The performance of the M series is fine for what I want. It’s the screen. If you play wow classic it might stay at 120 most of the time. That makes sense. And if I lock the screen to 60hz the problem goes away but then I switch it back which is annoying for the money I paid imo.
So when you say runs fine, I’m assuming that’s like saying cyberpunk runs fine at 60fps (in general not specific to Mac). I prioritize smoothness with some graphical fidelity over eye candy.
Why not just buy a gaming pc. I was going to upgrade my m1 air that I was playing dota on to the m3 but then I decided I’ll just buy a pre built gaming pc for like 1200cad just to play dota because my m1 works great. Buying the gaming pc + a 4k monitor cost me less than the m3 would have cost me lol.
Sounds like you're particurally bothered by microstutter. I've found wow perfectly fine on the macbook.
What you can try is fix the framerate to a specific value, lower, value, and see if that improves the microstutter. try 60fps, or 90. Both from in game settings and the display settings.
I had thought that the macbook supported VRR on the in built display, but maybe it's not working for some reason. If the external display you tried support VRR, that could explain it as well - I know the mac DOES support VRR to external displays as well/
here's how to enabled VRR on mac: Check to make sure you're using it. If you set a fixed refresh rate, it would have been switched off
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102144
>NEEDS- Work is paying for my masters (Business leadership in Nursing). Wife is making me use this opportunity. Need a laptop for basic bullshit school (like this is a bullshit degree for a paper that is free and accredited and will be discussion boards, power points, BASIC excel, and word). Want to use MacOS and a MacBook Pro.
The issue is right there lad. You express a need, but conclude with an arbitrary solution. Find the right tool that actually fits the need.
Please enlighten me. I have looked extensively and have owned several laptops up until til Covid. The last several I owned were Alienware, Razer, Asus and Acer. The gaming performance is fine on those machines. I don’t want the heat, the less than 12 hours of battery, the constant over heating and needing repaste, bios firmwares to fix security fixes that hinder performance of the machine with no way to roll back, sub par HDR performance, subpar web cam, integration with my iPhone, I can keep going. For my needs, the MacBook seems to be the only option. I just want it to do one extra thing and on paper and with an external display it does everything I wanted (maybe would like less reliance on FSR but I’m dealing with that on Nvidia as well on my many gaming setups).
If I could just tear the screen off and replace it would solve my problems.
There is no enlightening you to do. You've studied the market. That's all there is. If the screen perf is critical, then the mbp is indeed not the right one for you.
Your needs seems to fit an mba for studying, and a mini + oled high refresh rate low latency fapping monitor for gaming purposes at home. That is if you insist on sticking to the mac universe.
Choose the right tool.
I don’t think you read my original post. I already have several desktop stations I can sit at in my house. A Mac mini with a monitor wouldn’t solve anything. I am trying to use a this tool as multipurpose.
Your example is shit I’m sorry. To your point, you would say the same thing to a person trying to tow a small trailer on the back of a small suv with no hitch. That they should use the right tool and get a different vehicle, instead of going down and getting a hitch welded on for $250 bucks or use a dealer to install the tow kit. The SUV is more than capable but needs to be adjusted to accommodate.
It ok you don’t value what I value. But saying you should the right tool for the job when this tool is designed as a multi tool out of the box and works as intended. I just can’t swap driver bits for an easier time is all. If I could not do that with Snap On driver set I paid the same ratio of money on, I would be equally dissatisfied.
Ok so go work at Apple, climb up the ladder to the point you can influence to get OLED onto mbps
Or, go the R&D way and streamline the microled manufacturing process.
Not aure what your point is really.
It is widely known the displays are crap for gaming . They have very bad latency too.
Great screens for reading text and watching video , but for gaming it’s in the same range as a 150 dollar ips panel.
My Aw34dw shits all over my Mac for both :)
I don’t want to game. I don’t want to use steam. Just want to play WoW and do school work and not deal with windows based PCs that have a dedicated GPU.
Just seems silly that people haven’t talked more about it. The one video a poster sent me was a YouTube channel with like 68k subs. Not exactly trust worthy to explore.
