This 100%. When I still built PCs, I'd usually throttle the heck out of the GPU and CPU fan curves and keep them off or just barely on but inaudible. Usually that'd mean going down to medium settings or so, but games still look good enough (and run at a high FPS) it doesn't really matter. And that made the in-room experience a lot nicer.
I wonder how DLSS and frame gen affects power usage. Presumably they save power vs drawing real frames, but I haven't tested it...?
I used to do this too, now I mostly just game on Apple hardware or on Switch, which feels like the logical progression of what I was going for with less fuss.
Yeah, I can play BG3 on low settings on my M2 Max comfortably (at native res) and the fan doesn't get very loud. But the rest of the time it doesn't come on at all.
The Rosetta games (which is most of them) suck though, and Crossover/Whisky is such a hit or miss experience.
On the other hand, with GFN I can turn everything up to ultra and it looks great, and there's no fan or noise at all and barely sips the battery.
The library of games suck on Mac, but I realized my backlog has gotten so huge that I will still never run out of games that run well on there. I've got BG3 in my backlog, but I figure I'll wait until I get a new machine in a few years before I try running it.
My work machine is a M2 Max and I have a studio display. Every day I fight the temptation to install Steam and load up No Man's Sky on it...
I bet the Studio Display would be beautiful to game on, especially for a colorful game like that!
I don't think the M2 can comfortably drive that resolution at 60 fps though :/ As much as I love Apple Silicon, the GPU is a lot weaker than a RTX card. Especially since it lacks any of the AI features.
GFN offers day passes and works with your Steam library if you want to give it a shot. You don't have to install anything, just sign up for a day and you can play No Man's Sky in a browser window at max settings. (But I think you might need the GFN app to play at full native resolution or with proper HDR, not sure).
The nice thing about Studio Display is that it's exactly 2X the resolution of 1440p, so that resolution works very nicely on it. Definitely want to give GFN a shot too though, thanks for the recommendation.
I wonder how DLSS and frame gen affects power usage. Presumably they save power vs drawing real frames, but I haven't tested it...?