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Gaming on 16 inch MacBook pro

imrazor said:
Typically a soft reset (aka a simple reboot) typically will not clear changes made to voltages, clock speeds, etc. You will probably need to do a complete shutdown in order to reset to the default values in the Mac's EFI.
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That did indeed make it go back to default, thank you!
Was curious if tweaking windows could impact Mac performance, got my answer quickly :)
 
As I have previously said in this thread, if your current issue is ghosting try to connect to an external display if you are not on the go it helps a ton!

Plus the 5300M does amazingly well under a 1080p display at 60fps.
 
Alexander William said:
Why game on a MBP? what you're going to do it destroy the system battery and thermally kill your unit over time imo.

What you should do is get Playstations Now or Geforce Now IMO - Dual boot a windows 10 Lite copy, then run it from there with a controller.

Macs imo are for work. A solid desktop with an RTX card for gaming.
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A solid desktop with an RTX GPU cannot game portably or at work or at a friends house or a hotel.

The reasoning for wanting to game on a laptop period is versatility and portability.

The next question would be why not game on a windows gaming laptop rather than a macbook? Well the macbook offers a few distinct advantages. Macbooks seem to have much better power and battery management when not plugged in, they have luxurious best-in-class trackpads, best-in-class sound, low weight relative to power one of the best portable keyboards, great customer service if the laptop does get fried due to use and good displays (albiet not as good as the OLED ones offered on some of the highest end gaming laptops).

Once apple get a mini LED HDR display which goes up to 120hz like the ipad.. Its going to be a good sell for gaming.

You can either have more frames per second and pure power with RTX graphics portably or better battery life, build quality, track pad, keyboard, sound, weight, etc.

This is also ignoring the fact its a macbook pro which can obviously boot into mac OS and destroy most laptops in terms of productivity.




This is coming from someone who has a MBP and an RTX gaming rig.

Sadly the sacrifices in build quality, sound quality, trackpad quality, keyboard quality, microphone quality, webcam quality make windows laptops a really bad sell. All of them seem to have issues from battery life to portability to keyboard/trackpad quality to sound quality which make it difficult to stomach. Then if you take into account only DELL offer a customer service similar to apple.. you can potentially buy a very rotten apple from someone like Razer blade and struggle to get it fixed down the line.
 
I just got a 16" and its got a ton of issues man, I don't even want to say this is a good gaming rig before the instability, driver issues etc are fixed. Plus this thing sounds like a jet engine while gaming.

Honestly, this is good for wow, overwatch etc really light weight games. But I would not game on this, I still use streaming services for gaming -- which negate ssd size and give me a unlimited selection.
 
Alexander William said:
I just got a 16" and its got a ton of issues man, I don't even want to say this is a good gaming rig before the instability, driver issues etc are fixed. Plus this thing sounds like a jet engine while gaming.

Honestly, this is good for wow, overwatch etc really light weight games. But I would not game on this, I still use streaming services for gaming -- which negate ssd size and give me a unlimited selection.
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TBH most gaming machines sound loud.

However the driver issues really does suck :(

I wouldn't use streaming services because of latency, money, value, graphical fidelity, input lag, compression especially in dark games, and the fact that you need wifi to play the games.

I don't think a MBP is a good gaming rig. ITs just a good band-aid/temporary gaming machine for portable play.

My gaming rig is my windows gaming desktop still :D
 
PTLove said:
Hey guys, looking for some help / advice.

I just installed Windows and bootcamp for the purposes of gaming on my Macbook Pro 16" base model (ala this video:
).

My problem is that the changes made to the TPL settings of the CPU via throttlestop are sticking through reboots - even into OSX! My Cinebench scores in OSX fell once I made those changes, so I booted back into windows, deleted throttlestop settings, and loaded it back up - still the same override values (48).

Could anyone please give me the default values they see on Throttlestop for the TPL screen with a Macbook Pro 16" base model (i7-9750H)? I did not realize I would be overriding a core system thing through reboots and would lose those defaults!
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This really shouldn’t be the case from what I’m aware. The software says it has to be running to work, right? Did you delete the wrong settings file?

Try uninstalling (deleting the entire folder) and reinstalling. Failing that, try resetting SMC.

I’ll have a look at mine a bit later.

Edit: Glad you got it sorted.
 
My son wanted to borrow my 16" to play a very basic 2D platform game Terraria. I was surprised that the 16" can't really handle such a simple game!

Started off at 100% battery and the 16" lasted less than an hour, fans blasting away all the time. Surely it should be able to handle this? or do I have a problem with my machine?
 
bulldoze said:
Started off at 100% battery and the 16" lasted less than an hour, fans blasting away all the time. Surely it should be able to handle this? or do I have a problem with my machine?
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Handle performance-wise? Sounds the game ran fine, but you're dissatisfied by the fact that the battery ran down, which is perfectly normal. I have a Razer blade that is much faster and more powerful then the MBP and if I played on battery, it wouldn't last much. I was playing fallout 4 on battery once and after 45 minutes I could see this was going to be a problem :)
 
Ah, ok I was just confused that such a simple game with 16 bit style pixel graphics could stress this machine so much. I thought it would handle it without breaking sweat, maybe it say more about the coding on that particular game.
 
bulldoze said:
Ah, ok I was just confused that such a simple game with 16 bit style pixel graphics could stress this machine so much. I thought it would handle it without breaking sweat, maybe it say more about the coding on that particular game.
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Are you playing it on macos or bootcamp?
 
