Can you game on a 9 year old MacBook Pro?

In this video we'll be testing some games on a 2009 MacBook Pro to see if it's any good for gaming!

[GodSaveTheUnitedStates]

Old video but the ram is most certainly the bottleneck. 8 gb of ram would do wonders for what this macbook pro can handle. I own a mid 2012 macbook pro upgraded to 16gb of ram and I regularly use it to play Cities: Skylines when on the move which is a very heavy, very memory dependent game. These macbooks are more capable than you are letting on.

[eddiedowning]

I got a MacBook 13 inch mid 2010 with a 240gb SSD drive and it runs better then my windows 10 laptop

[samrudh]

I used to play a lot of league of legends on my 2010 MacBook pro with a gt 210 and was getting anywhere between 30-40 fps. But with a windows partition I later installed I was getting a consistent 80 fps. Would be super interested to see what fortnite would play like on bootcamped windows as my MacBook pro doesn't turn on anymore.

[jackklosinski]

I have this exact model, and when I was little I would play ARK survival evolved on this thing, it took like 2 hours just to boot into the menus but I dealt with it, and I played on a 144p window BOTTOM settings for it to even render lol. Now that you have mentioned Portal, I think I'll try it because I've heard good reviews of that game. Great video! I really laughed!

[BeastlyJew]

I have a mid 2010 and I have games such as cod 4, battlefront 2 (2005) and even insurgency that run pretty well. Don’t underestimate macs

[bhuvneshkmitra]

MacBook pro late 2011 i7
384 Intel graphics
MacBook pro mid 2012 i5
1.5GB graphics
Which one is better?

[SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim]

can you advise me about what cheap laptop or cheap macbook that i can buy between 100-200 dollars

the only thing it needs to be able to do is run GTA San Andreas

[gtsprocedure]

Honestly, installing Windows on these old MacBook's really improves the gaming performance and general performance. That's why I'm going to purchase one. Windows is better for performance and gaming.

[BlackFed]

Try it with windows and you’ll get way better results, on macOS it uses OpenGL, on windows it uses directx which improves a lot the performance in game

[TravisLohmannMusic]

using my 2009 Macbook Pro 15" as a retro-gaming machine / movies &tv machine :)

[Poire]

0:08 We already see from your face that it won't do well. :)

[Spider-dnds]

I have a MacBook 2009 with OS X Snow Leopard 😮😮

[fabd-tv]

With Bootcamp and Windows XP I was even overclocking the GPU, pretty funny. I used a tool to lock the fans at 2500 or 4000 RPM so they stop winding up and down all the time. I used MSI Afterburner. Tomb Raider Anniversary ran pretty decently. I remember playing even EverQuest II on this bad boy :P

Now took the dust off the 2009 MacBook Pro, put a small SSD in it, and will be testing Ubuntu 22.04. Too much hassle trying to keep my Windows XP partition, it seems like it would require SATA drivers to run. But, with increased Proton compatibility I'm curious to see what I can run under Ubuntu. I'll be using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (driver package 340 or something). In theory it should still be worse than Windows XP 1) because I can't OC it, 2) probably wont have control over the fan noise 3) Valve's Proton is still an overhead.

That said I think emulators for PSX should run pretty well! And you can also relive the golden era of 256 color PC VGA games with DOSBox Staging.

For me the most hilarious is I can connect this old fella to a 1440p LED Cinema I am using for 10+ years already and used on all my PCs :)

Unfortunately I suspect I wont be gaming at 1440p and I wonder if even upscaling will be an option. I remember trying to set fullscreen 720p to run exactly half of the 27 inch monitor but the pixels are pretty gnarly. (each 720p pixel becomes 4 at 1440p).

[williamskagen]

It works for minecraft, but not much else

[Seatiger]

PPSSPP runs smooth on my 2009 MacBook *white* running Catalina :)

[ShiggitayMediaProductions]

Emulation should run well on this machine...anything from PS1 down to NES should run great.

[genojason]

Dolphin Emulator runs very well on a unibody MacBook. They have the IR sensor so you can use a real wii remote

[alcatelmdify]

Hi all. Should I buy this MacBook for web browsing and Microsoft Office editing? Also, I would like to connect it to a external display to watch movies, so it would play 1080p movies? Thanks.

[rickyhoth]

Can you try on doing a video of running high sierra on this macbook? As I know there is a patch for installing high sierra on unsupported models.

[chriswidjaja]

I used to play cod mw 1, 2, 3 and blackops 1, 2. Csgo, dota. Obv using windows 10.