Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

I have my MBP – MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)
8GB of RAM.

Will GW2 run? I never got out of starting areas after buying GW2 at launch and would love to resume but I really want to play on my Mac.

If you’ve already got an account anyway, and already have the MBP, why not give it a shot? I don’t know 100% but there were a few teething problems for retina users in the beginning, but I think they’ve been ironed out.

Other than that, the Mac Beta is not very optimal for any Mac recently but can still be run by most users. A new native client is currently in the making though, so hopefully soon we’ll get a better, faster client.

Thanks. I"ll give it a shot soon.

Yes, those specs are sufficient to run GW2 – I played on a similar system for some time. Given the macOS client is, in essence, the 32-bit Windows client, it is already limited to ~ 4GB of RAM max, so the memory available won’t be a thing.

Don’t expect amazing performance, but that is a product of the macOS client, not the hardware.

I’ve played GW2 on both my 15" MacBook Pro (2011) and i5 Surface Pro 3.

GW2 will play on lower settings, but the cooling solutions aren’t really made to cope with CPU and GPU intensive games, so they heat up and throttle like crazy. I’m guessing the current gen MBP’s will behave similarly.

I play GW2 on my MacBook AIR (2014) . Works fine although I have to use pretty much lowest settings.

onevstheworld.2419:

I’ve played GW2 on both my 15" MacBook Pro (2011) and i5 Surface Pro 3.

GW2 will play on lower settings, but the cooling solutions aren’t really made to cope with CPU and GPU intensive games, so they heat up and throttle like crazy. I’m guessing the current gen MBP’s will behave similarly.

I use this https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/ for fan control. It works great when things get hot.

Supercluster.7159:

onevstheworld.2419:

I’ve played GW2 on both my 15" MacBook Pro (2011) and i5 Surface Pro 3.

GW2 will play on lower settings, but the cooling solutions aren’t really made to cope with CPU and GPU intensive games, so they heat up and throttle like crazy. I’m guessing the current gen MBP’s will behave similarly.

I use this https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/ for fan control. It works great when things get hot.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to fiddle with fan control on your macOS machine, assuming it runs on genuine Apple hardware. The system is carefully built to manage cooling as well as it can, and because the hardware and software are designed and built by the same company, it does a much better job than Windows hardware can. (Exception: Microsoft made surface devices, in theory.)

If your MBP or whatever gets hot enough to be a problem it will shut down automatically; remember, though, that it’s gonna get hot enough to be uncomfortable on your bare skin first, because it is designed to use that huge aluminium body to … radiate heat, when it works hard enough.

You probably want to consider having the MBP on a desk, and possibly lifting it a little so there is airflow beneath it, to help out. Having the lid fully open or fully closed is good, having it open just a crack is not.

…and that will do what you need. Also, given the software architecture, GW2 on macOS is not going to push your system to the limits of power use or energy consumption. It can’t run more than one core particularly hard, and it is relatively frugal in GPU use too.

I normally don’t mess with stuff like this but there were times before I used fan control that the CPU was getting super hot. I have a 27" IMAC and this keeps things much cooler, been using it for 3 years now.

You can change what temperature it kick’s in and what speed to adjust the fan to. It normally only kick’s in when I’m playing GW2.

I understand that Apple likes to keep their computers quiet, but I would much rather have a cooler computer than a quiet one.

It will work like kitten even at the lowest settings because they haven’t done any Mac optimization in over 2 years.

And if it doesn’t crash every 5 minutes in large battles you’re lucky. I recommend that you do not buy on Mac, even if it’s a great game. Just get the Free to Play version to try it out first.