The most important question: Peak Dota on a Mac?

[Thedragon67]

I play a lot of Dota, have $3500 USD to spend and all I really want is the best Dota gaming experience on a Mac. I am open to desktop, not just laptops, and am currently eyeing up a Studio M2 Max.

Just wondering, would that be the absolute best for playing Dota? i.e would the new M3 have some kind of graphical performance for Dota that would be more meaningful than the power I would get from a Studio (as I would likely have a less powerful M3 Pro chip).

Has to be Apple, as I refuse to go back to windows.

Thanks!

Currently on a 24'' iMac with 16gb ram that gets a bit hot and can't use the highest graphics settings

 

[iLuddite]

I’d personally wait for the Studio with M3-whatever due to enhanced GPU capabilities. Good luck!

 

[Bigwaff]

Just wondering, would that be the absolute best for playing Dota?

First, I will admit that I don't play games on my Macs. Never have. Second, I did not know what "Dota" was so your question intrigued me. Did some quick research. Dota does not appear to be a very resource demanding game... at least according to this article

Dota 2 on Mac: Benchmarks & How to Download | Mac Gamer HQ

www.macgamerhq.com

If Dota is the most demanding software you plan to use, this article implies you can get by w/ a M1/M2 MacBook Air and have decent FPS and smooth game play. Anything more is simply gravy or perhaps even wasted computing power (i.e. $$$$$)

Absolutely open to criticism on this ...

 

[HDFan]

I’d personally wait for the Studio with M3-whatever due to enhanced GPU capabilities.

A year or more is a long time to wait. Ran just the intro in my M2 Studio Ultra and it looked fine. Didn't play the game and am not a game player.

 

[padams35]

If you are already using an M1 iMac that gives you a point of reference. What setting/resolution are you using, and at what setting/resolution would you be satisfied enough to call anything else overkill?

For the absolute best M2 Max should be enough to smoothly play Dota in 4K on high, maybe even maxed, settings. If you are OK scaling down to 1440p then an M2-Pro should be enough.

M3-Pro is expected to only be marginally faster than M2-Pro and is probably worth skipping if you can get M2-Pro cheaper/earlier.

 

[Neork]

Same here, wondering about the current situation of running dota2 on mac, I have a m1 max mbp, and tried dota2 before, absolutely unplayable. You can feel a lot of glitch if you generally play dota2 on windows. And the most important thing of playing dota2 (and maybe other games) is smoothness rather than video quality.

 

[galad]

Dota2 doesn't precompile almost any shader, so the first time a new effect or a similar thing needs to be displayed it will stutter. It will usually get better after you watched or played a few games because most of the common shaders will be in cache.

 

[Neork]

Dota2 doesn't precompile almost any shader, so the first time a new effect or a similar thing needs to be displayed it will stutter. It will usually get better after you watched or played a few games because most of the common shaders will be in cache.

interesting！thx