Will I be fine to play the majority of games with the new rMBP?

[Putyouinmyoven]

Hello - I'm hoping to get the 2015 13" rMBP next week - 2.7GHz i5, iris 6100. I'm just hoping I'm right in assuming that it will be able to play the majority of older games and newer indie ones - basically, I'm not too interested in playing big budget 3D AAA games on the macbook such as the new call of duty / Battlefield / Arkham Knight, because I'd rather play that kind of thing on console, but I do want to be able to do things such as emulate PS1 and N64, play less beefy, probably older commercial games available on steam to the level of say, the original Mass Effect or psychonauts and newer 'indie' games, for example a hat in time (runs on unreal engine 3 I believe).

My current 2009 mbp just can't handle them, I'm guessing it's due to the poor NVIDIA 9400m.

And just in case, would it stretch to bigger games such as The Witcher 2? That's likely as intensive as it would get.

Furthermore, would the performance generally be good enough to use a virtual machine to play similar sort of windows only games for example, would newer indie titles such as Ori and the blind forest run okay? And for such a game, would it be essential to go for 16gb ram over 8gb? I'm really agoniseing over upgrading the ram right now!

Thanks!

 

[nirvanemesis]

I'm not an expert, but looking around online like an amateur shows that the Iris 6100 is supposedly comparable to an NVIDIA 820M, so it should be decent for the games you specified, except probably the Witcher. It's much faster than your old card if that helps. As for running games in a VM, you'd probably want to instead play in BootCamp because VMs don't give you the best performance.

 

[geoelectric]

Hello - I'm hoping to get the 2015 13" rMBP next week - 2.7GHz i5, iris 6100. I'm just hoping I'm right in assuming that it will be able to play the majority of older games and newer indie ones - basically, I'm not too interested in playing big budget 3D AAA games on the macbook such as the new call of duty / Battlefield / Arkham Knight, because I'd rather play that kind of thing on console, but I do want to be able to do things such as emulate PS1 and N64, play less beefy, probably older commercial games available on steam to the level of say, the original Mass Effect or psychonauts and newer 'indie' games, for example a hat in time (runs on unreal engine 3 I believe).

My current 2009 mbp just can't handle them, I'm guessing it's due to the poor NVIDIA 9400m.

And just in case, would it stretch to bigger games such as The Witcher 2? That's likely as intensive as it would get.

Furthermore, would the performance generally be good enough to use a virtual machine to play similar sort of windows only games for example, would newer indie titles such as Ori and the blind forest run okay? And for such a game, would it be essential to go for 16gb ram over 8gb? I'm really agoniseing over upgrading the ram right now!

Thanks!

I don't think you're going to be terribly happy with the gaming performance. The Iris 6100 is a better mobile GPU than most of the Intel stuff, but it's still fairly weak.

Of what you listed, 2d indie games are probably all fine, more simple 3d indie games might be OK, unsure on emulators (dunno if they scale to CPU or GPU), Mass Effect and Psychonauts probably is playable at lower resolutions and detail (although Psychonauts sometimes has smoothness issues even on my otherwise-good iMac, so you know), and Witcher 2 is probably not going to play well at all.

Playing through a virtual machine also sounds not real appealing--I think it'll just slow down too much. You might have better luck with wineskins/crossover, and will almost certainly have better luck with Boot Camp if you don't mind using it (and it'll improve the games above quite a bit too).

In general, though, the 13" rMBP just isn't very well spec'ed for laptop gaming due to the relatively poor GPU. You'd be much better off with a 15", even with just an Iris Pro, and way better off with a 15" with the dedicated GPU. Of course, that's $$$.

If you're not married to Mac and want to optimize for gaming, you can do much better for less with an XPS 13 or similar. Of course, you lose OS X.

Re: 820M, that is the rough equivalent for the 6100 according to benchmarks, but understand that's NVidia's low-end GPU. The key there is "20," which designates the class.

It's certainly faster than your 9400m was, but you don't get a ton of performance increase for the 6/7/8 part. So if you look at your game, and the min-spec was 640M or something like that, this is probably still too slow.

 

[dmccloud]

Older titles like TF2, HL2, Portal should run fine. WoW (or other MMOs) will probably run at lower framerates, especially some of the newer ones like ESO. Witcher is probably pushing it just to get playable framerates at any decent resolution just because of how the graphics engine is set up in that game. If you want to run windows-only titles, you would be better off creating a Boot Camp partition and running from there, since VMs actually use a hardware abstraction layer to make the VM "see" the actual hardware present in the system.