Gaming differences?

[amj23]

I was wondering whether a 13" mbpr with i5 would be as good as an i7 for light gaming such as Minecraft or Terraira. If there are any major differences worth the money please post your thoughts. ( I do know that the value of money differs from one another) Just tell me if you would upgrade for $200 and the performance gaps.

Thank you.

 

[saturnotaku]

The i7 isn't worth the extra money in pretty much all circumstances. Put the $200 you would have spent on it toward more storage capacity.

 

[golong15]

Minecraft is fine on the i5.

 

[severage]

Excellent, actually. I play it on the 2.6 GHz i5 with nearly constant 60 FPS. That is however, with vsync set to on. Turn it off, and I can get over 100 FPS, but in actuality, the game looks choppier than with vsync on since the refresh rate is only 60 Hz.

tl;dr: Yes, its play excellently without i7. Turn (or keep) vysnc on, however.

 

[paolo-]

Not worth it for gaming at the moment. The biggest difference between i5 and i7 is hyperthreading. Sadly, few games benefit from hyperthreading as opposed to professional applications (photo and video editing, audio production, 3d rendering...).

EDIT: The i5 actually does have hyper-theading. Either way, the performance increase should be quite small in your use case.

 

[Peepo]

Not worth it for gaming at the moment. The biggest difference between i5 and i7 is hyperthreading. Sadly, few games benefit from hyperthreading as opposed to professional applications (photo and video editing, audio production, 3d rendering...).

The new i5 processor in latest 13" Macbook Pro Retina have hyper threading.

 

[amj23]

Excellent, actually. I play it on the 2.6 GHz i5 with nearly constant 60 FPS. That is however, with vsync set to on. Turn it off, and I can get over 100 FPS, but in actuality, the game looks choppier than with vsync on since the refresh rate is only 60 Hz.

tl;dr: Yes, its play excellently without i7. Turn (or keep) vysnc on, however.

Thanks for the feedback. I think that I'm probably going to go for the i5/16ram/512gb as it seems to be what fits my needs best, although I could save another $200 if I choose 256gb.

 

[paolo-]

The new i5 processor in latest 13" Macbook Pro Retina have hyper threading.

I stand corrected! Apparently, only the desktop i5 chips don't have hyper threading.