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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • You won’t play BG3 comfortably on a MBA, otherwise it’s a good general purpose laptop.

    MBP is more expensive but more powerful and comes with 16Gb of Ram and a much more powerful GPU.

    There isn’t a big difference between M1 and M2 on the CPU side, but M2 GPUs are significantly more powerful.

    Finally, Pro models have better sound system, 120Hz ProMotion display, and more battery life.



  • Macs are not good for gaming because it wasn’t delivered with a proper graphic card for years, so game developers left the platform.

    Apple silicone Mac are pretty good for gaming now, if compared to similar form-factor PCs. Besides, Macs doesn’t lose any power when unplugged, contrary to PCs.

    But the catalog is still lacking. There are good games (BG3, Metro Exodus, Resident Evil Village, Lies Of P, World Of Warcraft if it’s your jam) but nothing merely enough for a true gamer.

    You could play Escape From Tarkov on a Mac using virtualizing software like Parallels Desktop, CrossOver or Game Porting Toolkit, but it won’t run natively, and I can’t make any promises on that subject.

    You’ll have to do some research if you want to play some games on a Mac.

    Otherwise it’s truly the best computer you can get. Not necessarily the most powerful (depends on what you’re doing) but definitely the best user experience.


  • joneskind@beehaw.orgtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat laptop to buy?
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    1 year ago

    There’s no way to answer that question without knowing what you want to do with your laptop.

    If you want anything but gaming, go for a Mac, especially if you are a musician (every Mac comes with GarageBand, is silent and has crazy battery life). You’ll also find the iWork suite installed for office work. No hidden cost.

    For photo editing, built-in Photos app gives a good alternative to Lightroom.

    For more advanced stuff you can also buy Affinity Photos or Pixelmator Pro, which are great alternatives to Photoshop, without the cost and the weight on the system

    Little built-in apps like Reminders and Notes can be life-changer if you’re in GTD stuff.

    The feature that impressed me the most back in the day was preview. Select any file and press the space bar. You’ll get instant preview (whatever the file is) without launching an app.

    If you want to game, it depends on the games you play.


  • I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis

    Low power mode on macOS gives that kind of feature. It works well because the computer never goes beyond a certain threshold of power. I guess it’s a simple downclock of some sort, but the caveat is that it won’t adapt to more demanding zones of the game.

    Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.

    I used to do exactly that with macros in World Of Warcraft. I had 3 different kind of setup for Efficiency, Balanced and Quality gaming. That game was the first that I know of to introduce built-in FPS capping during WOTLK extension, and 10 different settings mode plus the ability to make even more custom tweaks. My only wish is that every game developer to do the same.

    Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

    Speaking of WoW, there is a target FPS setting that will make the game lower the compute demand, but it wouldn’t help in my case since it’s meant to use as much compute power as possible to reach an FPS goal. It could do the trick if it could be coupled to a Don’t use more than 50% of the compute power, but I’m not sure a game can understand how much a computer has without reaching its limit first. Maybe some kind of benchmarking could help though.

    Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power.

    Me neither. But I do enjoy a silent machine !

    For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active.

    That would be very useful indeed! And another incentive for developers to write better code.

    Thank you for your answer anyway!


  • As I travel a lot, I would love to see a true eco mode for my laptop. Something that would keep my fans quiet (2500rpm max).

    Some games allow for FPS capping and lower settings, but it’s not always the case. Sometimes tweaking the settings doesn’t seem to make any difference to power consumption. Sometimes your only way to cap FPS is to rely on VSync, which doesn’t make much when you play on 120Hz screen.

    Metro Exodus is a good example of an almost impossible to tweak game.

    I think it would be nice to have a dedicated travelling mode. It would effectively help people with lower specs and entice developers to produce a more efficient code, rather than pushing for costly gears.

    As a developer myself I know very well it costs money. But if I had a wish to make I’ll go for this one