Review: Apple Boot Camp Public Beta - Software - HEXUS.net

Benchmarks

At this point, I got a couple of requests from people to try out some benchmarks - Counter Strike: Source and Battlefield 2. Setting up Counter Strike: Source was a breeze and it does support the Mac PowerBook's native resolution.

Counter Strike: Source

First, I ran the stress-test option to see if this threw up any issues. It ran through fine (check out this AVI video - 5.1MB) and gave a final figure of 83 frames per second – more than enough to keep me happy. Then, I ran up CS-Militia but that failed to load. I've been told that's to do with how HDR (high dynamic range) hangs together but haven't yet had time to go back and look into it further.

I loaded CS-Office instead and this worked well - with all the eye-candy you'd expect from Counter Strike: Source. I noticed no problems with the game. The MacBook's cooling fans kicked in automatically as needed and sounded to be running normally.

I had a quick run around the game and remembered that some Dell computers appear on this map. I hatched a cunning plan and if you download this video (6.3MB) you'll see what I did next.

Is that a Dell I see before me?

When it came to running 3DMark, I discovered that I had to use at a non-native resolution of 1280x768. Even so, it ran fine.

3DMark setup screen

The MacBook Pro scored 1535 3D marks and the CPU score was 1658. For the record, the spec of my MacBook is 2GHz dual core processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a 256MB ATI X1600 graphics processor.

3DMark results

As a fan of Battlefield 2, I couldn't wait to install it and was pleased to find that it, too, ran fine. I had to use the shortcut edit hack to get it to work at the LCD's native resolution but that took 10 seconds to do. A quick game showed it worked exactly the same as on my Shuttle-based system.

Battlefield 2 start screen

Playing Battlefield 2

You can also download a couple of AVI videos of Battlefield 2 being played on the MacBook Pro, one 4.6MB, the other 5.1MB.

Day-to-day working of a dual-booting Intel Mac is very easy. To select the operating system when you boot up, you hold down the Option key. This bring ups two hard discs on the screen – and you select Windows or OS X using the mouse or keyboard cursors.

Choosing which OS to boot

On my MacBook Pro, each operating system takes about 30 seconds to boot up – and that's fast for any computer. You can also set the default operating system to be one OS or the other, rather than just defaulting, as you might expect, to Mac OS X.