MacBook – Is it possible to limit resources to a game? Or forcibly limit the FPS

gamesmacbook properformancevideo

I recently bought and installed a new game through steam 'besiege' if you were wondering, and it ran really hot on my computer. On other games such as CS:GO for example you can cap the FPS in game making my computer not run as hot so less background noise.

I looked around and for this game there doesn't seem to be this option. (I've had similar problems with other games) My Mac (13" macbook pro retina 2013) runs at about 90 – 105 degrees with this game and I know the laptop won't be damaged as it'll thermal throttle and turn up the fans but I'd rather have a worse running game and not so much background noise due to the fan running at 6000 rpm…

My first thought was limiting the resources the game got, I'm not sure if this would affect the heat produced.

But anyways to just make the game run worse to decrease heat output. (It's capped at 60 fps I believe) down to around 20(ish) as this is perfectly bearable visually.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! šŸ˜€

Best Answer

Let's look at the two things you suggested, as these are two separate approaches to solving the issue.

  1. Limit the resources provided (presumably by limiting the CPU.)
  2. Cap the framerate

Limiting the resources provided is pretty easy (provided you're willing to work with a little bit of third-party software.) You can use cputhrottle to limit the usage at the system level (better explained here.)

Capping the framerate is generally done at the level of the game. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there's no way to set your framerate cap either lower or higher right now. So you're stuck with throttling the CPU, although given what you're trying to do, that seems like a fine option.

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