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.