@Felix you will single handedly bring about the age of the MacBook/PS4 Master Race. I’ve been looking for MacBooks ever since my laptop got broken due to my negligence and MacRumours keeps saying to waaait.
If you’re getting a Z170 board, you will be getting DDR4 memory. Everything else should be the same as it was other than buy an SSD and thank me later.
the 2013 MBA was a great “low end” product (for Apple, i.e., ~$1000 if you don’t buy refurb) that was a very smart buy at the time the way the new iPhone SE is now, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth (the whole reason it was cheap is because they didn’t bother improving the screen or the bezels at a time when everything else was going retina, and now it seems a little old by comparison). it also coincided with the best OSX release in years which didn’t hurt, as well as the transition to PCIe SSDs which are still uncommon on most non-Apple machines and make a huge difference, like you wouldn’t hesitate to get something with half the ram you normally would because it can swap like lightning.
WWDC should bring new stuff, though it’s not clear if they’ll shoot the low end of their lineup again. what I really want them to do if they won’t make great “low end” machines again is put an i5-xxxxHQ chip in a 13" – those are the quad cores with the iris graphics – but their thermal threshold is a little too high. so hopefully their new $1000 model this year will be as sensible as it was a couple years ago.
the $200 netbook i bought a couple months ago is low-end. a $1000 laptop is not.
the attitude that some models of macbooks can compete on budget now (even refurbished) doesn’t make much sense to me, especially considering how the rate of laptop wear and obsolescence drives up that cost.
but i kind of hate the current laptop market in general so ymmv
1 Like
@Felix or anyone else who can answer: explain like I’m an idiot, how do I play my many PC/Steam games on a Macbook in 2016? Dual boot into Windows, Boot Camp, Wine, etc.? I’m vaguely familiar with the concepts but never paid excessively close attention as a lifelong PC user.
Now I really kinda want to get a new Macbook once they refresh the lineup this year, but I don’t really understand what it means for playing games. I’m not really terribly interested in AAA stuff I can play on my PS4/XBO, more like older Steam titles and emulators (and as for emulators - are there reasonably good emulators on Mac, or for the most part am I still gonna be using Windows applications)? Something like Iris graphics sounds good for that, yeah?
at least 80% of non-AAA stuff these days gets released on OSX as well as Windows; for those which don’t – most people would just say boot camp, I like wine because it’s very compatible these days and dual-booting sucks.
download and install wine from here https://github.com/wine-compholio/wine-staging/wiki/Installation#mac-os-x or brew install wine-staging from a terminal if you’re of a developer-y bent and would already be using homebrew. almost everything will work natively nowadays – that means just installing windows steam to run alongside OSX steam for windows-only titles – though you might want to do winetricks dotnet452 right after installing wine so that you have .NET set up, since that’s the one thing that steam’s automated installers don’t always get right. you’ll also want to run winecfg at some some point and enable the tick box for CSMT or “command stream multithreading,” which allows wine to dedicate more than one thread to DX->OpenGL translation, which is generally necessary to hit 60fps in any games that’d need +/- a 9800GT level of performance if they were running natively.
these days all good emulators are on OSX and Linux as well as Windows.
I’m happy to provide more documentation as needed! the skylake iris graphics, once they finally ship, should perform about on par with a 460 as long as you aren’t using a heavily TDP-constrained chip, which is more than fine.
so who’s been on the fence when it comes to transformer-tablets? now’s your time to get one …
2 Likes
Hmm, I guess no new nvidia card yet
yeah they might be pretty slow with this after all (not sure why I’m surprised), they just announced a professional compute product that’s realistically not going to ship until early next year and they normally don’t release consumer stuff first, though if they’re waiting on HBM2 for the professional product and shipping regular GDDR5 for the consumer stuff that could change things.
still, the fact that the new top-end professional product only has 40% better FP32 than the Titan X after that big process shrink means that gaming performance/value is not likely to skyrocket when the new stuff does ship (even HBM’s advantages seem to be relatively marginal under current workloads if you look at the difference between the fury and the 390), so I think at best if you were already waiting out this year you’re probably just waiting for a cheaper 970. unless gaming pascal looks a lot different than compute pascal, but that’s not the way things have been going lately. but they did go all-out on FP32 at the expense of compute toward the end of maxwell because they were impatient for the process shrink, so there’s no saying they couldn’t do that again, eventually
tl;dr desktops are getting further marginalized at the high end by $$$ professional setups, high-mid-end stuff is increasingly not as much fun as it used to be because of this and because of windows and better DRM, and low-mid-end stuff (i.e. intel chips in notebooks or maybe a 750ti) plus a console is harder and harder to argue with
Now that I have the power to brute force everything to run like an arcade game it’s hard to go back to consoles and low end GPUs. I used to run L4D2 at 20 FPS on a MacBook with a 320m when I was broke in college and loved it, but by the grace of a used 780 I can run about everything smoothly. Lower frame rates aren’t bad, but poor frame pacing (Bloodborne) and unlocked frame rates that vary wildly (most open world games) are jump-out-of-my-skin unpleasant.
Some console developers try really hard to make smooth games (Platinum, Nintendo, 343) and they’re great. VR games seem up my alley because everything is flat or low poly to keep things going.
The GPU-over-USB option is probably the future for me.
2 Likes
Yeah I’ve wanted to external gpu for forever. Anyone in the know have opinions on currently available magic?
they’re juuuust barely becoming viable after years and years of being talked about (since external PCIe slots on notebooks iirc), but right now they’re limited to specific (gamer-skulls-and-flames-tastic) notebook models even though the underlying technology is fairly generic (thunderbolt 3):
http://www.razerzone.com/ca-en/gaming-systems/razer-blade-stealth
(dock costs $500 by itself)
if apple’s new set of MBPs does one that would be great. we’ll see.
1 Like
So, does this mean that if someone was holding off on buying a graphics card because they were waiting for new product to drop, they might as well just go ahead and buy something now? Or, if we can’t expect new products, can we at least expect decent price reductions in the next few months?
The someone is me. I am that person.
they might announce new consumer stuff next month. or at least when it’s coming. which may in turn trigger a price drop for the 970. I don’t know.
Got it. Thanks.
I feel like my next computer I’m going to have ended up buying all new shit just to have a barely better cpu and videocard mostly so I could just get stuff like ac wifi, hevc decoding, m.2 ssd, usb 3.0/.1, ddr4 etc
1 Like
I mean, I still think most people who already had the budget for a new desktop should just buy macs and get over it, but I understand that if you dislike the optics more than you like unix it’s a tough sell.
Are there any laptops that are still user upgradeable? A 200GB SSD plus 16GB RAM is still so crazy expensive right now
it’s very unlikely you’d need more than 8gb of memory unless you commonly run a couple dev VMs simultaneously given OSX’s memory management and pcie ssd swapping. Relatively many skylake laptops still have upgradeable storage, relatively few have upgradeable memory.
Most have microSD slots you can use for permanent storage too – you can get 128gb that’s basically hard drive speed with faster random reads (i.e. Good for games/music/video overflow) for not much money.
What are “optics”
You’ve used that term a couple times now and I only have a vague sense of your meaning