Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MacBook Pro 2018 gaming?
- Thread starter ginofresh
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If gaming is a major requirement then don’t buy a Mac.
A Mac is a terrible choice for gaming & anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong.
A Mac is a terrible choice for gaming & anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong.
Would be a dream come true. I have a 1080 Ti in my desktop back home and I spend most of the year away in college so being able to connect the 1080 Ti to my MBP would be a dream come true
[doublepost=1533647986][/doublepost]
I don't think anyone is buying a Mac for gaming specifically, but it does not hurt to warm up the dGPU inside from a time to time and use it while away from home (hotel, college, holiday, traveling, camping, etc.)
I correctly installed the bootcampdrivers.com drivers and launched the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark. It's the only reasonably demanding game I currently have installed that has a benchmark in it, so I used it to make the "before and after" test.
- dGPU 560X test, 2.6 Ghz i7, internal Mac display only
- Windows Bootcamp of course
- Wattage limited to 30 with Intel XTU, if you don't set a limit then any game that stresses the CPU is severely limited by the CPU throttling after only 10-20 seconds as soon as temps rise, I really hope Apple makes something for Bootcamp like they seem to have done on the macOS side
- Game: Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Resolution: 1280x800
- Graphical settings: "High" (the game has a generic low, medium, high and very high automatic setting, I chose high)
- Room temp: 27°C with a/c
- two runs executed one immediately after the other, one run lasts maybe 1 minute and a half
With Apple original bootcamp drivers:
----------
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 61.77
Syria: 42.42
Geothermal Valley: 24.49
Overall score: 42.91
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 61.47
Syria: 46.81
Geothermal Valley: 43.66
Overall score: 50.87
With bootcampdrivers.com drivers (august 7th release):
----------
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 61.20
Syria: 39.10
Geothermal Valley: 33.43
Overall score: 44.74
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 55.75
Syria: 36.13
Geothermal Valley: 38.48
Overall score: 43.89
As you can see there is not any meaningful difference in this particular game. In fact the original Apple drivers seem to fare better on the second run, but in the complete stats I could see it was a matter of a couple less hiccups during the rendering (higher min framerates).
Sadly I don't have any more time to test until the end of august since I'm leaving tomorrow for summer vacations, but I suspect that the modified drivers do not support brilliantly the 560X, in fact after the installation the dGPU is listed in the device manager as a generic "Radeon Pro", with the Apple original bootcamp drivers instead it's listed as "Radeon Pro 560X".
Long story short, you can game with this Mac if you lower your res even with the original Apple drivers, while also reducing the wattage. If you can use a powerful eGPU it can become a beast
In fact it's something like 20% less than my previous gaming PC, but it's enough for me to enjoy gaming since competitive FPS games are not that demanding usually and they run anyway with solid over-120 fps with a 1080 ti.I'd like to share my experience.
I bought this Mac a week ago:
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
2,6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB RAM
512 SSD
Radeon 560X
It's the top tier model without modifications
Also I bought the Razer Core X eGPU (320€) and I already had at home a MSI Gaming X 1080 ti 11G and a Asus PG279Q 165Hz external monitor.
Playing without the enclosure is a matter of lowering the resolution a lot, but you can play at recent games at 30-40-50 fps. I prefer to keep the resolution lower (think 720p) and graphics quality on high.
Playing with the Razer Core X and 1080 ti is almost a dream come true. It's the closest thing to plug and play I could hope for: I just have to connect the eGPU when the Mac is completely off and then just boot in windows (no tricks at the startup screen required). Stop. I'm talking about external display use obviously. No hot unplug allowed or it's a blue screen. First turn off the Mac, then unplug the eGPU. I didn't even try honestly using the eGPU on the Mac screen itself since I prefer gaming on high refresh display.
The first time I connected the eGPU I had to manually install Nvidia drivers and that's all.
With this setup I can use ultra settings (everything maxed out at 2560x1440) on every demanding game I can test, including Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider and still get more than 60fps, think about 60-100 depending on the scene.
If I play less demanding games like Overwatch (everything maxed out at 2560x1440) the fps are 120-165 (max monitor refresh rate) depending on the scene, perfect for competitive play.
Notes:
- If I take the graphical options down a little bit I can get solid 165 fps easily, and 100-120 on the more demanding games, always 2K.
- I'm also happy to use the Mac keyboard, I was coming from a Razer Blackwidow Chroma V2. External mouse is a must for competitive games (I have a Razer Deathadder Elite).
- Long story short I sold my PC to a friend, now I'm living the one machine dream after so many years waiting
- I didn't test eGPU gaming under macOS since I know there is no support for Nvidia eGPUs and I don't want to mess with my main macOS partition since I work with it
Problems still to solve:
- The only tinkering I had to do was install and use Intel XTU to calm down my Mac under Bootcamp while gaming, think about 30W max use, it depends on the temperature of the room, since if I don't do that the system will throttle every 5 seconds after a minute of gaming and make every demanding game TOTALLY unplayable. I hope Apple releases a Bootcamp update that resolves this issue. This is the only nuisance, it's incredible Apple didn't test this problem before shipping, unacceptable.