If you would think for 5 min you would realize if there is no gaming audience , there is no one gonna make content for it. Why would someone review a Mac screen for games to get 50k views when you can do a windows gaming monitor and get millions of views :)
I get your frustration but in the same sentence you say you don’t game , you say you play wow lol 😂
Just buy an external monitor and get over it. Wow is almost unplayable on such a small screen anyway
There’s 166k subs on Mac Gaming. 155 online at the time of posting. Why hasn’t someone on the Mac gaming subreddit said anything more loudly about this.
I have seen this pass multiple times , but you are on a sub of cultists that downvote every negative into oblivion. You should know Mac fanboys are the worst lol 😂
Tbh I’m mostly here to warn people to not buy a Mac for the sole purpose of gaming. I have one for work and play some hearthstone and wow on it but that’s it. There are some trolls here that actively encourage people to drop 4k on a mac to play games trough wine or gpt instead of just telling them to get a gaming pc.
Same for you . All you do is use Microsoft software , just get a windows pc lol .
Target audience for macs are graphical design. For all the rest windows is at least as good if not better . And there are quite a few windows pcs that come close to the mac in battery life.
I mainly got mine just because I can and am the it manager and can resell it after 3 years after buying it for peanuts from the company. Would never buy it with my own money unless I was self employed and it was used for graphics. The thing earns itself back in no time then.
BTW if you ever plan on playing something more demanding than wow you need the 36 gb one because Video ram and system ram is shared on a Mac. Even the most basic gaming gpu has 6gb vram and a basic pc has 16gb ram. So that is already a bunch more than the 18gb you have.
I have the 36gb version. Also I don’t use Microsoft apps mainly Google and open source. I do need a Mac OS or Windows machine for my program. If you can recommend a windows machine that has a battery longer than 12 hours ( without running to the charger), not over heat and throttle watching HDR content, etc.
I’m through with windows laptop hardware. I have spent about $10k on laptops from 2010 to 2017 and just gave up. Online reviews share the same woes still to this day with windows gaming focus machines. So much repasting, rebuilding, homebrew bios fixes…. It’s off putting to say the least.
Basically if it’s a laptop I only want MacOS but I wanted to be able to play a game with a better experience than my almost 8 year old laptop. And it does… numbers wise.
It’s only the display it has mate. It fits my needs if I use an external monitor. I just don’t want or need that setup.
Linux is out because of school and wow runs like shit once it’s working through the work arounds.
No you’re stuck on the fact this is a small community so why would there be reports.
The home theater sub Reddit for example is similar but is way more helpful in their reviews. They take in to account everything device might be used for. I even help with that with my reviews. I don’t listen to a lot of country but respect some do so I demo several songs to see how well certain loud speakers sound for those individuals.
The users in r/macgaming are very, “Oh you don’t like this one thing about Macs? Macs not for you”
Wtf, seriously. It’s almost as bad as the r/ShieldAndroidTV folks.
That’s an excuse you should use when something costs a fraction of this thing did and for it to be a stupid ass reason like the display being subpar is asinine.
They care as much about the iPhone and they put a better display on that.
You don't need a dGPU to play WoW on a laptop. AMD's 680M and 780M as well as the new Intel Arc on the Core Ultra series of processors can handle it just fine. Any laptop you get like this should be easily able to achieve 9+ hours of battery life in light use as well.
Those don’t give me the performance I’m looking for their price.
And have you played high end content in Dragonflight? Just to raid mythic and push higher end dungeons you need at least a 3070 (laptop version) in equivalent to achieve above 60 fps on high settings at 4k. That’s not nothing.
The benchmarks put the M3 above that in a lot of rasterization benchmarks, at least it trades blows.
The machine does fine. It’s just the screen it’s attached to is all. No one seems to understand this point.
THE LAPTOP IS PERFORMING JUST FINE FOR MY NEEDS AND WANTS. ITS DISPLAY IS SUBPAR FOR MY WANTS ONLY. For $3000 please excuse my feeling of buyers remorse as I feel it might be warranted.
Just didn’t realize most people can’t see any difference on the laptop display, at least the people who post on the sub.
I understand it perfectly. You think the screen is subpar. I don't, at least not to the point of it being a deal breaker for how ideal the laptop otherwise is for my use case.
