Red Alert 3 for Mac

[surfymark]

Has anyone played this game on the Mac?

I have been a big fan of the Command & Conquer games on the PC but now I have a Mac I have reluctantly bought it again for the Mac.

It is still superb but I have a question about the settings.

I am trying to play it on a mid-2010 MBP i5 with 8gb of Ram. I have an external monitor.

It automatically selected all of the most basic graphics settings. On these settings it looks ok but not brilliant.

I tried bumping up all of the settings to the max and the game looked amazing but was unplayable. The limit at which it was playable seems to be the highest resolution (I think it was 1280 x 1024) but only Medium on all of the rest of the settings.

Now I thought my MBP had a second graphics card for higher performance. Am I using this? How do I tell?

The game is quite old now really. It has only been out since March 2009 on Mac but was released in October 2008 on PC. I am slightly surprised that my significantly newer MBP can not cope with the highest graphics settings.

Am I being naive here? Would it work better using the panel and not the external monitor? What can I do to make things better?

Many thanks
Mark

 

[RobM]

Download and install a utility called 'gfxCardStatus'. It might not be the answer to your problem, but it shows you which graphics card is active and allows you to switch between them, which is handy for battery life (enforce integrated only for normal use), as well as gaming (enforce dedicated for performance).

 

[surfymark]

Thanks for this RobM. I installed it last night and it seems to currently be set to n (for NVIDIA). I did some Googling and it seems that it only uses the integrated graphics for it's own panel, if you are using an external monitor it is always using the other graphics card.

cheers
Mark