I’m considering a move back to Mac from Windows and specifically to a 2019 Macbook Pro with 2.4ghz i9 and Vega 20. In the past I know Mac performance was quite poor vs Windows. Has the new multi-threaded renderer improved performance? Anyone with this config care to chime in? Can you maintain 60fps now? With the loss of full screen can you only play at native resolution?
Sorry for all the questions but WoW is basically the only game I play and $3,000 is a lot of money. I really prefer the MacOS experience though.
I can’t speak for that particular model but generally speaking the performance gap between macOS and Windows has pretty much evaporated entirely at this point. The multithreading optimizations and Metal engine have done wonders.
You don’t have to play at full resolution. In the game settings, there’s a render scale slider that lets you set the game world to whatever resolution you like (most put it at 50% since retina pixel doubles) while keeping the text and UI elements at full resolution and razor sharp.
Just installed WoW on my 2017 15” MBP to test (my main machine is a hackintosh tower) and the scaling doesn’t make textures blurry. Pixels are more apparent than they would be on a non-retina screen because there’s no low resolution “screen door” effect to hide them, but it’s not blurry.
As a sidenote, running around Boralus, WoW seems pretty playable on my MBP at mid settings and 50% scale. The Vega 20 in the model you’re looking at buying is around ~80% more powerful than the Radeon Pro 555 in my 2017 model, so that should give you a sense for where the current 15” MBP sits in terms of performance with WoW.
EDIT: This thread should be helpful to you. This guy has an i7 instead of an i9 but it’s closer to your model than mine is.
I can build a $700 Ryzen gaming PC that outperforms a $3000 Macbook pro any day,
The problem with Macbooks is bottlenecking and thermal throttle.
$3000 sure is a lot of money but if you had spend it on either a windows gaming laptop or a gaming desktop you would have gotten 4K at 60fps or 1080p @ 144fps easily with an Intel or AMD system.
Macbook’s and iMac’s are not very suitable anymore for continuous loads, run a benchmark one time = seems good performance then run it again and your down 40% on performance.
I use the Vega when traveling. I set scaling to 50% - looks good.
I usually play around 4-6 in settings with no issue at 60 FPS.
In fact, prior to getting an eGPU for home i used the Vega 20 to power a 1440p @ 144hz. I played this on 4 with water and shadow set to high/ultra. Usually at or around 120-144 FPS.
On any of those settings if I manually pegged fans at 6k RPMs (can’t hear them with headphones on) I can keep the laptop between 65 and 73 depending on what I’m doing.
It’s VERY playable. I suspect you could push it further, but I prefer the lower heat and play longevity.
Lots of MacOS / MBP hate around here for how cheap a desktop can be.
I’m happy with my portable beast of a machine that crunches 10,000,000 data point SQL tables in PowerBI, in parallels, while on iMessage on my iPad via SideCar while playing WoW at 60 FPS.
Im running WoW (8.2.5) on a 2019 MacBook Pro 16 inch with the i9 upgrade and the Radeon Pro 5500M - it runs really well, no complaints at all. at native res the default quality presets ( 5 I believe) work well - consistent 60 frames. If you drop the res to something lower you can quite easily push the quality preset further up.
Now I usually play on battery so I force WoW to run on integrated graphics fairly often - and even that works really well for me! however I don’t mind dropping the quality preset to 1 and dropping the res under these conditions.
On a side note I also run WoW on a 2018 Mac mini w/ with the i7 upgrade and an eGPU box with an RX 5700 - this set up has no problems at all running WoW at full (preset 10) settings and 60+ frames. I run a triple display setup with this machine and it doesn’t even get warm!
I’am looking into upgrading to the same laptop, but I’am worried about whether I can play WoW smoothly. Can you elaborate WoW’s performance on the new macbook pro 16?
It runs amazingly well on the 16 inch (I have the i9 5500). You’ll have no issues there. I use 50% render scale, most things turned up high (water on good, SSAO off). Constant 60fps.
SSAO seems to be the one expensive setting, it seems to cause the gpu to start thermally throttling when other settings don’t. With it off you can really push most of the other things up high.
I’am thinking about getting the same config as your with the i9 and the 8gb gpu , and go with 32gb ram. High settings and 60 fps sounds great. Is this consistent , I mean of course raids would be harder but I assume it is stable 60 most of the time at high settings?