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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

After Apples announcement of M1, I feel like it is mandatory for such a laptop test to discuss power per watt and for how long you can game on the 11 vs 12th gen processor.

I also feel like it is worth mentioning that 12th gen laptop is priced ~ $150 over the 11th gen.

If you're coding against an online build system and 11 last an extra hour (or whatever), it's a no-brainer to stick with the old one.

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Im generally not that concerned about power consumption. My laptop almost never is unplugged for more than a couple hours. I understand that there are many others who don’t use their computer like I do, but personally the only negative effect of power consumption is that it costs an extra $10 a year.

But are you concerned with heat and fan noise?

I think not everyone is going to be sensitive to this, but apart from battery life, it's super nice having a computer that's not spewing out heat or running the fans loudly.

You can't game on M1 or Mac AFAIK

With MacOS probably never in a good way as MacOS doesn't support standard graphic APIs (Vulkan)

In the near future you might if you install linux.

Using box64 for amd64 translation and steam proton for windows translation if necessary.

Lots of people just don't game at all. Also, a lot of people like me prefer different gaming and work setup (and different rooms) in order to achieve better work-life balance. I build games on my M1 machine, just don't play on it.

How is M1 for game dev? I've been thinking of getting one for my own personal laptop, but have had a few concerns, mostly just due to the issues of building software on a totally different platform to the majority of your target users (which'll be Windows, x86). I used to have some compatibility worries but I'd guess they've gone away now.

If you are using a game engine like Unity you should not worry at all. If you need to access Windows specific APIs, of course it is a different story. A Macbook is a perfect machine for developers: you can build for android and iOS, has a great screen, perfect touchpad, finally fixed keyboard and ports.

I use Godot at the moment, but have been experimenting with frameworks like Bevy and the like. I doubt I need immediate access to windows specific api as I currently work on Fedora without any issues, though from what your saying it sounds like you mean more mobile-game dev than desktop.

To be honest the last time I used a mac was I think a decade ago so they're just so unknown to me at the moment, but everyone else seems to love them so I'm quite tempted

I mean Unity in general for desktop and mobile. Mentioned exporting to android and iOS as an extra benefit.

What are the specs of your machine? If you've tried them, how have have other engines such as Unreal fared? Do you primarily do 2D or 3D development? How long are the build times?

It depends on the type of game you're shipping. Not every library has caught up to offer a mac arm binary. You still see some Rosetta problems here and there.

You can't dual boot so you can't natively run the game you're working on. The graphics are integrated so you can't test on a PC GPU. VR dev doesn't work at all.

Lots of small things but if you also have a PC its not so bad unless you need some library that just doesn't work.

I game on my m1 macs. Maybe not the latest and greatest 3d games but for me that’s ok. Have a ps5 for that. there are a ton of older ones that just work, and even many newer ones. Currently playing baulders gate EE

You definitely can with emulators for other platforms, such as AetherSX2 for PS2 and Dolphin for Wii/GC.

You can't play the latest and greatest (graphics-intensive games at least), but there are many titles that work just fine, and the performance of the x86 translation is surprisingly good. There are even a handful of games with native builds, like World of Warcraft and Disco Elysium.

World of Warcraft has a native ARM64 build, and that's the only game I care about.

This is not true. I have an Macbook Pro 16 Inch M1 Max and I play a ton of games. Both Dota 2 and World of Warcraft runs without issues, you just need to do some tweaking with the settings and also framerate cap the game so you don't end up thermal throttling which introduces stuttering.

I can't believe these M1s throttle! My 2012 era computers never throttled because apparently apple had better thermals back then. I had a more recent intel mac and I sent it back because of the throttling, biding my time for M1s to come down in price but now I see that won't be worth it.

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/M1_perfect_games_list

Good ref. None of my current games appear though.

Rather, you probably can't game on Mac.

Completely untrue. I replaced my gaming desktop with a Mac Mini for several months. I was able to play many games:

* League of Legends

* Civilization 6

* Stellaris, EU4, etc.

* Minecraft

* Factorio

Gaming on mac is a bit like guessing wrong in the console wars back in the day: there are far fewer games, and they’re usually late.

But if you aren’t picky about specific games, there’s something from every category that runs on m1.

As per most reviews 12th gen is more power efficient. Particularly for the use cases you have mentioned, as P cores wouldn't be working most of the time and E core are much more power efficient.

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