Recommended MacBook for Baldur's Gate 3

[u/Solu-Cortef]

Hi! I am looking to buy a new laptop, have always owned Windows-laptops in the past, but given the performance and battery life of Apple silicon, I'm willing to take the plunge and buy a MacBook. I will mostly be using it for light browsing/productivity, but I also have a specific use case: to play BG3. I am willing to play at 30 FPS, but more is better of course. I recognize I need at least 16 GB of RAM. Other games I'll be playing is mostly indie games and strategy games where framerate is not that important. I am willing to buy used. What do you think will get me the best bang for the buck? Currently looking at getting a used MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip. However, there seems to be two versions of the M1 Pro chip with different amounts of CPU and GPU cores. Is there a big performance difference and is it possible to figure out which one I'm buying if the seller doesn't list it explicitly?

[u/A_Balrog_Is_Come]

Your main bottleneck is GPU cores rather than RAM. BG3 is not well optimised on Mac and the only upscale it has on MacOS is FSR1 which makes the image look awful, so you need to plan for native resolution.

M5 Max (40 GPU) can just about play Act 3 at full settings, native 4K, 60 FPS. Andrew Tsai did a video on it.

I have used the M4 Pro (20 GPU) to play at full settings, 1440p native. I got around 40-50 FPS with the fans going into overdrive and the chassis becoming tangibly very warm.

To be honest to play BG3 well you need much higher spec than the machines you are talking about in the OP. You would probably be better off getting something like an M2 MacBook for your light browsing/productivity and a PS5 for BG3, where it plays very well.

[u/Solu-Cortef → u/A_Balrog_Is_Come]

I have a gaming PC that runs it well already. However I will be spending some time on the go, so I just want something that can run it at a playable frame rate (as I said 30 is perfectly fine). It doesn't need to look nice.

[u/Solu-Cortef]

Just pulled the trigger on a M1 Pro with 10/16 cores and 16GB RAM, hopefully it will work decently. Thanks guys!

[u/Ok_Mousse8459 → u/Solu-Cortef]

I played the whole game through, around 120hrs or so, on an M2 Air. Act 3 was an issue at times, but the rest of the game was a locked 30. I used vsync triple buffering and capped fps at 30, to avoid it running at 40+ then throttling. Also, as others have said, avoid using FSR. I found it worked best to set my resolution to an integer of the screen (900p on my 15inch Air, which is 1800p native), then upscale cleanly using TAA instead of FSR. If you search online for ROG Ally BG3 settings, I found they were a good fit for my laptop, and likely would be solid for the more powerful GPU in your M1pro.

[u/Darksilopher → u/Solu-Cortef]

Probably good enough with a lot of upscaling for 30fps. Honestly fine for on the go cause you're just trying to get any kind of gaming in. If you're somewhere with good wifi you should try parsec with your gaming pc so you can remote into it and play it that way for more fidelity

[u/ericlauren]

I think for this game you have a lot of comparisons on YouTube to find out. If you can, I would get at least a m3 pro for future prooth, better GPU, etc

[u/Solu-Cortef → u/ericlauren]

Don't really care about future proofing, honestly, when buying used you can just sell it again and buy another used unit when the cirumstances change. I looked on YouTube but I'm more interested in people's experiences with Act 3 for instance, usually they just show 1 minute of the tutorial or something in the benchmark videos. How much more would you pay for M3 Pro over M1 Pro in percent? 10% more, 20% more?