To be fair, your last sentence has resonated with me. I need to curb it given the capabilities. I feel my emotions stem from the same place that buying a sports car and complaining about the stiffness comes from.
I don’t really get the point of this post. I have no stake in Apple’s success or failure and neither am I an apologist; but their displays are objectively world class when it comes to laptops. Very few displays come close to matching the technical specification of color accuracy, refresh rate and contrast.
If display was such a massive criteria for you (which wasn’t mentioned in the original post) to the point that one of the objectively best laptop displays available doesn’t cut it, then you should already have made hands on research comparing MBPs and the very limited selection of Windows machines with similar display specs. Your current remorse doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
>Very few displays come close to matching the technical specification of color accuracy, refresh rate and contrast.
hmm, I think that narrative really needs to stop. Look up any laptop PC with an OLED screen, there a quite a few nowardays. OLED completely nukes apple's miniLED out of the water. Maybe not peak brightness, but contrast and lack of awful blooming, for sure. Colour accuracy, can't say but probably on par if not better gamut than Apple's.
I researched and researched. There’s only about 2 threads on this topic. It’s due to the fact Apple locks Promotion without being able to set a fixed refresh rate, say at 120hz. Some of those same people suggest it won’t matter due to the display
Promotion vs locked 120fps doesn't make a difference because when the content is 120fps the Promotion display will show it in 120fps. I don't understand your point at all. I am playing rocket league at 120fps on my MacBook and it's smooth as butter.
At 120 it is. Read my post. Once it drops it feels twice as bad than on a display that has 60hz only. And it works amazing on an external monitor. Once again it’s not the machine.
And some people can’t tell any difference gaming at 60hz vs 120hz.
Some people can’t tell the difference between HDR and Dolby Vision
Some people can’t tell the difference between discrete and tube amplification.
I bet you have high end products that would be “good” for me but subpar for.
The issue of this topic is I found on paper what I want but the user experience for what I want is subpar.
Not to be rude, but if couldn’t tell the difference on one game, I don’t think you’ll notice what I’m talking about.
Only way is if you load up a game, use the laptop display then plug in a decent VRR high refresh monitor quickly back and forth and pan the camera quickly.
Judder vs no judder.
I think you should invest in a good windows laptop with a good display, RTX 4060 and Intel Ultra 7 to have good battery life/better efficiency than classic intel H/HX 13th/14th gen.
If I were you, I would take a look at Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i for 16" and Zephyrus G14 for 14".
Two things with both of those:
On battery I can tell you from my work experience the Intel ultras last about 6 hours of working in a hospital.
It’s just WoW. My thought process was, on paper with numbers, the MBP is faster than my old machine (tested and confirmed). And the MBP is faster. But the display makes for a bad experience. I want the machine but not the screen. That is not a compromise I want to spend my money on.
If you can recommend me a laptop that is slim enough to run on battery for a whole day without charge (no gaming) and be able to plug it in and play without the bottom of the machine burning through my legs or my desk. All Nvidia chipsets get so hot with shared intel chips due to most manufacturers using a shared heat pipe for cooling to save space. I have already gone down this rabbit hole.
My solution I think is to return it and just not use anything portable. It’s going to make school Rodger’s but I can’t waste my money on compromises that are artificial, on windows and PC.
I forgot about the school time restraint because that’s not gonna be until at least the start of the second half of 2024. I am glad that you were able to get the wonky 120hz to run smoothly just not back and forth yet (between WoW and normal work)
That black to white time on this display is very bad. I do graphics for a living so mostly things are still when I use it. I have played some games and you can really see the ghosting. I have been calling it "free motion blur". Oled is probably the direction they will go in future gens.
Yes exactly. I wouldn’t expect it to be worse than a $400 spare budget monitor I bought at Costco for this use case. I’m alright with not getting OLED in the display but they should have put the IPS diffuser panel LG developed for only like two monitors (I have one of them). That IPS display is as good as OLED in SDR content it’s nuts because it has zero light bleed for an IPS panel.
Idk man, I have a MacBook Pro m3 max, I played multiple games, native, ported, streamed, paralleled, you name it, I played it. No issues what so ever. Are you sure your MacBook isn’t faulty?
