menace690 wrote:
Been using a hackintosh for over a year due to the Mac Pro not being updated. Due to a monitor issue that I thought was a graphics card issue, I wiped my bios settings and now am forced into windows only. OMG I HATE windows. It has a litany of intrusive issues. I miss my mac so much. Please please please Apple, release a new fucking mac...
Guessing you need more stuff in your computer however, as a budget-conscious father who cannot justify forking out for an Mac Pro or iMac pro, I've recently acquired a Mac Mini with an eGPU. This is mostly for the purpose of being able to emulate Saturn/Dreamcast games smoothly, but it also allows me to play a few games from the last ~15 years that require something marginally better than integrated graphics. The stats are:
- Refurbished 2018 Mac Mini (3Ghz 6-core i5, 256GB SSD is standard... which is nice as iMacs come with fusion drives but it cannot be upgraded)
- 16GB RAM (upgraded it myself - TBH I don't need any more)
- Razer Core X with an 8GB Sapphire RX Vega 64
- 24" monitor & decent wireless mouse/keyboard
I costed this machine somewhere between the price of a 21.5" iMac and a 27" iMac (8GB RAM, 3Ghz i5 and fusion drive). Thus, I reckon it's a pretty good deal because I can now upgrade my CPU.
The eGPU lag's quite significant in that I get ~20-30% of the performance once would expect from an RX Vega 64. However, graphics are still super fast (i.e. benchmarks are the only place I notice any 'slowness'), I can upgrade it in the future and IMO it makes my Mac ALMOST like a hackintosh, but with a legit Mac.
Food for thought if anybody's wanting to get a Mac with a semi-decent GPU. The RX Vega 64 allows me to play the following with settings maxed out (haven't tried anything else):
- Redream (Dreamcast games... worth noting I'm no purist and I've got the graphics 'enhancements' cranked up full. To the best of my knowledge it renders 3d graphics at 3840x2880 then squishes everything down to 1600x900 so that you get much sharper looking graphics... purists probably hate it but I like it)
- Mednafen (I use it for Saturn games and compile it without the other emu cores... quite impressive as the author notes it requires a lot of grunt... it's quite an accurate emu for a system that's notoriously difficult to emulate too)
- Dreamfall Chapters (not a 'high-end' game but made by a small studio using an engine that's not as fast as some of the commercial engines so in its day, people with high-end setups were still complaining about slow-downs due to a lack of optimisation... so this one's a bit of a crown jewel for me)
- The Witcher 2 (I played the first on a hackintosh back in ~2012 so this was nice as I could never play the sequel)
- Second Life (another one of those 'not high end but still resource intensive' games)
We'll see how I feel in 5 years time when I wanna upgrade my GPU (Thunderbolt 3's still not quite as fast as I'd like it) but for now I'm really pleased with the setup! Just trying to think of some more emus this coulda opened my world up to. Any suggestions? Probably some of those more taxing arcade games (ones that are either tough to emulate or 3D).