Mac Studio M1 Max

L

Lenzzie

Refugee
Hello everyone. 

I have a Mac Studio M1 Max with 32 GB Memory (please no hate ❤️ ). I play 7 Days to Die via a premium subscription to GeForce Now and I have no complaints. However, I just found out that I will not be able to play the new Alpha until it becomes stable. GFN doesn't allow non-stable versions. 

I tried playing 7 Days on my Mac and the quality isn't that great and I get a bit of lag with it. Anything I can do to make the game more playable on my Mac? I am not getting rid of my computer :-). 

 
So don't get rid of your Mac. Get a PC to sit next to it :lol: . Runs fine for me under both Gentoo Linux and Windows 10, but I don't have a Mac to test with. Maybe a Mac guru can help more.

 
Yeah, the real issue with that PC is that it's a hugely overpriced microPC with no dedicated GPU. 

Your only option really would be to purchase an actual computer. I don't think there is much you can do with the settings due to the shared RAM and lack of a discreet GPU chipset.

Maybe @Crater Creator has more Mac experience and can chip in. However, from what I could see from the specs of that, it's a $2000 CPU powerhouse with no real gaming potential. It's designed for video editing and similar studio tasks. You could build a pure AMD Desktop for about $1300 that would have more CPU power, and a decent GPU. (Something like a 5900X paired with a 6900XT and 32GB RAM. )

 
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Lenzzie said:
GFN doesn't allow non-stable versions. 
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You would have to buy the game on Steam if you want to play the experimental A21 release.

Or wait the few weeks or so until the stable release.

Lenzzie said:
Anything I can do to make the game more playable on my Mac?
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Reduce the resolution to 1080p. Maybe lower or turn off some of the graphics settings; like AA, reflections, and shadows.

 
Yeah, that’s a tough situation. I’ve gamed on Macs whenever possible my whole life. I currently use a 2019 iMac (Intel Core i9 9900K CPU, dedicated AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 GPU, 40 GB RAM, SSD) running macOS 10.14 Mojave, the last OS to support 32-bit apps. I’m happy with the performance I get running 7DtD in macOS, but for best performance the conventional wisdom was to run Windows on your Mac, using BootCamp. Now that Apple has switched to their own chips, that’s not an option: https://www.howtogeek.com/701733/can-you-run-windows-software-on-an-m1-mac/.

7DtD is still an Intel app (source), so you’re taking the performance hit from using just-in-time translation (Rosetta 2). Apple claims the M1 chip is fast enough to compensate, but here we are. Maybe the developers can make the app run natively at some point. If we’re lucky that’s just a checkbox in Unity - I haven’t looked into it. All I know for end users to do is to turn down their settings.

Here’s the good news:

  • Experimental builds historically don’t last very long - maybe a month before they go stable.
  • You don’t have to opt in to A21 experimental right away. In fact, staying on A20 while A21 is unstable is the default option if you do nothing.
  • The Metal renderer looks to be supported in A21. I tried it, and I didn’t see any glaring rendering errors like in A20, including with reflections turned on. The performance isn’t better for me, but for you on an M1 chip, hopefully you’ll find better performance than on the older OpenGL renderer.
 
Crater Creator said:
Yeah, that’s a tough situation. I’ve gamed on Macs whenever possible my whole life. I currently use a 2019 iMac (Intel Core i9 9900K CPU, dedicated AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 GPU, 40 GB RAM, SSD) running macOS 10.14 Mojave, the last OS to support 32-bit apps. I’m happy with the performance I get running 7DtD in macOS, but for best performance the conventional wisdom was to run Windows on your Mac, using BootCamp. Now that Apple has switched to their own chips, that’s not an option: https://www.howtogeek.com/701733/can-you-run-windows-software-on-an-m1-mac/.

7DtD is still an Intel app (source), so you’re taking the performance hit from using just-in-time translation (Rosetta 2). Apple claims the M1 chip is fast enough to compensate, but here we are. Maybe the developers can make the app run natively at some point. If we’re lucky that’s just a checkbox in Unity - I haven’t looked into it. All I know for end users to do is to turn down their settings.

Here’s the good news:

  • Experimental builds historically don’t last very long - maybe a month before they go stable.
  • You don’t have to opt in to A21 experimental right away. In fact, staying on A20 while A21 is unstable is the default option if you do nothing.
  • The Metal renderer looks to be supported in A21. I tried it, and I didn’t see any glaring rendering errors like in A20, including with reflections turned on. The performance isn’t better for me, but for you on an M1 chip, hopefully you’ll find better performance than on the older OpenGL renderer.
Click to expand...


Thank you for the breakdown! Fingers crossed as the game evolves it will work better on a Mac. 

 
That would require, at the bare minimum, the devs purchasing new Macs and the software to build it on the new Macs. More than likely, they'll need to make coding additions to make it work properly on the new architecture. This is why I stopped developing for Mac. Now it's just Windows and Linux. I had more Linux users than Mac anyway, so no big loss.

 
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Vampirenostra said:
Getting a new M2 MacBook in a few, wonder how that would run comparing to current Intel i7 MacBook 2018
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One of the main things to check is if it has a dedicated graphics card or if it is integrated.  If it is integrated, don't expect great performance even if it probably will be better than something from 5 years ago.

 
Riamus said:
One of the main things to check is if it has a dedicated graphics card or if it is integrated.  If it is integrated, don't expect great performance even if it probably will be better than something from 5 years ago.
Click to expand...
sure thing they all come with integrated graphics... Even though mine is going to have plenty of cores dedicated to graphics it is still an integrated video...

image.png

 
Vampirenostra said:
sure thing they all come with integrated graphics... Even though mine is going to have plenty of cores dedicated to graphics it is still an integrated video...

View attachment 27969
Click to expand...
Not being someone who likes Macs, I didn't know they all had integrated graphics in that series.  I also can't really compare how certain Mac hardware works compared to PC as I just don't really care to learn about Mac hardware since I don't like Macs in the first place.  Lol.  But Macs are generally designed around video editing and similar things and not really around gaming, so they usually don't perform as well as a general rule.  That doesn't mean you can't get a good Mac that plays games well, of course.  At least with PC - and I can't imagine it is really any different for Mac - integrated graphics are far less powerful than dedicated graphics.  For gaming, you always want dedicated graphics if you can get it.  Even integrated graphics based on a better graphics card is typically far slower than lower level dedicated graphics (up to a point).

That being said, maybe Mac is different and their integrated graphics are on par with dedicated graphics.  I don't know.  But the thing to keep in mind here is that this game is CPU bound rather than GPU bound, so you won't have as much of a performance hit with integrated graphics as you'd have with most other games.  At the same time, this game doesn't really make much use of multiple cores compared to what other games do, so I doubt you'll gain much from 12 cores vs. 4 cores.

You really need to compare the various bandwidths and timings and such of the hardware to get a decent idea of how it'll perform or look for details of how it compares on the various benchmark apps.  That'll give you a good idea of performance compared to dedicated graphics in another computer.  Faster (or more) RAM and faster hard drive can play a far bigger role in your performance in this game than other things if you have decent hardware.

 
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