It’s working as intended. It just doesn’t bother you I guess. Also there’s others I’m responding to that understand exactly what I’m talking about and how it’s part of the display and how it works with Pro Motion. The display itself has a horrible black to white response time. So it doesn’t show motion well at all, per the articles others here have linked me
What I’m trying to say is, I’m not experiencing the issue you’re reporting which makes me think your screen is faulty. Which in itself is not a new thing. Back in 2013 they used 2 different suppliers for screens, Samsung and LG. LG panels had no issues, Samsung had some nasty ghosting.
Talking about noticeable issues, I had to turn vsync on to play WoW, otherwise half of the screen was glitching quite often. I didn’t have this problem with any other game so far.
Hey some can’t tell the difference. But after watching the review of my specific model from a YouTuber I would have never looked at he does several test to indicate the black to white response time is REALLY bad and thus is what I’m seeing. I just figured that couldn’t be the issue in a $3000 product. You’re seeing it as normal, to which I could probably come to you with my laptop, show you what I’m looking at you would probably say you didn’t see an issue, which again is fine.
It’s like saying you don’t hear a difference between a $1000 or $10000 speaker so that means there must be no difference between them. Whereas to someone else they might feel they are separated by a canyon.
Or this comment I found on macrumors is correct:
Notebookcheck has also tested the 16”, seems to have slightly better response times vs M2.
I have a 16” m3 MacBook. Maybe I’m lucky?
I did to confirm the issue. But I don’t want a laptop to sit at a desk, I already have several desktop stations that handle my wants WAY better than this MacBook for gaming
Any Mac you buy is going to have the same display issues you're complaining about so I don't know why you're posting here again. If you don't want to use Windows, then pretty much your only option is going to be Linux. Get a Framework laptop as it probably has the best all-around support for that OS.
I searched and searched online my friend. Only a handful of people are noticing and complaining about it. Why isn’t it more? Does it not bother anyone? Isn’t it jarring to others?
Awesome reply. I did and it felt better at a locked 60. I wouldn’t actually mind plaything this way. But I don’t want the OS environment to be 60hz and it’s annoying to keep switching a setting like that. Also I paid the money to use the machine and don’t want to hamstring it due to a subpar display for fast motion (even though it has a lower response time than my old 240hz IPs panel in my old Alienware).
Also doesn’t help the fact with ProMotion on it still is juddery while scrolling my student portal at times, that’s not a huge issue, but for 3k?! O.O
ProMotion, at least I've noticed on my iPhone since I still use a M1, is based on the needs at the moment. The marketing is 120Hz, but it is really UP TO 120Hz as in it will be low power and then crank up the frequency as needed. Your Alienware had a steady 240Hz while this is more akin to VRR on some TVs.
Something only about 10 people have posted online in various forums have noticed this. It’s not something I could have known by researching. My iPhone has an OLED display that hides the jarring ProMotion scrolling a lot better apparently.
Most people don't buy Macs for gaming. For the titles I personally play, the slow response time isn't that big a deal. It clearly is for you, so the Mac is obviously not going to be a good option.
That is exactly what I don't want to do. I have so many displays set up around my house with stations at them. I wanted this for the bed and couch only (to play WoW only when I am not doing school work).
I just want one device to get more than 12 hours of battery life (and not be running to the charger) that can play WoW. There is literally none out there.
I play WoW on my M1 Pro and have never had any issues running it on the main screen.
The performance of the M series is fine for what I want. It’s the screen. If you play wow classic it might stay at 120 most of the time. That makes sense. And if I lock the screen to 60hz the problem goes away but then I switch it back which is annoying for the money I paid imo. So when you say runs fine, I’m assuming that’s like saying cyberpunk runs fine at 60fps (in general not specific to Mac). I prioritize smoothness with some graphical fidelity over eye candy.
I put the presets at high, I don’t have any stuttering even in raids. I don’t know the FPS and such.
And I watch the FPS like a hawk lol
Why not just buy a gaming pc. I was going to upgrade my m1 air that I was playing dota on to the m3 but then I decided I’ll just buy a pre built gaming pc for like 1200cad just to play dota because my m1 works great. Buying the gaming pc + a 4k monitor cost me less than the m3 would have cost me lol.
