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What's your settings (details/quality/resolution) and FPS on your MBP 15?

I've gotten the machine, and I'm working on getting it together. I'll collect the above info. What's a recommended benchmark I could use to compare?

I also got Bootcamp going and plan on trying it there, but it's not as easy as just running my VM.
 
What's the general recommendation on cooling pads for the 16"? I've started to game a bit on it and the hardware is truly great, I can run the games I want to run without issue but the fans really starts to spin up making me a bit nervous about (future) heat problems. Do you guys recommend a cooling pad or can they cause more harm than good?
 
just recently got the new 16in MacBook Pro was wondering if it possible to play call of duty modern warefare in Mac OS bootcamp
 
I installed bootcamp and played Destiny 2 on my i7 32 gb ram 8 gb GPU, and was able to keep it at 50-60 fps at high settings with lowering the render to 60%, resolution at the default (3k x something, it was the highest. But whenever I tried to lower the resolution, it only scaled to part of the screen. I’ll have to read some of the older comments to see how to fix this. Only about 2 -3 gb of the GPU was being used up though. What is keeping the game from running better? CPU? Also, tried playing with nintendo switch pro controller but input lag was awful. Going to buy a exercise deathadder tomorrow and see how that works.
 
just recently got the new 16in MacBook Pro was wondering if it possible to play call of duty modern warefare in Mac OS bootcamp

Yes
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I installed bootcamp and played Destiny 2 on my i7 32 gb ram 8 gb GPU, and was able to keep it at 50-60 fps at high settings with lowering the render to 60%, resolution at the default (3k x something, it was the highest. But whenever I tried to lower the resolution, it only scaled to part of the screen. I’ll have to read some of the older comments to see how to fix this. Only about 2 -3 gb of the GPU was being used up though. What is keeping the game from running better? CPU? Also, tried playing with nintendo switch pro controller but input lag was awful. Going to buy a exercise deathadder tomorrow and see how that works.

Are you using the bootcampdrivers adrenaline red?
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What's the general recommendation on cooling pads for the 16"? I've started to game a bit on it and the hardware is truly great, I can run the games I want to run without issue but the fans really starts to spin up making me a bit nervous about (future) heat problems. Do you guys recommend a cooling pad or can they cause more harm than good?

I use this cooling pad but any cooling pad would be fine. You have have fans spinning no matter what. Put on some headphones.
 
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Not that a cooling pad will hurt anything, but I don't use one and never did. I haven't seen any real evidence they help keep temperatures down on the internal parts. They tend to just cool off the outer case and make you feel like you're doing something good for the computer.

Really, using the third party utilities that help you tweak the CPU and fan behavior will help keep those temperatures from rising too high in the first place, which is better than letting things get excessively hot but trying to keep the outer case cool.


I use this cooling pad but any cooling pad would be fine. You have have fans spinning no matter what. Put on some headphones.
 
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Yes
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Are you using the bootcampdrivers adrenaline red?
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I use this cooling pad but any cooling pad would be fine. You have have fans spinning no matter what. Put on some headphones.
I’m going to install them today. Wasn’t using them yesterday because I was worried about it voiding applecare, but then I caught up on old posts in this thread that said it’s not a problem.
 
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What's your settings (details/quality/resolution) and FPS on your MBP 15?

Ok, I've had some chance to play with it.

I'm using the same settings. On my MBP 16", I gave Parallels 2GB of video RAM.

Resolution: 1440x900
AA: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: Off
Texture Quality: Medium
Radial Blur Quality: Low
Shadow Quality: Low
Decal Quantity: None
FXAA: Off
Water: Reflect air only

It's usually around 60FPS. Some jerking once in a while when loading textures. It drops a few FPS when in misty areas like Raven Rock. It was wild to see.

On my 2016 1st gen 15" with TB, I gave Parallels 1GB of video RAM.

