Tips on playing Skyrim on an old MacBook Pro

[dofaking]

hi, i have a pretty old macbook pro, intel core 2 duo 2.16 Ghz, 3GB of memory and ATI Radeon X1600 with VRAM of 128mb, im running it on a cider port, im getting around 30-40 fps INSIDE a room, my computer freezes when i get outside, but with your .ini tweaks it runs faster and fixes some problems but still freezes, is there any ways to lower the .ini things even more?

 

[Skullrattla]

Hi, that card is not as good. You really want to run this on windows XP, it will work MUCH better.
Even when running natively on windows, Skyrim really pushes these machines to their limits, so running it inside a virtualized windows on Mac OS, you really won't enjoy it. There are a lot of bugs as is, so you don't want to increase them by running it in an unstable environment .

Look for Bootcamp 2 disk image in the torrents, as Apple will probably "not support" this machine anymore, ie you won’t be able to get the Bootcamp drivers from Apple, *I think*. I also think the Bootcamp disk image was included in the OS X install disks that come with the MBP.

The Cider port I tried at first had some stupid Post Process Injector (inkjfx or somehing) mod included which obviously drops the FPS so look for any d3d9.dll files there remove them. The only d3d9.dll you really should try is from the FPS Limiter mod, set it to 60 FPS. It worls great here, also try FPS Booster (Skyrim Nexus)

Anyway, I'm now updating the ini files with my current settings. If you are running Skyrim version 1.4.27 or above I recommend you move your ini files out of their location, then run Skyrim launcher and re-coose high graphics settings at 900* 630 with no AF or AA, to generate fresh ini files as things have changed with recent patches.

Play the game to test it out, after that you can try turning on AA and AF or try my ini settings (minus the bit that contains the graphics card name) to see if they work better or worse.

Good luck, any questions just ask, I'm here twice a week at least.

 

[Skullrattla]

Any particular reason you chose XP instead of 7? Wondering if you would upgrade to 7 if you got the chance or if you chose XP for a specific reason. I'm capable of obtaining both so I want to make sure I get it perfect.

I chose XP years ago. I have no way of changing it at the moment, no internal optical drive, you see. Apple borked the firmware in an update and no reasonably priced replacements seem to exist in Europe. So I'm just cloning using WinClone and reinstalling the clone if necessary (super fast recovery!). Anyway, seems that Apple doesn't seem to offer Win 7 drivers for this machine ?

I too would like to know if games would perform better on Win 7, cause that's all I want Windows for.

 

[Skullrattla]

3GB of memory

Don't be a cheapskate.

 

[OldLace]

I actually asked a 'genius' about the windows thing a while back, and it appears that you can only utilize windows 7 if you have OS Lion. Since I have OS Snow Leopard, the latest I can use is XP - which is fine, because the last time I touched a PC was with XP and I despise 7

 

[dofaking]

Hi, that card is not as good. You really want to run this on windows XP, it will work MUCH better.
Even when running natively on windows, Skyrim really pushes these machines to their limits, so running it inside a virtualized windows on Mac OS, you really won't enjoy it. There are a lot of bugs as is, so you don't want to increase them by running it in an unstable environment .

Look for Bootcamp 2 disk image in the torrents, as Apple will probably "not support" this machine anymore, ie you won’t be able to get the Bootcamp drivers from Apple, *I think*. I also think the Bootcamp disk image was included in the OS X install disks that come with the MBP.

The Cider port I tried at first had some stupid Post Process Injector (inkjfx or somehing) mod included which obviously drops the FPS so look for any d3d9.dll files there remove them. The only d3d9.dll you really should try is from the FPS Limiter mod, set it to 60 FPS. It worls great here, also try FPS Booster (Skyrim Nexus)

Anyway, I'm now updating the ini files with my current settings. If you are running Skyrim version 1.4.27 or above I recommend you move your ini files out of their location, then run Skyrim launcher and re-coose high graphics settings at 900* 630 with no AF or AA, to generate fresh ini files as things have changed with recent patches.

Play the game to test it out, after that you can try turning on AA and AF or try my ini settings (minus the bit that contains the graphics card name) to see if they work better or worse.

Good luck, any questions just ask, I'm here twice a week at least.

all right, thanks for the advise

 

[xaraan]

Well, I wasn't able to use my old macbook for this, but I did use my new iMac and bootcamp it and get skyrim for the pc. OMG it's so awesome on pc, like a whole new game sometimes.