Mac Fan Issue?

[mossfoot]

My friend is using a MacBook Air and for some reason she's been having a problem. She finds that using Unity on it ends up kicking the fan into overdrive after a few minutes, and it seems like a process that shouldn't be so taxing.

We switched to Unity because on Classic she was trying to run Zoom and FGC together, and the computer ended up crashing three times over the course of the evening. The fan always went into overdrive during this time.

Not running Zoom on FGC resulted in things being stable and the fan not needing to turn on (or if it was, it was at a very low level).

However, using FG Unity, even without the Zoom running, the fan came on after a few minutes of use. As a result, she's worried about her computer eventually failing again.

Any thoughts on what is going on and why?

[DCrumb]

Unity is taxing as it is a graphics heavy framework (the Unity engine, not necessarily FGU).

[damned]

Have her try typing in chat

/vsync 2

See if that helps

Can also try 3 or 4.
If it doesnt do anything set it back to 0.

[Kelrugem]

Have her try typing in chat

/vsync 2

See if that helps

Can also try 3 or 4.
If it doesnt do anything set it back to 0.

1 is the standard (takes the OS value) while 0 forces 60 Hz :) So, when it doesn't do anything, then rather put it back to 1 :D

[damned]

Thanks Kel.

[LordEntrails]

I would also have her consider cleaning her laptop intakes and filters. My experience shows that with laptops the ventilation often gets clogged after extended use. When that happens, the computer can't cool like it normally can, so the fan kicks in, and doesn't work very well because the cooling fins or intake/exhaust are clogged.

[jaharmi]

A MacBook Air with a fan (as of now) implies an Intel-based MacBook Air. There are a number of generations, but all of them are going to use an Intel integrated GPU (iGPU).

I looked around a bit for the official Mac system requirements to see if that would help. The easiest ones to find were on Steam, where the Mac minimum graphics requirements are "Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities and a minimum of 2 GB of graphics memory." This is the same as the Windows listing. This is silly because DirectX is irrelevant on the Mac — so it wouldn't help a Mac user understand whether or not their system would run, or run well.

(Also, a minimum of 4 GB of RAM on macOS? Good luck with that.)

I know fans ramp up when running FGU on my Mid-2012 (non-Retina) MacBook Pro, which has a discrete mobile Nvidia GPU. Beyond that, I think I've gotten about 30 minutes of battery life when running FGU without AC power (old laptop, old battery), which is half or less what it normally can do. I can survey my players, because I think all of them are running on Mac laptops.