this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Macintosh Gamers 🖥️🍎 | Gaming on macOS and Mac hardware
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The fans spin, but really slow, and even with open back headphones they’re hardly audible. Like a whisper compared to other games (or even BG3 on CrossOver).
I also have a 14” MacBook Pro, M2 Pro, and I have the game at:
• 2560x1440 on an external monitor (laptop display for discord) • All high or ultra settings • FSR set to high quality • Capped at 60fps • Low Power Mode off • DOF off
Can you give me the fan spin in RPM please?
MacFansControl is free to use.
Also, what is DOF ?
EDIT: Depth Of Field (Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker) Also, I was playing on my lap. Not the best way to keep my machine cool, but still I get the fans spinning with your setup. DOF Off doesn't seem to change anything.
Sorry for taking a bit to get back to you. So just tested it, my fans are sitting around 3200-4700 rpm but I forgot to mention its on a well ventilated stand.
dB(A) reading from my phone was about 35 away from my Mac, very quiet, and next to my Mac was reading 45 dB(A). This is according to the NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) app for iOS. Unsure of how calibrated an iPhone is for dB(A) ratings but thats compared to a baseline.
I tried on my stand plugged to a 4K display with your settings and get similar results. The M2 Max 14 inch MBP needs to be well ventilated to stay quiet.
I found that activating Low Power Mode allows for a 45 to 60FPS in a much more silent fashion on my Mac as, it will cap to a compute usage and not a capacity usage. I'm almost continuously under 3000rpm on my stand, making the Mac fans completely silent.
That's a bit disappointing TBH, but I'm a silence maniac ^-^
FYI: I also tested the game on my wife's M2 MBA, and only managed to get 720p@30 Low settings with TAA and FSR on Quality. That's not very good IMO.
I think we're pretty spoiled by the relative silence of these macbook pros. Try playing BG3 on pretty much any pc laptop, and you'll see. On my desktop with a RTX3080, I actually limit it to 60fps otherwise it'll sound like a jet engine. I have a Fractal Design North case with a beefy AIO also, and it's no slouch in the airflow department. The game just gets heavy, especially in certain areas with lots of NPCs.
Nice to have some insight from the PC world ^_^
I looked at benchmarks of the game and found some interesting results.
The game runs on my 30 cores M2 Max « as smoothly as » a RTX 4050. But it probably could run like a RTX 4060.
In Blender, my Mac has the same perf as a 6700XT, which has the same perf as the RTX 4060 in BG3.
Blender on Mac is highly optimized by Apple engineers for Apple Silicon, but BG3 is still a Metal 2 game.
I have good hope that Larian will release some improvements patch with the adoption of MetalFX.
Have a nice day!
Yep, this game has been long in the works with the mac port, so unfortunately they haven't had the chance to use metal 3 and metalFX. Hopefully they will add at least FSR 2.0 in the future, because 1.0 is pretty bad. I also go back and forth between that gaming pc and an m1 max mbp, and the dlss implementation is a lot better. Still, I do use FSR on the mbp, but I turn on antialiasing to smooth things out.
Yeah FSR doesn’t shine very much here. It kinda works with Ultra Quality + TAA, but anything lower than that makes the whole thing blurry.
It’s also pretty annoying that the game doesn’t seem to be able to remember that I checked TAA and disable it every time I boot.