It’s been about a week now of using a 2011 computer in 2023, and things are still going well. The only real noticeable difference between decades is that the Mac Pro takes a second or two longer to open an application – and some of the fancy “AI” things in Photoshop take 10 seconds or so to process.
The only real “game” I play is Secondlife (SL for short), and the 2012 Mac Pro does okay with that as well. Though I also own the new Baldur’s Gate III game, but it won’t be out for Mac until the 6th… But I expect the Mac Pro will do okay with that as well.
As for Secondlife, it is, well, old – so it’s not exactly a speed demon even on pinnacle hardware. The client that is used to connect to the service is generally single-threaded and therefore mostly CPU-bound. And in SL the entire visible world can be changed on a whim, with user generated content, and this makes for a decidedly unoptimized render pipeline. This means that even on things like my old Windows workstation (Xeon 6312U / Nvidia 3090) I would generally get 20-30 FPS at “ultra” settings, in a 4K window, in busy areas with lots of people in them.
The Mac Pro gets 20-30 FPS in the same areas with the same number of people, but with slightly reduced graphics settings and a 1440p window size – which isn’t bad for what it is.
You may have noticed that I mentioned ‘fancy AI things in Photoshop’ up above; yes – I paid for another year of Creative Cloud.
Fortunately, I’ve already made that money back… See, I sell some stuff I make on the Secondlife marketplace and I also completed some custom texture work for a couple of folks. And this netted enough to cover another year of Adobe Mafia protection.
Basically I work to afford the tools I use to to do work to afford the tools… But with the cost covered I was able to spend a few days working on some stuff for myself, which was fun.
Other than that, everything is mostly okay – or at least as okay as is possible here in 2023. Everything is crazy expensive so I don’t really leave the house save to get supplies, which means my car isn’t getting very many miles put on it and all of my entertainment is on the computer… I have managed to catch a few new(er) movies though, and the other day I binge-watched the entire second season of “Strange New Worlds” which wasn’t bad.
Listening to "Lightbeams" by MJ Cook