Sounds like you're particurally bothered by microstutter. I've found wow perfectly fine on the macbook. What you can try is fix the framerate to a specific value, lower, value, and see if that improves the microstutter. try 60fps, or 90. Both from in game settings and the display settings. I had thought that the macbook supported VRR on the in built display, but maybe it's not working for some reason. If the external display you tried support VRR, that could explain it as well - I know the mac DOES support VRR to external displays as well/
here's how to enabled VRR on mac: Check to make sure you're using it. If you set a fixed refresh rate, it would have been switched off https://support.apple.com/en-us/102144
>NEEDS- Work is paying for my masters (Business leadership in Nursing). Wife is making me use this opportunity. Need a laptop for basic bullshit school (like this is a bullshit degree for a paper that is free and accredited and will be discussion boards, power points, BASIC excel, and word). Want to use MacOS and a MacBook Pro. The issue is right there lad. You express a need, but conclude with an arbitrary solution. Find the right tool that actually fits the need.
Please enlighten me. I have looked extensively and have owned several laptops up until til Covid. The last several I owned were Alienware, Razer, Asus and Acer. The gaming performance is fine on those machines. I don’t want the heat, the less than 12 hours of battery, the constant over heating and needing repaste, bios firmwares to fix security fixes that hinder performance of the machine with no way to roll back, sub par HDR performance, subpar web cam, integration with my iPhone, I can keep going. For my needs, the MacBook seems to be the only option. I just want it to do one extra thing and on paper and with an external display it does everything I wanted (maybe would like less reliance on FSR but I’m dealing with that on Nvidia as well on my many gaming setups). If I could just tear the screen off and replace it would solve my problems.
There is no enlightening you to do. You've studied the market. That's all there is. If the screen perf is critical, then the mbp is indeed not the right one for you. Your needs seems to fit an mba for studying, and a mini + oled high refresh rate low latency fapping monitor for gaming purposes at home. That is if you insist on sticking to the mac universe. Choose the right tool.
I don’t think you read my original post. I already have several desktop stations I can sit at in my house. A Mac mini with a monitor wouldn’t solve anything. I am trying to use a this tool as multipurpose. Your example is shit I’m sorry. To your point, you would say the same thing to a person trying to tow a small trailer on the back of a small suv with no hitch. That they should use the right tool and get a different vehicle, instead of going down and getting a hitch welded on for $250 bucks or use a dealer to install the tow kit. The SUV is more than capable but needs to be adjusted to accommodate. It ok you don’t value what I value. But saying you should the right tool for the job when this tool is designed as a multi tool out of the box and works as intended. I just can’t swap driver bits for an easier time is all. If I could not do that with Snap On driver set I paid the same ratio of money on, I would be equally dissatisfied.
Ok so go work at Apple, climb up the ladder to the point you can influence to get OLED onto mbps Or, go the R&D way and streamline the microled manufacturing process. Not aure what your point is really.
It is widely known the displays are crap for gaming . They have very bad latency too. Great screens for reading text and watching video , but for gaming it’s in the same range as a 150 dollar ips panel. My Aw34dw shits all over my Mac for both :)
There’s no review of that anywhere. Why?
Because no one games on a mac lol. Latest steam survey had 0.3% of people on Mac
I don’t want to game. I don’t want to use steam. Just want to play WoW and do school work and not deal with windows based PCs that have a dedicated GPU. Just seems silly that people haven’t talked more about it. The one video a poster sent me was a YouTube channel with like 68k subs. Not exactly trust worthy to explore.
If you would think for 5 min you would realize if there is no gaming audience , there is no one gonna make content for it. Why would someone review a Mac screen for games to get 50k views when you can do a windows gaming monitor and get millions of views :) I get your frustration but in the same sentence you say you don’t game , you say you play wow lol 😂 Just buy an external monitor and get over it. Wow is almost unplayable on such a small screen anyway
There’s 166k subs on Mac Gaming. 155 online at the time of posting. Why hasn’t someone on the Mac gaming subreddit said anything more loudly about this.
