much as I can (the play games on the Mac thing, not the Russian thing).

So you can expect to hear about more stuff like this: the good folks over at Bare Feats ran the new MacBook Pros (with the Santa Rosa chipset) through the benchmarking gears and found what you might expect: they're pretty darn fast. Not quite as fast as the Mac Pro with a Radeon X1900 XT in the video card slot, but the new MBP did beat out the quad core Mac Pro running with the Geforce 7300 GT in 4 of the 5 tests they did-- gaming like that on a laptop is very, very nice.

The new MacBook didn't fare quite as well-- the integrated video chip in that one, says Bare Feats, is "un-optimized" for 3D, even if it's fine for movie playback. Unfortunately, none of the Apple rigs tested come even close to Alienware's standard PC box (the Mac Pro ran at 83 fps on Quake 4, and the Area-51 7500 ran at... ummm... 135.7), but if you, like me, want to frag a few noobs in between, y'know, working with a UI that actually makes sense, the new MacBook Pro will do you right.

[ via Inside Mac Games ]
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