PSA: A Mac for Civ VI: No, you do not have to get a NEW one...

[oakdragon]

I've seen this here and there in this forum. People saying they'll have to get a new Mac to play Civ VI. I want to remind everyone that no, you don't have to get a new Mac; You can get a used or refurb one. My Mid 2012 model plays Civ VI just fine. (And if you get a refurb from Apple, it comes with the full, standard warranty, which can be upgraded to AppleCare.)

Something that's really bothered me about the Mac product line the last five years, especially in the case of the MacBook Pros, is that performance, especially for gaming, does not scale properly with price or older-to-newer generations. Any Mac with a 1 GB or better discrete graphics chipset (AMD or nVidia; not Intel) made within the last five years should play it just fine. One would think that all the MacBook Pro models would come with discrete chipsets, but for some reason, they don't. Buying a new Mac without one is a waste of money. For that matter, so is buying a new Mac with one, particularly if you just want to use it to do something like play Civ VI.

 

[CGPanama]

As the person who started the New MacBook Pro thread, I heartily agree and endorse OakDragon's comment. I am getting a new MBP for work, life and because I usually do so every three years (currently 4+ because the last MBPr was not enough to make me jump).

That said, I will be happy that my Civ VI will benefit from the upgrade, but the Mac has never been a gaming computer.

 

[Kevin Rohrer]

But you DO need to upgrade to Mac Sierra. The game will not run w/o it.

 

[oakdragon]

Really? Aspyr claims it runs on El Capitan also.

 

[Siptah]

I actually was a friend of the idea of buying a new mac now. But since I have to carry it around every day, and I'm used to 12'' (MB) and later 13'' (MBP), I'm really disappointed by the new macs. Civvi runs on my mac, but late game turn times on larger maps are indeed painful. So now I consider keeping my MacBook for work and buying a gaming laptop instead of a new mac...

 

[coffee junkie]

It works fine on El Capitan. Tested here.

 

[Kevin Rohrer]

Odd. The game would not run for me, demanding Sierra. I upgraded and it ran fine.

 

[mirtos]

Im running on El Capitan just fine. at later points some of the diplomacy dialogs get a bit wonky...

I also turned on quick combat, to help.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 16 GB

 

[Rubel]

I've seen this here and there in this forum. People saying they'll have to get a new Mac to play Civ VI. I want to remind everyone that no, you don't have to get a new Mac; You can get a used or refurb one. My Mid 2012 model plays Civ VI just fine. (And if you get a refurb from Apple, it comes with the full, standard warranty, which can be upgraded to AppleCare.)

Something that's really bothered me about the Mac product line the last five years, especially in the case of the MacBook Pros, is that performance, especially for gaming, does not scale properly with price or older-to-newer generations. Any Mac with a 1 GB or better discrete graphics chipset (AMD or nVidia; not Intel) made within the last five years should play it just fine. One would think that all the MacBook Pro models would come with discrete chipsets, but for some reason, they don't. Buying a new Mac without one is a waste of money. For that matter, so is buying a new Mac with one, particularly if you just want to use it to do something like play Civ VI.

See, it's that "1 GB or better" that gets me. I have a late-2012 iMac with the same GeForce 650M as you have...but it came standard with only 256MB vram. I paid extra at the time for a juicy 512MB. Sadly, so teensy by today's gamer standards. It's why I haven't tried Xcom2. I guess I could do the Steam refund thing if it wouldn't run...

 

[n8mac]

The only macs I ever buy are used, and I have had great success with them. My current rig is a Mac Pro 5,1 with 2.8ghz quad, 16gb ram, SSD, Geforce GTX 670 4gb. I only paid about $900 USD for it including upgrades and it runs really well.

Performance with Civ 6 is decent IMO with only one crash so far...

Resolution set to 1920x1080
Performance set to medium
Memory set to high
Getting an average of 12-15 FPS in the test in El Capitan

I definately recommend more VRAM the better with Civ 6, although I know that is hard to do with Macs.

 

[coffee junkie]

it isn't so hard : it is mostly expansive

 

[mirtos]

my only thing ive noticed.... is that when playing for a long time, after trying to quit to the desktop, it doesnt always do so, and i have to force quit. my stuff is still saved though

 

[Rob Evans]

I'm getting the same prob exiting to desktop during later game but apart from that it runs like a dream on my i5 2015 MBP

 

[Drudy]

I've seen this here and there in this forum. People saying they'll have to get a new Mac to play Civ VI. I want to remind everyone that no, you don't have to get a new Mac; You can get a used or refurb one. My Mid 2012 model plays Civ VI just fine. (And if you get a refurb from Apple, it comes with the full, standard warranty, which can be upgraded to AppleCare.)
.

I use a mid 2012 15" MacBook Pro with a 50" TV as monitor (since the display is broken). The game isn't lightning fast and graphics are at the lowest but four hours into the game it's still running and performance is not an issue.

 

[DonPato]

Really? Aspyr claims it runs on El Capitan also.

I'm running the game on my mid-2012 Macbook Pro with El Capitan

 

[gobbledydook]

Running Civ6 successfully on a 2014 Macbook Air. The graphics are glitchy in some places, but it runs at least.

 

[Trilo Byte]

I don't know that I'd ever get a new machine to play a game (Civ or otherwise). Get the machine (or keep using the machine) you need for work or school, and gaming should fit around that (adjusting settings as necessary). That's probably especially true when you're talking about a 1.0 release of something that's likely to be updated many times, any of those could greatly improve performance. If the late game performance gets unbearable, when you create new games go into advanced settings and reduce the number of AI's (all those delays are because it's trying to process other players' turns).

It's also worth noting that MacBook Pros with the Intel integrated graphics run the game well enough. I've seen numerous reports of people with 2011/2012 series machines that can run it, and my girlfriend's MacBook Pro with the Iris 6100 has no issues either.

Civ6 definitely runs on El Capitan, but I believe requires 10.11.6 or later.

 

[Mavfin]

I bought a 2011 Mac Pro, 6-core 3.33 GHz Xeon, 16 GB RAM on Ebay from a reputable used Mac dealer. Cost me 700 bucks instead of 1500 or 2000. It'll run Civ VI just fine, in Mac mode or on Bootcamp under Windows 10. I run it on the Windows side, because historically, you can't run DLL mods with Mac later. My AMD Radeon 5770 actually runs Civ VI just fine, even if Aspyr listed as not good enough. I'm guessing that my CPU doesn't bottleneck it any, so it works fine.

(and, yes, I run the current OS X on it, happily.)

 

[KWagle]

I've been playing it on a 2015 MacBook. It's expectedly slow, but aside from some black vertical lines, the graphics are working just fine, playing at native retina resolution. I'm amazed.