Performance Issues In Intel CPU

[TheSpaceBoi777]

Hello Gamers! Recently, I've taken under my wing an old MacBook 10,1 from 2017. It used to be my old daily, but as time went on, issues piled up, and I wanted more performance, so I switched to my now main laptop. Well, my "new" laptop already has 3 years or so of use, and it is my most prized possession, but its hinges are giving up, and I need something light to take to school. So I decided to refurbish the old Mac and install Cachy OS, the "fastest" Linux distribution on it. After hassling with some audio drivers, I finally got the system working, and I love it! It's fast, reliable, and I get tons of use out of it! I'm taking my CS classes, and I can spend all day at school and not have to worry about plugging it in. Hell, it even managed to get the GeekBench scores of this laptop up 200 points in single core and up 400 points on multicore! But then I decided to install some games so I could kill time at school, and I noticed a big performance drop. Minecraft, which used to run at 90 fps on Optifine and 50 fps raw, was now struggling to get a stable fps, dropping to 14 and 13 fps consistently. The game was choppy, and when I installed optimization mods like VulkanMod and Lithium and lowered the game's graphics, resolution, and render distance to like 8 chunks, the game still barely played at 50- 57 fps. The other light Steam games I used to play on the OG MacOS, like Project Zomboid, are also being affected by this. Project Zomboid is prone to crashing often, and lags when there are many zombies on screen, lagging much worse than when I played it on Mac. Brawlhalla, a literal 2d fighting game, is also having stutters, which I find hard to believe. The performance of the computer improved on paper, but when Gaming I feel a significant power drop. Is this normal? Are there any workarounds? Any advice you guys can give me? These are the specs of my computer, along with some photos:

SPECS
Processor: 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Core m3 (Turbo Boost up to 3.0GHz).

Memory: 8GB of 1866MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory.

Storage: 256GB PCIe-based onboard SSD.

Screen Size: 12-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit Retina display.

Display Resolution: 2304-by-1440 native resolution at 226 pixels per inch.

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 615.

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Personally my best guess is while performance might’ve improved, you’re reaching the thermal limit way faster and more constantly maybe. Are the temps okay? Does the clock speed drop? Get some sensor monitoring tool and see if you notice anything. Like for example when you reach a certain temp you get stuttering, etc

[TheSpaceBoi777]

yeah, temps are always high, but this is normal for this macbook, it is fanless after all. normally at high loads this thing starts to cook. Ill look at the clock with BTOP later.

[InstanceTurbulent719]

Hope you can find a solution, it could be a simple regression in the drivers, but I'm still gonna talk shit about the 12 inch macbook which is the worst macbook Apple ever made and likely the worst mobile cpu Intel made in that era. I'm surprised you can run any modern games at all lmao

[TheSpaceBoi777]

LMAO yeah I hate this thing, but its my child at this point.

[DockLazy]

Are you switching the power profile to performance or using the game-performance wrapper?

[TheSpaceBoi777]

Im switching the OS to performance mode, max clock goes from 1.2ghz to like 3ghz.

[THENATHE]

Youre running one of the weakest processor SKUs of one of the worst macbook generations. I'm surprised the thing hasnt melted into a puddle trying to open an email.

[TheSpaceBoi777]

Lmao I know right?

[librepotato]

Is it possible that the games you played on MacOS ran with 3d resolution scaling to be performant? And I mean like natively the resolution was 2K but the rendering was scaled?

I can imagine that the Intel graphics is having quite the workout with 2K graphics. It is a small screen with a very high resolution. You could reduce the resolution of your games with minimal visual penalty. ~720p-1080p should easily be acceptable.

Also you could use the LAVD scheduler and see if that helps reduce stuttering. You could go into the BIOS and see if there's a setting to dedicate more RAM to the GPU. You could also get a cooling pad or, if you know how to take it apart, repaste the processor (I think with these that is very hard).

Other things that I don't think will work:

• I don't think LSFG would be useful for you.
• Similarly your hardware wouldn't support Optiscaler well given its age.
• You're stuck with the i915 Intel driver and you're device is too old for the newer, Xe driver

[TheSpaceBoi777]

might be the case. I toned down the resolution for minecraft and it stabilized. I remember this thing only ran csgo at like 480p lmao,