2016 13" Iris 550 Gaming (video)

[mikeo007]

I've seen quite a few threads asking about gaming performance on the new 13" Macbook Pro with touchbar and Iris 550. So I threw together a quick video over the holiday weekend to give some folks an idea of how it performs.

I looked at 4 games:
World of Warcraft
Counter-Strike GO
Overwatch
DOOM 2016

Now before anyone asks "why would you buy this laptop for gaming", I'll answer "I didn't".

I have a dedicated gaming PC, and I bought this laptop as my everyday computer.
But I am pretty impressed with what this little thing can handle, and I'm happy that if I want to play a game while on the go, I'll be able to.

I'm open to recording some other games if folks want, but I thought this was a good sample of some older and newer games.

 

[Appleaker]

Thanks for doing this, it's very interesting. Ther aren't many tests for the 550, partly because, as you said, people have the attitude that gaming on a MacBook is impossible and pointless.

 

[mrex]

I have only played games like Master of Orion II and my mbp works fine

 

[jozero]

I've seen quite a few threads asking about gaming performance on the new 13" Macbook Pro with touchbar and Iris 550. So I threw together a quick video over the holiday weekend to give some folks an idea of how it performs.

I looked at 4 games:
World of Warcraft
Counter-Strike GO
Overwatch
DOOM 2016

Now before anyone asks "why would you buy this laptop for gaming", I'll answer "I didn't".

I have a dedicated gaming PC, and I bought this laptop as my everyday computer.
But I am pretty impressed with what this little thing can handle, and I'm happy that if I want to play a game while on the go, I'll be able to.

I'm open to recording some other games if folks want, but I thought this was a good sample of some older and newer games.

Kudos man. That was a really informative video, and you have a great speaking style and voice. Keep it up !

 

[jacob_w]

I've seen quite a few threads asking about gaming performance on the new 13" Macbook Pro with touchbar and Iris 550. So I threw together a quick video over the holiday weekend to give some folks an idea of how it performs.

I looked at 4 games:
World of Warcraft
Counter-Strike GO
Overwatch
DOOM 2016

Now before anyone asks "why would you buy this laptop for gaming", I'll answer "I didn't".

I have a dedicated gaming PC, and I bought this laptop as my everyday computer.
But I am pretty impressed with what this little thing can handle, and I'm happy that if I want to play a game while on the go, I'll be able to.

I'm open to recording some other games if folks want, but I thought this was a good sample of some older and newer games.

thanks for sharing! how's the fan noise?

 

[mikeo007]

Kudos man. That was a really informative video, and you have a great speaking style and voice. Keep it up !

Thanks, I appreciate the comment, my first time trying something like this!

thanks for sharing! how's the fan noise?

Fan is actually almost silent when I was playing games under macOS.
Under Windows 10, the fans were a bit louder while playing overwatch, and very loud at times while playing Doom.
I'd say at their loudest, the fans were about the same noise level as my old 2010 Macbook Pro, but they didn't stay at max speed for too long.

 

[Scott G.]

I've seen quite a few threads asking about gaming performance on the new 13" Macbook Pro with touchbar and Iris 550. So I threw together a quick video over the holiday weekend to give some folks an idea of how it performs.

I looked at 4 games:
World of Warcraft
Counter-Strike GO
Overwatch
DOOM 2016

Now before anyone asks "why would you buy this laptop for gaming", I'll answer "I didn't".

I have a dedicated gaming PC, and I bought this laptop as my everyday computer.
But I am pretty impressed with what this little thing can handle, and I'm happy that if I want to play a game while on the go, I'll be able to.

I'm open to recording some other games if folks want, but I thought this was a good sample of some older and newer games.

What specs did you go for?

Nevermind, should probably have watched the video first lol.

 

[MH01]

Cheers for this. These type of videos and feedback are great/

And brave man playing elemental shaman, hope they improved since start of legion, gave up levelling mine, so broken.

 

[SJTrance]

I'm basically playing around with steam for just the same reason: for some simple on the go gaming. I've been a PlayStation guy for a long time with gaming and have never really considered gaming on my computer. I think that I can manage to pack in my game controller on the go for some simple gaming on flights and such. Unfortunately, many of the games that I really like require a discrete graphics card. I quickly realized that I don't know the first thing to computer gaming.

My questions are:

When using steam for PC, an I attempt to play using parallels or should I do boot camp/external windows only?

What are the games that I can download on steam that will work with my 2016 13" touch bar base CPU with 16gb ram as the only upgrade. You don't have to list all the games, but rather, what settings in the minimum requirements should I be looking for? Which graphics cards should i look to be looking for?

Thanks for clearing this up for me.

 

[terminator-jq]

I've seen quite a few threads asking about gaming performance on the new 13" Macbook Pro with touchbar and Iris 550. So I threw together a quick video over the holiday weekend to give some folks an idea of how it performs.

I looked at 4 games:
World of Warcraft
Counter-Strike GO
Overwatch
DOOM 2016

Now before anyone asks "why would you buy this laptop for gaming", I'll answer "I didn't".

I have a dedicated gaming PC, and I bought this laptop as my everyday computer.
But I am pretty impressed with what this little thing can handle, and I'm happy that if I want to play a game while on the go, I'll be able to.

I'm open to recording some other games if folks want, but I thought this was a good sample of some older and newer games.

Great video! Can you please give more details on your Windows setup? Are you running Bootcamp via an external SSD or you you using a VM?

 

[mikeo007]

Cheers for this. These type of videos and feedback are great/

And brave man playing elemental shaman, hope they improved since start of legion, gave up levelling mine, so broken.

Haha thanks, and ya elemental is still trash tier in raids, but they're decent in Mythic+ which is all I do anymore.

When using steam for PC, an I attempt to play using parallels or should I do boot camp/external windows only?

What are the games that I can download on steam that will work with my 2016 13" touch bar base CPU with 16gb ram as the only upgrade. You don't have to list all the games, but rather, what settings in the minimum requirements should I be looking for? Which graphics cards should i look to be looking for?

Thanks for clearing this up for me.

I wouldn't use parallels, you'll get much better performance out of an actual Windows install using either bootcamp or an external drive.

For GPU requirements in Steam, they're unfortunately all over the board. Doom lists a GTX 670 as a minimum so anything the requires equal or less should run fine on the Iris 550. But other games that run better than doom list higher requirements, so it's kind of hard to go by that alone.

You may be better off searching for youtube videos of how the game runs on other hardware. The Iris 550 is roughly equal to the 940m in the Surfacebook, so you should be able to find some videos of that running pretty much every game available.

Great video! Can you please give more details on your Windows setup? Are you running Bootcamp via an external SSD or you you using a VM?

No VM, I'm running windows 10 natively from the external SSD. I'm using bootcamp drivers, but I actually installed it on the SSD using an application called Rufus. Windows 10 has something called "Windows to Go" that allows you to run it off of an external drive and it works really well.

 

[terminator-jq]

No VM, I'm running windows 10 natively from the external SSD. I'm using bootcamp drivers, but I actually installed it on the SSD using an application called Rufus. Windows 10 has something called "Windows to Go" that allows you to run it off of an external drive and it works really well.

Thanks! I love Mac OS but there are some things that are only available on Windows that I need. Its nice to know that I can run Windows without giving up space on my internal SSD.