- In Rise of the Tomb Raider I have problems with sound if I play with the Mac speakers, crackling sound and various noises, I understand this is a common driver issue, I heard that maybe Mojave beta doesn't have these issues. No probs with headphones
Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope they update the drivers for bootcamp to solve the audio issue and patch the throttling issues.
About the "you can't game on Mac period" thing, my opinion is that certainly you can say that Windows PC have better performance for the same price as a Mac, but you can't say that you can't game at all on a Mac. I personally found that with Bootcamp you can game keeping your expectations low (no 2K gaming, full HD with lower settings), which is enough for not demanding/casual gamers.
I don't understand why youtubers try to game at native screen resolution, 2K, 4K, and show games that run at 7fps on the Mac, when not even a dedicated gaming PC can keep up perfectly with the highest resolutions and settings. You have to lower your expectations and you can game for sure.
As you can read from my previous messages I can confirm that with a eGPU you can also play at competitive levels games like Overwatch with a MacBook Pro or demanding titles at Ultra settings 2K, provided you have a beefy eGPU.
There are some people who prefer having only one machine, me being one of them of course. I need a laptop, I hate Windows, love macOS and MacBooks, and the design of Windows laptop sucks bigtime for me.
I don't understand why youtubers try to game at native screen resolution, 2K, 4K, and show games that run at 7fps on the Mac, when not even a dedicated gaming PC can keep up perfectly with the highest resolutions and settings. You have to lower your expectations and you can game for sure.
As you can read from my previous messages I can confirm that with a eGPU you can also play at competitive levels games like Overwatch with a MacBook Pro or demanding titles at Ultra settings 2K, provided you have a beefy eGPU.
There are some people who prefer having only one machine, me being one of them of course. I need a laptop, I hate Windows, love macOS and MacBooks, and the design of Windows laptop sucks bigtime for me.
2.2/32/555x, same settings, just a note - v-sync off and FXAA, fullscreen (but not 'exclusive fullscreen') - other than vsync it was default so I assume it is the same as your runs. Also I'm assuming it was DX11, since in DX12 I was getting higher results than what you posted. No XTU, default bootcamp drivers, didn't observe choppy frame rates, it was quite smooth, but didn't have any monitoring software in the background though.
DX11:
----------
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 52.22
Syria: 38.87
Geothermal Valley: 37.17
Overall score: 42.98
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 52.76
Syria: 38.25
Geothermal Valley: 37.25
Overall score: 43.01
DX12:
----------
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 58.21
Syria: 43.21
Geothermal Valley: 41.26
Overall score: 47.80
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 58.07
Syria: 43.03
Geothermal Valley: 41.19
Overall score: 47.68
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 52.22
Syria: 38.87
Geothermal Valley: 37.17
Overall score: 42.98
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 52.76
Syria: 38.25
Geothermal Valley: 37.25
Overall score: 43.01
DX12:
----------
First run
----------
Mountain Peak: 58.21
Syria: 43.21
Geothermal Valley: 41.26
Overall score: 47.80
----------
Second run
----------
Mountain Peak: 58.07
Syria: 43.03
Geothermal Valley: 41.19
Overall score: 47.68
I just picked up a base 15 MacBook Pro. I've installed Diablo 3, just wondering if any other titles will work decently on the base model? I'd like to try Destiny 2, but Blizzard doesn't seem to have a return policy. Anybody have insight on how more modern games run on the base model?
I opted not to upgrade to the second tier because I figured mac's aren't really gaming machines so there was no point spending more for marginal performance increases that don't benefit my main workflow.
I opted not to upgrade to the second tier because I figured mac's aren't really gaming machines so there was no point spending more for marginal performance increases that don't benefit my main workflow.
The first version to officially support the 560X and 555X was actually 18.8.2, which was released on September the 1st.
I suspect you will notice a difference now in driver performance, as previous releases were not optimized for your graphics card.
Other settings that are worth tweaking include setting the texturing mode in AMD settings to performance, setting an FPS limit of 59 FPS (works better to reduce screen tearing than setting to 60 FPS) & turning on OpenGL triple buffering...
Last edited:
Ok thank you for the info! Last time I checked MacsFanControl was not compatible with 2018 MacBook Pros under Bootcamp (where I game) because of T2 chip security. I will check again
i play league of legends, also diablo 3, and hearthstone...so you can game on mac...but thats depending of the games
I think i can play these games non stop and the mac doesn't take any damage not even in 5years..but again these are not that demanding games
All of them on macOS
What really holds Mac gaming back is that games are often poorly ported and not particularly well optimised - why? Because the Mac has a small market share in the first place, and particularly for gaming there is no reason you’d choose a Mac. You pay a significant premium for power vs an equivalent PC, the cooling isn’t really set up to run at full tilt continuously and the game selection is limited (and poorly optimised). It’s a bit of a vicious circle