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Anyone done long gaming sessions on a MBA?
- Thread starter badsimian
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The result is still a much better Cinebench score than the previous Pro. If it ran fine on the 2 port Intel Pro, it should theoretically be fine on the Air.
It is easy to get caught up in the reviews with all the benchmarking. I basically use browsers, terminals, odd bit of scripting and one day maybe I'll get round to picking up iOS dev at some point (or probably not). I like the fact it has no fans and sips power but I do like the odd game of Warcraft 3 reforged and/or SC2. They seem to run fine to me although not had really long gaming sessions myself.
It will throttle but it’s not a huge performance dip and these are pretty powerful chips so even with the throttling it still out performs most other laptops (besides dedicated gaming ones with actual graphics cards)
I can’t comment on Warcraft 3, but I did play some MMOs on a 2013 Air for long periods when it was new. I had to set graphics down but it played those games well. Blizzard tends to keep updating their games so I can’t say how the current version of WC3 would run. Though I’m sure the original version would run just fine. I still have my air, maybe I’ll give it a try later. If that old thing can still run it then I’m sure the new ones will do fine.
Played world of Warcraft on it a few times now. Last session was over 9 hours. Air ran great, got warm but not hot. I cap the frames at 45 FPS to balance performance vs heat output. Ran slick throughout. Been levelling in shadowlands and had multiple occasions of raid like encounters, e.g. multiple players attacking with lots of spell effects, stuck to the 45limit like a champ.
wC3 likely runs a bit hotter as it’s not native, Diablo 3 certainly gets the temp up, not played WC3 reforged on it yet tho.
(note: it will happily run at 60fps but gets quite hot after a while. Having played WoW since launch on Macs I am used to tweaking settings to get the best out of the game without deafening fan noise or burning the Mac up. So it’s worth sacrificing some FPS for a smooth cool experience)
wC3 likely runs a bit hotter as it’s not native, Diablo 3 certainly gets the temp up, not played WC3 reforged on it yet tho.
(note: it will happily run at 60fps but gets quite hot after a while. Having played WoW since launch on Macs I am used to tweaking settings to get the best out of the game without deafening fan noise or burning the Mac up. So it’s worth sacrificing some FPS for a smooth cool experience)
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On these settings at native resolution I can get up to 60fps. It's a little less here due to it being a more graphically complicated scene in Ardenweald but while in Maldraxxas I was getting a consistent 60fps while leveling solo. After about an hour leveling in Maldraxxas my MBA got pretty warm and I could definitely tell it was throttling as the frame rate dropped to about 40-45 for a little bit until things cooled down...then back up to 60fps.
