To celebrate my new MacBook Air, I decided to play Diablo III again with maxed out graphics settings, but it’s laggy even at the lowest quality & resolution. It’s an 8 year old game, which I figure should run blindingly fast now. I think it actually ran better on my 7 year old MacBook Pro (which I’m finally replacing.) Any advice?
More on the lagginess: When I’m playing, the screen will freeze for a fraction of a second, then continue. This is happening regardless of the graphics quality. I’ve had every graphics setting on the lowest option and resolution down to 800x600 - and still I get that freeze/lag. There’s no difference between playing on my laptop screen or external monitor.
2020 Macbook Air
1.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 1536 MB
Thank You!
- Your “tricked out” MBA has a 1.2 GHz base CPU. Despite the turbo rating of 3.8 GHz, it can’t maintain that turbo for more than a few seconds at a time at best. There simply isn’t enough heat dissipation capability in the chassis of an MBA. That’s why your eight year old MBP fared better - it was thicker and had better heat dissipation, despite having a faster base CPU clock.
- You’re running on Intel integrated graphics (IGP), which also shares your system RAM, meaning it is using RAM that is notably slower than traditional dedicated VRAM.
- You’re on Catalina. OpenGL games absolutely suck on Catalina, and it won’t get fixed. Ever. Apple deprecated OpenGL years ago in favor of Metal. Diablo 3 is an OpenGL based game and has not been converted to Metal, and is unlikely to as it is handled by the Classic game team now.
Basically, in a nutshell, you’ve got the perfect storm of integrated graphics, a low base CPU clock (1.2 GHz is not speedy by any definition, even for Facebook games), an outdated graphics API that has severe bugs in 10.15 (and even 10.14 for that matter), and not enough heat dissipation to keep the machine from thermally throttling when playing the game. MBAs weren’t designed for games, they were designed for relatively casual workloads. They can see bursts of speed, but only briefly. A 3.8 GHz turbo clock would fry the CPU after more than a few seconds of being active. There’s a reason MBAs are far cheaper than MBPs.
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A big THANK YOU for your reply The TIAS, as I was thinking of getting the new 14" MacBook Pro when it comes out in May (rumored), it will probably not have a optional high end AMD graphics chip/card.
Have you fixed it? I am curious because I’ve a different issue, but similar device