I don't entirely follow what Blizz have done in the settings!! Fullscreen mode is gone entirely now and I always thought that Fullscreen (Windowed) was more taxing than plain Fullscreen.
It typically is!
On a technical level if you do windowed mode you first have to render your screen buffer as usual, and then do a scaling blit to the desktop surface, which is an extra operation. Also, at least with older windows/directX versions, windowed mode seems to have incurred some random overhead here and there which all together brought framerate down noticeably compared to "exclusive mode" (IE traditional fullscreen.) With Win10 and DX12 things have changed somewhat and apparently MS wants developers to move away from oldstyle fullscreen mode for whatever reason (which is why Blizzard did away with it in the latest patch.)
Not sure how fullscreen/windowed mode plays out performance-wise on MacOS though; my MBP is so old and slow I just don't use it much. WoW pretty much ran single-digit FPS, maybe low tens even with everything on off/lowest possible last time I ran it, and now I'm not sure if it runs at all. I might not reach minimum system requirements anymore.
Oh well, I should have my replacement laptop in another 9 days tops. Should. lol
By the way:
Is fullscreen gone even on MacOS? IE, what happens if you press option-M while in-game, nothing?
I was inside Stormwind and went on the tram to Ironforge and getting 60fps
Hm, well, even updated Stormwind doesn't tax a computer nearly as much as some of the Legion zones, and Suramar in particular anywhere you have a view of the city itself.
Lol at the fans waking the dead, btw.
Now whether you are happy with 30fps is entirely personal. For me I think it's OK on something like WoW.
Yes, I think that's what I'll do as well. It's not exactly ideal, but since it cuts down on heat and noise so much it'll be worth it I'm reasoning.
So yeah, for sure it's perfectly playable that way if you find yourself away from home for work or whatever. You may well benefit from the newer CPU and 655 GPU too.
2018 13" gets the 128MB eDRAM "crystalwell" chip, that's twice the capacity of the 2017 model year's chip. It certainly won't double performance, but maybe some improvement here or there can be gleaned.
Also, IIRC it benefits the CPU cores as well, so processor performance doesn't have to suffer compared to the faster DDR4 in the 15" model in many situations (and from what I read a few years ago it seems some workloads benefit so much that mobile CPUs with crystalwell cache beats out top of the range performance desktop chips. lal)
