A Review: Don't buy CIV5 for Mac

[civ_king]

Current Snow Leopard, very early model i7 2.67 GHz, ATI 4870, 6 GB of RAM.

That's pretty beefy compared to last year's MBP

 

[Snowbeavers]

current snow leopard, very early model i7 2.67 ghz, ati 4870, 6 gb of ram.

10.6.6?

 

[Mavfin]

10.6.6?

Yes. Civ's more CPU-intensive than graphics-intensive, anyway. And I have CPU to burn, 2 years old or not.

I heard something about performance issues with 10.6.6, but I haven't noticed any issues with my setup. Of course, I was running SC2 at launch when others could barely launch it with the same hardware except they had Nvidia GPUs vs my ATI, so there's still issues there. I would hate to try Civ on *any* Mac with an Nvidia GPU right now, because right now, they suck for Mac. Badly.

If you have an Nvidia GPU on a Macbook right now, go Bootcamp to game. Not worth the trouble. There's a reason *all* the 2010 and later Mac models are ATI, no new Nvidia video in 2010 Macs.

That's an Apple+Nvidia issue, though, not Civ specifically.

 

[Mavfin]

That's pretty beefy compared to last year's MBP

Well, it's still factory equipment from April 2009, though. I went back and looked. I'm thinking that the MBP's people are having so much trouble with have Nvidia GPUs. That's the issue, not Civ, really.

If you read, there's a pattern. People with decent ATI cards aren't having issues, while people with Nvidia are, a lot. Same pattern with Starcraft 2.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Just wanted to add I've been playing on OSX with a dual-core i3 and 5670 green go and play just fine with all settings on medium at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

I'm sure glad I got this through steam now (although I'm anti-steam) as when I installed it to see what games were available for the Mac, I seen it would let me install Civ V. It sure is nice to have this feature as I would never buy Civ V a second time.