On a simple outdoors scene, it can do 60FPS. But it drops down to 40 or worse pretty easily. Outside the mushroom house in Solstheim, it would have problems whenever I looked at the house. In Raven Rock, it had a sustained FPS between 25 and 40, and occasionally dipped to 15FPS. It's a pretty substantial difference.

I'll have to try it on bootcamp sometime, but it was playable enough on my 2016 machine and plays well enough on my 2019 I might up the settings.
 
Wasn't able to install the red or blue bootcampdrivers on my MacBook Pro 16". When I would attempt to run the AMD install towards the end of the process, it got a 1603 error. Checked the forums on bootcampdrivers and it looks like Matt himself is now having the same error. For now I'm reinstalling Windows, because I couldn't reinstall the original drivers.
 
Wasn't able to install the red or blue bootcampdrivers on my MacBook Pro 16". When I would attempt to run the AMD install towards the end of the process, it got a 1603 error. Checked the forums on bootcampdrivers and it looks like Matt himself is now having the same error. For now I'm reinstalling Windows, because I couldn't reinstall the original drivers.

That's strange. I'm using the Adrenaline Red January drivers and it has been working flawlessly for me. What I did was:
  1. I installed Bootcamp as normal
  2. Update Windows
  3. Made sure bootcamp was updated in Windows
  4. Installed Adrenaline Red
  5. Installed Steam and played games.
 
That's strange. I'm using the Adrenaline Red January drivers and it has been working flawlessly for me. What I did was:
  1. I installed Bootcamp as normal
  2. Update Windows
  3. Made sure bootcamp was updated in Windows
  4. Installed Adrenaline Red
  5. Installed Steam and played games.
I was able to get it to work with the older drivers from December which I found in a thread on boot camp drivers.com. I probably won’t mess with the January ones for now, just happy to have it working!
 
No thread on gaming would be complete without it! I actually have a PC, a Dell, I switch back and forth from time to time.

OP, I play World of Warcraft, Elite Dangerous (Bootcamp), Ghost Recon Wildlands, Elder Scrolls Online and Fortnite. I play a lot of WoW. My Radeon 455 handles it great.

Does your macbook pro make any loud fan noise? Mine is just super loud and I'm wondering whether my new macbook pro 16 is defected or not just because of the loud fan noise
 
Does your macbook pro make any loud fan noise? Mine is just super loud and I'm wondering whether my new macbook pro 16 is defected or not just because of the loud fan noise

Loud is relative. This computer with the fans at full tilt is considered fairly quiet compared to prior Macbooks and comparable windows notebooks. What are you comparing the volume to?
 
with my macbook pro 15 inch 207 model. When I run the same program such as after effects or games like league of legends, the newer macbook pro 16 inch is just louder. My older macbook rarely makes a fan noise.
 
Does your macbook pro make any loud fan noise? Mine is just super loud and I'm wondering whether my new macbook pro 16 is defected or not just because of the loud fan noise

It's as loud as any gaming laptop - at least comparable to my MSI GS65 when gaming. Fans are usually drowned out by sounds and music when playing.

Dead silent when running MacOS and not gaming.
 
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Does your macbook pro make any loud fan noise? Mine is just super loud and I'm wondering whether my new macbook pro 16 is defected or not just because of the loud fan noise

16 is probably louder than 15 2016-2019 on max fan speed. But depending on the game, you can use some tricks. I can only speak about WoW (tested on Classic): 1. Set video performance to level 5 or less in WoW; 2. set render resolution to about 50% of your display's if using laptop's display or any high res. display; the game will still look great on these displays; 3. turn on vertical synchronisation if it isn't, this will cap your FPS (CTRL+R in game to check FPS) to 60 if using laptop's or a typical display.

Basically, if you want to minimize heat and fan noise, tweak these settings so that the game wouldn't push the GPU to the max.
 
with my macbook pro 15 inch 207 model. When I run the same program such as after effects or games like league of legends, the newer macbook pro 16 inch is just louder. My older macbook rarely makes a fan noise.

