Mac Studio Upgrades for Streaming/Minecraft

[CatMorgan]

So I guess it’s time to retire the 2012 Mac Pro, so I’m looking at an M2 Studio. My use case is live streaming to Twitch (video input from retro machines via an ElGato and transcoded with OBS) and light gaming such as Minecraft, etc. Maybe some Windows gaming via VM until such time as MS gives us ARM Windows and we can Bootcamp again. (A girl can dream right?)

I have a little extra room in the budget due to not having to buy a sound mixer like I thought I would have to so I’m looking at upgrades. I was always gonna pop for the extra HDD space (1TB) but I can maybe upgrade to either 64GB RAM or the 38 GPU Cores. I have done some research but most of the stuff I read or see is about photo workflow and video workflow and mine is a slightly different use case, so I’m not sure. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

 

[Chuckeee]

Gaming with Apple Silicon is still very iffy. Light gaming, like Minecraft, isn’t an issue and a Studio is way overkill. Windows gaming using VM is often still very restrictive using an ARM machine. Which window’s gaming titles are you considered?

 

[datagov63]

I use Nvidia Geforce Now to stream the games from an RTX 4090 cluster in 4k and I get 120fps. Plays almost everything for $20 a month.

 

[Pezimak]

So I guess it’s time to retire the 2012 Mac Pro, so I’m looking at an M2 Studio. My use case is live streaming to Twitch (video input from retro machines via an ElGato and transcoded with OBS) and light gaming such as Minecraft, etc. Maybe some Windows gaming via VM until such time as MS gives us ARM Windows and we can Bootcamp again. (A girl can dream right?)

I have a little extra room in the budget due to not having to buy a sound mixer like I thought I would have to so I’m looking at upgrades. I was always gonna pop for the extra HDD space (1TB) but I can maybe upgrade to either 64GB RAM or the 38 GPU Cores. I have done some research but most of the stuff I read or see is about photo workflow and video workflow and mine is a slightly different use case, so I’m not sure. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

It is a dilemma which one to upgrade, I think I would go with the extra GPU cores though as in the future it may give a little boost you’ll appreciate. 32GB is quite a bit of RAM still I think?

 

[haralds]

Get at least 32GB of RAM and 1TB of disk. I ended up configuring my M1 Ultra with 64GB and 4TB. The internal disk is very fast. It was overkill at the time, but I intend to have this for a while.

I am not sure how much extra GPU cores get you for current gaming apps. They are helpful in photo, 3d, and video editing applications.

I have found gaming and CEMU/Ryujinx emulation to be quite good. DirectX12 is still lacking on Parallels VM, I have not tried it with Wine (Whisky or Crossover.)

For pure gaming, a gaming PC is still the most versatile and cheapest solution. The downside is it is Windows.

 

[Pressure]

I use Nvidia Geforce Now to stream the games from an RTX 4090 cluster in 4k and I get 120fps. Plays almost everything for $20 a month.

NVIDIA GeForce NOW doesn't offer a tier with the GeForce RTX 4090.

You must mean the GeForce RTX 4080.

 

[Andrey84]

I'd go either for both upgrades, or for none.

If you have a good budget, $600 won't make a difference for you in the long run. However, an appreciation that you have a very high spec machine will make you feel good each time you use your Mac Studio.

An alternative would be to save $600 and don't select either of the upgrades. For your requirements you don't need any of them, and realistically you won't feel any difference at all.

 

[CatMorgan]

I am just getting back to this now since I was at a conference this past weekend, and I appreciate the responses! The one thing I did not mention was that I play a lot of modded Minecraft and that they’d to change the requirements because modpacks are huge resource hogs most of the time. Does that change anything?