New MacBook Pro and Gaming?

[koyoot]

the 450 and the 370x are equal as far as i know

Yes, thats true. However... Polaris architecture has improved Geometry performance so if your application relies on that, you will see improvement. Like for example, here:

The GPUs have been declocked to the same level of core clock, and same level of memory bandwidth.

 

[Uplift]

Thanks guys, so not really worth it then 🙂

 

[Heirborn391]

Just played some Rocket League with my 15" 460 in MacOS. Runs perfectly smooth with settings maxed (but no aa) at 1680x1050. Even is pretty smooth at 1920x1200, but there were a couple of noticeable fps drops at that resolution. I realize this isn't exactly a hardware intensive game (nor a particularly well optimized game), but it was some nice IRL confirmation that the benchmarks don't lie.

 

[kirkroyster]

I just set up the BizonBox3 (w/ NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti) with a MacBook Pro 2016 w/ Radeon 460. The setup was reasonably smooth. X-Plane 10 works well. X-Plane 11 (still in beta) crashes after displaying the cockpit, every time. Bug reported.

The MacBook Pro still runs hot, so the BizonBox 3 did not address that concern. I upped the rendering detail to maximum everything, and I'm getting about 25fps on X-Plane 10.

Are the visuals that much more stunning? I don't know ... definitely more detail. Does it fool my brain into thinking it's real? No. Is the BizonBox 3 worth the money? Jury is out.

Kirk

Has anyone looked at the BizonBOX 3 eGPU? Apart from the ludicrously high price, it looks pretty great. (And let's face it, if we were worried about ludicrously high prices, we'd be posting on the Dell forums, not here.)

Has anyone played with one of these? Any thoughts on how well it will work?

 

[aaron5566]

15" with 460 graphics here. Been playing Overwatch since I got my hands on this laptop at consistently 70 fps on medium-lowish settings. No thermal throttling on my end, even after 4 hours of non stop gaming. Temps are around 75 Celsius. My room is about 22 Celsius.

 

[Patrick-Photo]

15" with 460 graphics here. Been playing Overwatch since I got my hands on this laptop at consistently 70 fps on medium-lowish settings. No thermal throttling on my end, even after 4 hours of non stop gaming. Temps are around 75 Celsius. My room is about 22 Celsius.

Native resolution, 50% scaling and I get a solid 60fps locked on medium-high. Looks and plays amazing!

 

[Hellsurfer]

Native resolution, 50% scaling and I get a solid 60fps locked on medium-high. Looks and plays amazing!

ditto

 

[TrueBlou]

Don't think I've ever bought a Mac for gaming, well, I'll play the odd game on it but it's hardly the forte of the MacBook Pro.

That said, on pure horsepower alone it would seem the 460 (1.86 TFLOPS) is much like the chip that's in the PS4 (1.84 TFLOPS,) slightly more powerful than Xbox One (1.31 TFLOPS) but nowhere near as powerful as my PS4 Pro (4.2 TFLOPS.)

I'll be happy if it runs SimCity (which it will easily 😀) that's about the only game I play on my Mac with anything approaching regularity. The rest, I use the consoles. Though if the MacBook Pro (460) can get close to the visuals of the PlayStation 4 (non Pro) as the power would suggest I'll be pretty happy.

And from watching YouTube benchmarks it seems to do at least that if not better. Putting in good frame rates for GTA V/ Battlefield/COD IW/MGS/Fallout IV. So if I decide to play the occasional game on it, I'll cope.

I don't think we'll ever see a MacBook that could hold a candle to a similarly priced Wintel laptop for gaming, that's par for the course. I personally don't think anyone should ever buy a MacBook if their primary concern is gaming. Fine if you're a casual gamer just playing the occasional game and not too concerned with getting ultra high quality visuals and frame rates.

If it can handle most games well enough I'm happy, like I say I've never been much interested in a Mac for games. I'm more interested in its performance in non-gaming apps.

 

[therealseebs]

TFLOPS are, unfortunately, basically completely useless as a measure of 3D performance.

 

[TrueBlou]

TFLOPS are, unfortunately, basically completely useless as a measure of 3D performance.

If we were measuring the difference between two different architectures then yes, most definitely. However the GPUs in both of those consoles and the MacBook Pro are all basically derivatives of the same architecture, so as a rough estimate of what should be possible you could look at what those systems are capable of.