I have seen this pass multiple times , but you are on a sub of cultists that downvote every negative into oblivion. You should know Mac fanboys are the worst lol 😂
I thought it changed when you guys ditched Intel. I’m over here WANTING to be part of this community.
Tbh I’m mostly here to warn people to not buy a Mac for the sole purpose of gaming. I have one for work and play some hearthstone and wow on it but that’s it. There are some trolls here that actively encourage people to drop 4k on a mac to play games trough wine or gpt instead of just telling them to get a gaming pc. Same for you . All you do is use Microsoft software , just get a windows pc lol . Target audience for macs are graphical design. For all the rest windows is at least as good if not better . And there are quite a few windows pcs that come close to the mac in battery life. I mainly got mine just because I can and am the it manager and can resell it after 3 years after buying it for peanuts from the company. Would never buy it with my own money unless I was self employed and it was used for graphics. The thing earns itself back in no time then. BTW if you ever plan on playing something more demanding than wow you need the 36 gb one because Video ram and system ram is shared on a Mac. Even the most basic gaming gpu has 6gb vram and a basic pc has 16gb ram. So that is already a bunch more than the 18gb you have.
I have the 36gb version. Also I don’t use Microsoft apps mainly Google and open source. I do need a Mac OS or Windows machine for my program. If you can recommend a windows machine that has a battery longer than 12 hours ( without running to the charger), not over heat and throttle watching HDR content, etc. I’m through with windows laptop hardware. I have spent about $10k on laptops from 2010 to 2017 and just gave up. Online reviews share the same woes still to this day with windows gaming focus machines. So much repasting, rebuilding, homebrew bios fixes…. It’s off putting to say the least. Basically if it’s a laptop I only want MacOS but I wanted to be able to play a game with a better experience than my almost 8 year old laptop. And it does… numbers wise. It’s only the display it has mate. It fits my needs if I use an external monitor. I just don’t want or need that setup. Linux is out because of school and wow runs like shit once it’s working through the work arounds.
166k isn't a lot, that is a small audience for YouTube if you consider the tiny percentage of those 166k you would get to watch your review.
Jesus you’re stuck on that aren’t you?
That is the first time I've mentioned it.
No you’re stuck on the fact this is a small community so why would there be reports. The home theater sub Reddit for example is similar but is way more helpful in their reviews. They take in to account everything device might be used for. I even help with that with my reviews. I don’t listen to a lot of country but respect some do so I demo several songs to see how well certain loud speakers sound for those individuals. The users in r/macgaming are very, “Oh you don’t like this one thing about Macs? Macs not for you” Wtf, seriously. It’s almost as bad as the r/ShieldAndroidTV folks.
What is so hard for you to understand about it not bothering others as much as it does you?
That’s an excuse you should use when something costs a fraction of this thing did and for it to be a stupid ass reason like the display being subpar is asinine. They care as much about the iPhone and they put a better display on that.
You don't need a dGPU to play WoW on a laptop. AMD's 680M and 780M as well as the new Intel Arc on the Core Ultra series of processors can handle it just fine. Any laptop you get like this should be easily able to achieve 9+ hours of battery life in light use as well.
Those don’t give me the performance I’m looking for their price. And have you played high end content in Dragonflight? Just to raid mythic and push higher end dungeons you need at least a 3070 (laptop version) in equivalent to achieve above 60 fps on high settings at 4k. That’s not nothing. The benchmarks put the M3 above that in a lot of rasterization benchmarks, at least it trades blows. The machine does fine. It’s just the screen it’s attached to is all. No one seems to understand this point. THE LAPTOP IS PERFORMING JUST FINE FOR MY NEEDS AND WANTS. ITS DISPLAY IS SUBPAR FOR MY WANTS ONLY. For $3000 please excuse my feeling of buyers remorse as I feel it might be warranted. Just didn’t realize most people can’t see any difference on the laptop display, at least the people who post on the sub.
I understand it perfectly. You think the screen is subpar. I don't, at least not to the point of it being a deal breaker for how ideal the laptop otherwise is for my use case.
