matliqucoe

@clobchob: Awesome, worked for me! Now the FPS is now ~60 at 1600x900. Haven't tried higher settings yet.

Note: when I got to the part in the PDF instructions to copy and paste the text for the new drivers into the nvao.inf, I used notepad and there were some characters added, like a "!" after the first copied line. I just deleted them to make it look like the PDF file, and all worked fine.

I checked Sleeping Dogs. At 1600x1050 with settings at normal/high, I get pretty smooth FPS. So terrible FPS in BF4 while NotebookCheck.net reckons you can 30-60 (depending on your settings) sounds like maybe BF4 triggers some crappy driver combination on a macbook pro with 750m. Especially since I was able to run the BF4 beta on my 2.5 year old macbook at much much better FPS.

Notebook Check now has tests for BF4 and the 750m can get ~65 FPS (albeit at a paltry 1024x768, see http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M.90245.0.html). At 1024x768 I'm getting like 2-4 FPS, so definitely sounds like some combination of MacBook and nVidia drivers.

I just picked up a MacBook Pro Retina with 750m as well. I'm having the same experience of terrible performance in BF4 (non-beta). And yes I have the latest drivers, etc.

I'm pretty sure it is a driver issue, since:

1. I could run the BF4 beta on my old 2011 MacBook pro with a Radeon 6750m. I had to turn absolutely everything to lowest settings, and to get 60 FPS I'd had to drop resolution to the absolute worse, but hey it ran :). BF3 also was smooth, so long as everything was turned down at 1680x1050. Considering the 750m is ~2 generations newer then the 6750m, has double the RAM, the terrible FPS has gotta be a driver issue. Note the FPS is just as terrible in campaign as in multiplayer
2. As for whether the integrated GPU might be running, MacBooks when running Windows can't run the Integrated GPU, i.e. optimus is disabled. (It should be noted even if the intergrated GPU was running, the new Iris Pro 5200 in the 2013 MacBook Pro Retinas are pretty capable. Yes, Integrated GPUs used to suck, but the new 5200s are roughly on par with a 650m, and a 650m can easily run BF3 at 60 FPS)

As for people saying MacBook Pros suck as gaming laptops, I totally disagree. I've been (Windows) gaming on MacBooks for the last 5 years, and they've often been my main gaming machine. Mac (or Linux) is almost a requirement for web developers like me, and the gaming power of MacBooks, so long as you get the top of the range ones with discrete graphics, are more then enough. Sure you can't run all games at full settings, but many recent titles you can run at e.g. medium at 1680x1050, and that's totally fine for what the laptop is for, work + gaming.

Anyways, since I suspect its a driver issue, we'll just have to wait it out until the drivers (or maybe BF4) gets updated. Luckily I've got a gaming desktop in the meantime :).

~Mat

EDIT: It occurs to me a good way to check if it is indeed a driver issue is to see if other games run poorly. BF4 is the only game I've installed so far, so I'll install some others and check them. E.g. Sleeping Dogs runs fine on my old MacBook with 6750m, so it should run a lot better on the 750m.