Gonna buy a 16" MBP for work and research. Would it be good for some gaming as well?

[Fluttershy462]

I'm getting the i7 CPU but the 8gb 5500M GPU and 32gb of RAM.

I'd be interested in lower impact games like Minecraft, League of Legends, Blizzard games, emulators, etc.

 

[LinkRS]

Howdy Fluttershy462,

It seems the local consensus is to get the upgraded version with the Radeon Pro 5600M 8 GB HBM2 Memory. That version seems to work cooler with external displays, and has more performance than the 5500M original upgrade. I have the 5500M, and have played Diablo 3 on it, and if I want the FPS to be above 60fps, I have to keep the resolution down at 1600X1200, which looks fine, but I expected better performance from it. It is possible if I were to use BootCamp, it might run better, but I have no current plans to do that. Good luck!

Rich S.

 

[venom600]

The 5500 will run the games you want without issue, but if you can afford it I'd spring for the 5600.

 

[Natzoo]

I disagree with the price of the 5600, 5500 with the 4gb should be plenty for those games. Spend the cash on a gaming PC, even the 5500 is overpriced for its worth but the extra computing units are a decent upgrade. The difference between 4gb and 8gb for those games won't be noticeable. Make sure your SSD is upgraded too, I feel 1tb should be the minimum.

 

[Invisible Elf]

I play league of legends and world of warcraft with absolutely no problems on my 16" with the 8-core i9 and 5500 4gb graphics. Usually I run them in MacOs but Bootcamp has worked okay as well.

 

[simonmet]

5500M is decent for gaming at 1080p (or 1920 x 1200) but depending on the title or settings you probably won’t get a stable 60 FPS (except for less demanding titles).

I’ve been playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided mostly happily at that resolution with a combination of high and very high settings; and it’s a very attractive game! I could post settings but I settled on something that gives me an average of about 50 FPS for the benchmark, which was good enough for me. The 5600M could therefore probably achieve an average or stable 60 FPS; even higher maybe. It’s not the most recent game but it’s reasonably detailed and demanding.

Be aware however that the graphics card does throttle a bit (and maybe a lot) depending on various factors. The card also boosts quite a lot, so when it stops boosting that can impact performance quite a bit. There’s a lot of discussion about these issues on various forums like BootCampDrivers.com. One thing that helped to reduce thermal throttling for me was to limit the number of active CPU cores, which you can do in Windows itself using Administrative tools in the OS. Games don’t typically need more than 4-6 cores, so I limit it to 6 (thereby also disabling hyper-threading) and that seemed to help. Throttlestop and MacsFanControl on the other hand did little or nothing, so I wouldn’t bother with those.

At this point in the cycle I wouldn’t be throwing too much money at the 5600M. Get the 5500 on discount or wait for the next 16” to see what Apple does with graphics. Sure the 5600 would be nice, and would probably let you play almost any game at a stable 60 FPS, but it’s just so damned expensive!

 

[Pangalactic]

I'm getting the i7 CPU but the 8gb 5500M GPU and 32gb of RAM.

I'd be interested in lower impact games like Minecraft, League of Legends, Blizzard games, emulators, etc.

Minecraft - yes
LoL - yes
Blizzard Games - mostly yes, though I noticed WoW performs quite a bit worse on Mac compared to windows
Emulators - mostly no (if we are talking about virtual machine emulator or wineskin)

 

[Yebubbleman]

I'm getting the i7 CPU but the 8gb 5500M GPU and 32gb of RAM.

I'd be interested in lower impact games like Minecraft, League of Legends, Blizzard games, emulators, etc.

That would probably be plenty sufficient for those games. More than that would be overkill.