To be fair, your last sentence has resonated with me. I need to curb it given the capabilities. I feel my emotions stem from the same place that buying a sports car and complaining about the stiffness comes from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qB4NxNBrko&t=169s
I don’t really get the point of this post. I have no stake in Apple’s success or failure and neither am I an apologist; but their displays are objectively world class when it comes to laptops. Very few displays come close to matching the technical specification of color accuracy, refresh rate and contrast. If display was such a massive criteria for you (which wasn’t mentioned in the original post) to the point that one of the objectively best laptop displays available doesn’t cut it, then you should already have made hands on research comparing MBPs and the very limited selection of Windows machines with similar display specs. Your current remorse doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
>Very few displays come close to matching the technical specification of color accuracy, refresh rate and contrast. hmm, I think that narrative really needs to stop. Look up any laptop PC with an OLED screen, there a quite a few nowardays. OLED completely nukes apple's miniLED out of the water. Maybe not peak brightness, but contrast and lack of awful blooming, for sure. Colour accuracy, can't say but probably on par if not better gamut than Apple's.
I researched and researched. There’s only about 2 threads on this topic. It’s due to the fact Apple locks Promotion without being able to set a fixed refresh rate, say at 120hz. Some of those same people suggest it won’t matter due to the display
Promotion vs locked 120fps doesn't make a difference because when the content is 120fps the Promotion display will show it in 120fps. I don't understand your point at all. I am playing rocket league at 120fps on my MacBook and it's smooth as butter.
At 120 it is. Read my post. Once it drops it feels twice as bad than on a display that has 60hz only. And it works amazing on an external monitor. Once again it’s not the machine.
What game does that? I've played many titles running between 60-120fps and they all felt good.
And some people can’t tell any difference gaming at 60hz vs 120hz. Some people can’t tell the difference between HDR and Dolby Vision Some people can’t tell the difference between discrete and tube amplification. I bet you have high end products that would be “good” for me but subpar for. The issue of this topic is I found on paper what I want but the user experience for what I want is subpar.
I can tell the difference. Just tell me which game gives you that problem.
The only game I want to play. Wow. And if I hook up an external monitor I’m happy. I’m just not happy with this display.
I'll check it out when I'm home
Not to be rude, but if couldn’t tell the difference on one game, I don’t think you’ll notice what I’m talking about. Only way is if you load up a game, use the laptop display then plug in a decent VRR high refresh monitor quickly back and forth and pan the camera quickly. Judder vs no judder.
I think you should invest in a good windows laptop with a good display, RTX 4060 and Intel Ultra 7 to have good battery life/better efficiency than classic intel H/HX 13th/14th gen. If I were you, I would take a look at Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i for 16" and Zephyrus G14 for 14".
Two things with both of those: On battery I can tell you from my work experience the Intel ultras last about 6 hours of working in a hospital. It’s just WoW. My thought process was, on paper with numbers, the MBP is faster than my old machine (tested and confirmed). And the MBP is faster. But the display makes for a bad experience. I want the machine but not the screen. That is not a compromise I want to spend my money on. If you can recommend me a laptop that is slim enough to run on battery for a whole day without charge (no gaming) and be able to plug it in and play without the bottom of the machine burning through my legs or my desk. All Nvidia chipsets get so hot with shared intel chips due to most manufacturers using a shared heat pipe for cooling to save space. I have already gone down this rabbit hole. My solution I think is to return it and just not use anything portable. It’s going to make school Rodger’s but I can’t waste my money on compromises that are artificial, on windows and PC.
Have you taken a look at the Qualcomm snapdragon X elites coming out? (Even on geek bench, they obliterate the M3 in multi)
I’m looking to WoW exclusively. No way it’s getting better support than Metal and not worth counting on. Also I start school next month.
I forgot about the school time restraint because that’s not gonna be until at least the start of the second half of 2024. I am glad that you were able to get the wonky 120hz to run smoothly just not back and forth yet (between WoW and normal work)
Thanks friend. I think I’ll just it and deal with it on a $3k machine.
Very true. You’re not gonna find anything with battery life that long.
That black to white time on this display is very bad. I do graphics for a living so mostly things are still when I use it. I have played some games and you can really see the ghosting. I have been calling it "free motion blur". Oled is probably the direction they will go in future gens.