Okay, so this thing is a beast for gaming, tested it on Call of duty with the new drivers.
90fps at native res is just unreal.
Also the onboard audio overpowers the fans so I basically don't hear them at all.

Now playing diablo or Starcraft I don't really hear any fans.... its a great device really well engineered- minus the screen.

Only complaint is apple half assed the bootcamp work, like really no Igpu/dgpu in windows ? so basically windows for plugged in work, osx for everything possible.
 
Alexander William said:
Okay, so this thing is a beast for gaming, tested it on Call of duty with the new drivers.
90fps at native res is just unreal.
Also the onboard audio overpowers the fans so I basically don't hear them at all.

Now playing diablo or Starcraft I don't really hear any fans.... its a great device really well engineered- minus the screen.

Only complaint is apple half assed the bootcamp work, like really no Igpu/dgpu in windows ? so basically windows for plugged in work, osx for everything possible.
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What new drivers they haven’t been updated since it came out
 
Kylo83 said:
I never trust them they can break the machine I wish Apple would update the amd ones it’s a joke they dont
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Their fine, I did a display driver clean installed the red series and it fixed everything. Solid drivers highly recommend you trying.
 
Alexander William said:
Their fine, I did a display driver clean installed the red series and it fixed everything. Solid drivers highly recommend you trying.
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Yeah thanks I’ll have a look, I don’t get my Apple can’t just update them with amd it’s not fair
 
icyfire said:
I know of course that no MacBook is meant for gaming but I was wondering if anyone knows what the capabilities are with the new 5500m. Any benchmarks out yet?
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I just the macbook
icyfire said:
I know of course that no MacBook is meant for gaming but I was wondering if anyone knows what the capabilities are with the new 5500m. Any benchmarks out yet?
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i just got the 16 MacBook Pro and I play whatever game on it . Gta5 2k20 cod war zone with no problem but as u know **** gets hot . Waiting for a cooling pad as we speak
 
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Sixowematt said:
I just the macbook

i just got the 16 MacBook Pro and I play whatever game on it . Gta5 2k20 cod war zone with no problem but as u know **** gets hot . Waiting for a cooling pad as we speak
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can you let us know if a cooling pad really works?
 
venom600 said:
Has anyone done any benchmarking on Red vs Blue drivers?
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Blue is more stable. (less crashes, less graphics errors, less black screens)

January 2020 is more stable than April 2020, regardless of blue or red. This is reported on the community.

Also if you use a monitor with resolution greater than 3840 x 2160 like I do, you have to use the December 2019 drivers. None of the 2020 drivers supports Eyefinity properly, so external monitor resolution is capped at 3840 x 2160.

But even the December 2019 driver is a marked improvement over what Apple shipped with Bootcamp. Some of the rare games I still play see major performance boost. Forza Horizon 4 for instance gets on average 75 - 80fps at 1080p. Rise of the Tomb Raider in some areas went from 30fps to well over 75fps. Most of the others don't get much of a boost (but they're already above 60fps to begin with), but there's less micro stuttering and less frame drops in total.

Apples' bootcamp drivers can't sustain 1080p gaming, the custom drivers can.

But I use the Blue drivers for Solidworks and Fusion 360. Those see major boosts as well and can sustain well over 60fps easily now, allowing me to just concentrate on modeling. Solidworks used to be a stutter-fest with Apple's bootcamp drivers.
 
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bill-p said:
Blue is more stable. (less crashes, less graphics errors, less black screens)

January 2020 is more stable than April 2020, regardless of blue or red. This is reported on the community.

Also if you use a monitor with resolution greater than 3840 x 2160 like I do, you have to use the December 2019 drivers. None of the 2020 drivers supports Eyefinity properly, so external monitor resolution is capped at 3840 x 2160.

But even the December 2019 driver is a marked improvement over what Apple shipped with Bootcamp. Some of the rare games I still play see major performance boost. Forza Horizon 4 for instance gets on average 75 - 80fps at 1080p. Rise of the Tomb Raider in some areas went from 30fps to well over 75fps. Most of the others don't get much of a boost (but they're already above 60fps to begin with), but there's less micro stuttering and less frame drops in total.

Apples' bootcamp drivers can't sustain 1080p gaming, the custom drivers can.

But I use the Blue drivers for Solidworks and Fusion 360. Those see major boosts as well and can sustain well over 60fps easily now, allowing me to just concentrate on modeling. Solidworks used to be a stutter-fest with Apple's bootcamp drivers.
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bill-p said:
Blue is more stable. (less crashes, less graphics errors, less black screens)

January 2020 is more stable than April 2020, regardless of blue or red. This is reported on the community.
Click to expand...

I get confused about this. On the website it states the blue drivers are best for the 16 inch Macbook Pro but then heaps of people are saying to install the red drivers.

Can you confirm the blue drivers work well with games on the 16 inch Macbook Pro?

Thanks
 
You can try both.

Red April 2020 crashes a lot for me. Blue fares a bit better.
Red January 2020 doesn't crash at all, but seems on par with Blue to me.
Blue December 2019 supports Eyefinity properly and allows me to use my external monitor (5120 x 2160) properly in Bootcamp, so it's my preferred option.

I don't use Bootcamp primarily for gaming after all. Gaming is an afterthought for me.
 
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