Assuming you mean the 2017 model and not the 2007 model, that was a quad core machine with very different cooling requirements. The fans were mapped differently.
 
just recently got the new 16in MacBook Pro was wondering if it possible to play call of duty modern warefare in Mac OS bootcamp

It certainly is! Just install the latest Win 10 (v. 1909), then download the GPU drivers from bootcampdrivers.com (blue version recommended). Read and follow the instructions and you will be just fine! :)
 
I’ll take the big performance jump with a comparable fan noise to the 2015 15” any day. I used to play Cities Skylines and similar games on that 15” and I don’t think the 16” is noticeably or indeed any louder. It’s also possible to minimise (or even eliminate) fan noise for non-demanding games on the 16” using some of the tweaks mentioned.

Turbo Boost Switcher works well when playing games in macOS. It sets the CPU to a constant and stable base frequency, which is better suited to gaming than the schizophrenic behaviour these chips normally exhibit by design; drawing large power spikes to reach their boost clocks and considerably more on average, with associated heating up to 99 degrees.

With Turbo Boost disabled, I find the CPU uses no more than 10-12 W and remains cool at around 66 degrees, even during gaming. This leaves more power available to the rest of the system and GPU.

Granted I haven’t played any demanding 3D games yet; and I expect fan noise when I want the most power; but for non-demanding games I’ve been able to play completely silently even at the native resolution, and that’s without tweaking fan profiles. In general there are even more options in Windows, which I’ve yet to explore.
 
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I am not a hardcore gamer, just occasional games like SC2 and RoTR but I am very impressed with how well the 16” plays them. Base GPU/CPU here with upgraded memory/storage for other reasons. I am running my boot camp off an NVMe drive in a USB-C enclosure and it work great.
 
So is the 5500m throttling down several hundred mhz (to almost half in some cases) when gaming in bootcamp an unavoidable issue?
 
I’ll take the big performance jump with a comparable fan noise to the 2015 15” any day. I used to play Cities Skylines and similar games on that 15” and I don’t think the 16” is noticeably or indeed any louder. It’s also possible to minimise (or even eliminate) fan noise for non-demanding games on the 16” using some of the tweaks mentioned.

Turbo Boost Switcher works well when playing games in macOS. It sets the CPU to a constant and stable base frequency, which is better suited to gaming than the schizophrenic behaviour these chips normally exhibit by design; drawing large power spikes to reach their boost clocks and considerably more on average, with associated heating up to 99 degrees.

With Turbo Boost disabled, I find the CPU uses no more than 10-12 W and remains cool at around 66 degrees, even during gaming. This leaves more power available to the rest of the system and GPU.

Granted I haven’t played any demanding 3D games yet; and I expect fan noise when I want the most power; but for non-demanding games I’ve been able to play completely silently even at the native resolution, and that’s without tweaking fan profiles. In general there are even more options in Windows, which I’ve yet to explore.

Have you been able to test WoW at all? I used to play WoW on my 2013 15" rMBP which had the GT650M card and I used to play at full retina res which was 2880x1800 all on low settings which looked awesome. I could turn the settings. up higher but I personally didn't feel a need since the resolution was so high to begin with. Anyways, looking to see what the 16" could do at the new native res on low settings. Thanks for any feedback!
 
For me I was experiencing 90* temperatures in sensors even just OPENING Solidworks in BootCamp. I ended up using Thottlestop and reduced the TPL's. I brought the short term turbo to 30 watts and the long term to 25. I also lowered the turbo duration limit to 5 seconds.

This was a game changer for my 16" MBP. Just thought I would share that.

I now can run Solidworks Performance Tests without thermal throttling once. It throttles, however that's because I have pulled the max watts down to 25 with bursts of 30. Still runs great, fans are in check....much smoother experience.
 
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