DataCalamity.7630

I'll be honest, I love Mac and GW2 and I have spent an enormous amount of money trying to get a good experience on Mac and it eludes me. I don't like to get into the whole conversation about spec for price. I understand you can get more at the same price from a windows build and I understand the whole counter argument that MacOS requires less because the hardware/software pairing so it's a moot conversation. I have a mid 2017 MBP that is fully spec'd. 3.5ghz i7 and Iris Plus 650 (1.5gb shared vram), GW2 is pretty reliant on processor so I expected it would run ok on that. Since the MBP has integrated graphics, I knew there would be a hit but really it's just sad performance. I get around 30fps on mid settings. I can't play on high or it drops to a crawl, stutters, does all the really irritating things I definitely don't like a pc to do while gaming. I thought, ok, I'm already in this hole, I'll keep digging and get an eGPU. I bought the Razer Core X and AMD Radeon 56 (8gb vram), it works flawlessly with other games, but to my surprise, I still get an unstable 30fps on medium settings that still drops to a crawl on high. Maybe it's my hardware I thought, but no, running in bootcamp (which is super annoying to get the eGPU working in bootcamp btw) I get 60 - 70 fps on max settings. It's a Mac client thing. I don't know why but it's just awful. Does it play? Yes, sort of. Would I recommend it? It depends. If you love to use MacOS and you just want GW2 to run, then sure, it works in a pinch. If gaming is all you do and you still want the MBP, get used to running bootcamp. The windows client is far more stable, you get higher fps and less graphical glitching. If you don't hate windows as I do, save yourself the trouble and just get a windows gaming laptop. I personally would get the MacBook every time, but I understand at that price point, you can get something that runs this game much, much better.

Praise Joko!