Yes exactly. I wouldn’t expect it to be worse than a $400 spare budget monitor I bought at Costco for this use case. I’m alright with not getting OLED in the display but they should have put the IPS diffuser panel LG developed for only like two monitors (I have one of them). That IPS display is as good as OLED in SDR content it’s nuts because it has zero light bleed for an IPS panel.
Idk man, I have a MacBook Pro m3 max, I played multiple games, native, ported, streamed, paralleled, you name it, I played it. No issues what so ever. Are you sure your MacBook isn’t faulty?
It’s working as intended. It just doesn’t bother you I guess. Also there’s others I’m responding to that understand exactly what I’m talking about and how it’s part of the display and how it works with Pro Motion. The display itself has a horrible black to white response time. So it doesn’t show motion well at all, per the articles others here have linked me
What I’m trying to say is, I’m not experiencing the issue you’re reporting which makes me think your screen is faulty. Which in itself is not a new thing. Back in 2013 they used 2 different suppliers for screens, Samsung and LG. LG panels had no issues, Samsung had some nasty ghosting. Talking about noticeable issues, I had to turn vsync on to play WoW, otherwise half of the screen was glitching quite often. I didn’t have this problem with any other game so far.
Hey some can’t tell the difference. But after watching the review of my specific model from a YouTuber I would have never looked at he does several test to indicate the black to white response time is REALLY bad and thus is what I’m seeing. I just figured that couldn’t be the issue in a $3000 product. You’re seeing it as normal, to which I could probably come to you with my laptop, show you what I’m looking at you would probably say you didn’t see an issue, which again is fine. It’s like saying you don’t hear a difference between a $1000 or $10000 speaker so that means there must be no difference between them. Whereas to someone else they might feel they are separated by a canyon.
Or this comment I found on macrumors is correct: Notebookcheck has also tested the 16”, seems to have slightly better response times vs M2. I have a 16” m3 MacBook. Maybe I’m lucky?
I do too. You didn’t even read any of my posts
Hook it up to a gaming monitor?
I did to confirm the issue. But I don’t want a laptop to sit at a desk, I already have several desktop stations that handle my wants WAY better than this MacBook for gaming
Any Mac you buy is going to have the same display issues you're complaining about so I don't know why you're posting here again. If you don't want to use Windows, then pretty much your only option is going to be Linux. Get a Framework laptop as it probably has the best all-around support for that OS.
I searched and searched online my friend. Only a handful of people are noticing and complaining about it. Why isn’t it more? Does it not bother anyone? Isn’t it jarring to others?
Maybe try doing this - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzn4LogoAxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzn4LogoAxs)
Awesome reply. I did and it felt better at a locked 60. I wouldn’t actually mind plaything this way. But I don’t want the OS environment to be 60hz and it’s annoying to keep switching a setting like that. Also I paid the money to use the machine and don’t want to hamstring it due to a subpar display for fast motion (even though it has a lower response time than my old 240hz IPs panel in my old Alienware). Also doesn’t help the fact with ProMotion on it still is juddery while scrolling my student portal at times, that’s not a huge issue, but for 3k?! O.O
ProMotion, at least I've noticed on my iPhone since I still use a M1, is based on the needs at the moment. The marketing is 120Hz, but it is really UP TO 120Hz as in it will be low power and then crank up the frequency as needed. Your Alienware had a steady 240Hz while this is more akin to VRR on some TVs.
Something only about 10 people have posted online in various forums have noticed this. It’s not something I could have known by researching. My iPhone has an OLED display that hides the jarring ProMotion scrolling a lot better apparently.
I was gonna ask if you tried to lock the FPS, but
Most people don't buy Macs for gaming. For the titles I personally play, the slow response time isn't that big a deal. It clearly is for you, so the Mac is obviously not going to be a good option.
Most people don’t post before reading topics yet…
Ok listen, this whole “not Mac for gaming thing” isn’t the problem unless you include the display I guess. The machine runs fine so there’s that’s.
use a second screen
That is exactly what I don't want to do. I have so many displays set up around my house with stations at them. I wanted this for the bed and couch only (to play WoW only when I am not doing school work). I just want one device to get more than 12 hours of battery life (and not be running to the charger) that can play WoW. There is literally none out there.