TLD on Apple Silicon (MacBook Pro)

[Guest jeffpeng]

Hello fellow survivors,

just wanted to quickly share my experience running The Long Dark on the brand new and highly talked about Apple Silicon MacBooks, in my case the MacBook Pro Late 2020 13 inch.

Well, if you now expected a long review with how to get it running and what quirks to circumvent I must disappoint you. After 1-2 minutes of translating the game to the ARM instruction set "It just works", as one Mr. Huang would say. And surprisingly well. At 800p, which is half the native 1600p resolution, you'll just get 60 frames no questions asked, everything is working, no bugs, no glitches, top tier responsiveness. On the iGPU (well, there is no dGPU and no eGPU support anyways). 1600p is still well over 30 frames if you prefer eye candy and a more "cineastic" experience.

So, bottom line, if you consider buying one of those but are uncertain if your favorite game (which better be TLD) is running.... it's running. Very well.

And as always: Thank you for reading.

[odizzido]

It's nice that it works. There is a lot of talk about the M1 being super amazing....but I wonder how it will hold up in general tasks that don't have hardware acceleration. Hopefully well, I wouldn't mind x86 getting some competition.

Getting at least over 30FPS on their igpu seems like a tolerable start though. It would be interesting to see how something like the 3400G would compare

 

edit--------

actually I guess we will need to wait for the 5000 series mobile to get a more proper comparison.

Edited December 6, 2020 by odizzido

[Guest jeffpeng]

49 minutes ago, odizzido said:

It's nice that it works. There is a lot of talk about the M1 being super amazing....but I wonder how it will hold up in general tasks that don't have hardware acceleration. Hopefully well, I wouldn't mind x86 getting some competition.

Getting at least over 30FPS on their igpu seems like a tolerable start though. It would be interesting to see how something like the 3400G would compare

3400G is ........ miles behind that. I've got a 2400G (which has 95% the same GPU) at my mom's, and while I didn't run TLD there, I did some games for shoots and giggles, and .... nah. The Vega 11 in the 2400G/3400G is not even half as fast. Think of the iGPU of the M1 more along the lines of a 1050Ti, maybe even a tad above that. On the M1 TLD is running close to 60 at 1080p on an external display. The built in display is 16:10, so no real 1440p, but actually 1600p, so that's more than twice the amount of pixels than "Full HD". 30 frames on more than 1440p? On an iGPU? Unheard of.

Also ... I wouldn't be too worried about non-accellerated CPU stuff. As long as you run narrowly threaded things that thing is just in a league of its own. And for heavy multi-threaded stuff .... I kinda feel like a machine like this is the wrong hardware to begin with. But that might be my opinion.

For clarity the MBP isn't mine. It's my wife's new daily driver after she finally retired her MBA from 2014. But I took the chance to run some tests on it to see what the machine is actually capable of.

Well, why is this even relevant for me.... two months ago I finally gave macOS another try. I had an iMac collecting dust 8-9 years ago, and I couldn't bear how slow that thing was. So I stuck with PC/Linux back then. Now, after taking a weekend to get Catalina running on my R5 2600 (which is seasoned but still all I really need) and running it as my daily driver (I'm a web developer doing mostly PHP and Java, so I run a lot of browsers, terminals, VSCode and compile a lot of stuff) for a few weeks I'm convinced enough to stick with it. It has all the things I need from it professionally that made Linux vs. Windows a no-brainer decision for me (like SSHFS), but actually just runs all the stuff without having to fiddle with it - for which I kinda don't have the time and, more importantly, the patience anymore. So, turns out, at least for me macOS is actually the convenient middle ground. But I can perfectly understand how others will see that differently.

So bottom line I am happy that I actually could (and probably will) go and buy an M1 Mac Mini and still run pretty much all my games, including TLD, on it in an acceptable fashion. And honestly, for the casual gamer I've become that's all I really need. But that this is possible on a 10-25 watt tablet processor on steroids ... just blows my mind.

 

Edited December 6, 2020 by jeffpeng

[odizzido]

I know they never will, but it would be cool if apple sold the M1 and future CPUs for people to build their own PCs.

 

And yeah zen/zen+ were never amazing at games. The difference between something like a zen or zen+ compared to zen3 is pretty huge. Like 40-50% improvement clock for clock in games. I think the 2400G is zen?

[Guest jeffpeng]

8 hours ago, odizzido said:

And yeah zen/zen+ were never amazing at games. The difference between something like a zen or zen+ compared to zen3 is pretty huge. Like 40-50% improvement clock for clock in games. I think the 2400G is zen?

2400G is Zen, 3400G is Zen+. Altough the difference between Zen and Zen+ is negligible. Zen 3's CPU can definitely hold its own against the M1 doing multithreading, but the GPU portion is just not up to it. I mean we'll see Navi in "APUs" eventually. That should be able to compete.

[Adamo]

I’ve got an M1 in the post I didn’t know TLD was available for Mac, might see how I can use the PS4 controller with it 

[IamSameer]

Thanks @jeffpeng good to know, I got one recently and had not considered it as a travel option (whenever that starts again)!