Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Still will have horrible GPUs. I at least want to occasionally play a game and not just code. My ancient 2009 Mac Pro won't run Sierra but at least I could sometimes update the video card. The Mac Pro is way out of date. Only the top iMac is vaguely decent.

View on HN

Hopefully Apple will at least support Thunderbolt 3s external GPU profile, so you can attach something like the Razer Core.

I wouldn't expect Apple to make it that easy given their history of extremely overpriced video cards and custom BIOSes for them. I would be shocked if an external GPU solution on Macs were supported and sold for less than $700 and Apple-approved GPUs go for less than 30% mark-ups from aftermarket retail pricing. So at that point I'd honestly expect an Apple GTX 1080 solution to cost well over $1500. For that price almost anyone would just buy a dedicated gaming machine and not bother with the Apple ecosystem that's hostile to PC gaming by default.

I think with Thunderbolt 3 you can just plug an external GPU and you're ready to go.

You get a tiny fraction of the power of the card though, a 1080 would get you the performance of a 750. Also, I think it's kind of insane that instead of just getting decent onboard graphics your option is to buy a whole nother graphics card, power supply, and the adapter which can cost 500-800$.

If you are serious about graphics you'd probably just build your own desktop. Desktops have the best graphics cards and every hardcore gamer I've seen doesn't use a laptop.

Not a hardcore gamer (obviously being a Mac owner) I just want something that at least in Bootcamp is reasonable for the few games I want to play. WOT is one that works OK running under Crossover. But the really cutting edge games require a bigass video card you need a custom PC rig to play. If I bought one of those I'd get too little done :-)

No you don't [1]. You get within a (reasonable) margin of error of full performance (assuming there are no CPU bottlenecks).

[1] http://www.ultrabookreview.com/10761-razer-core-review/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com