I’m not a hardcore gamer. But like a lot of people, I like to fool around here and there. Looking at my limited Steam account, I find a few remotely current titles that I’ve been enjoying lately, whether it’s Baldur’s Gate 3 or Civilization VI.
When I fully converted to MacBook Pro from Windows, I didn’t expect that even my limited gaming needs would be met. I thought it would just be something I would lose in the transition. To my surprise, I found myself quite enjoying playing games on my computer M3 Max MacBook Pro 16 inch. It won’t be enough to keep gamers happy, but it was enough to get them excited about the future of gaming on the Mac.
Where metal meets microchip
Historically, Macs have not been great gaming machines. That’s partly because Apple has refrained from taking it seriously, both in terms of hardware and software.
One of the biggest changes to gaming on the Mac has been performance Apple metal construction, which gives developers closer access to the GPU, potentially dramatically improving gaming performance. Metal has been around since iOS 8, in 2014, and first appeared on Macs in 2015, in OS X El Capitan. Metal entered its second generation in 2017 with macOS High Sierra, and subsequently, Metal 3 was announced in 2022. The latest iteration adds MetalFX for high-performance upscaling, as well as anti-aliasing to the overall framework of graphics features. In addition, Apple is offering a new set of game porting tools to help developers more easily port their games to macOS.
Metal 3 first appeared in macOS Ventura, which coincidentally – or not – was just a year before the release of Apple’s M3 chipsets with significant GPU upgrades. In addition to switching to the new 3nm process and introducing improved processor performance, the M3 adds Dynamic caching mesh shader support and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
All in all, this development should theoretically make it easier for game developers to reach out to the platform.
But hardware is also key. Until recently, Macs didn’t have the GPU power to run many of the most demanding AAA games. However, the M3 Max in particular changes that. With up to 40 GPU cores on board, it’s incredibly impressive what it can achieve. It’s so fast that in certain GPU-intensive tests, it outperforms the M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores – up to twice as many.
What’s less clear is how the M3 Max stacks up against Nvidia and AMD’s fastest discrete GPUs. In creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, it’s faster than top-of-the-line Intel processors and the top-of-the-line Nvidia RTX 4090. That performance doesn’t necessarily extrapolate to gaming, but it appears to be roughly as fast as a mobile Nvidia RTX. 4070 which is capable of playing at 1440p resolution.
Aside from raw performance, the MacBook Pro has two other major advantages over Windows gaming laptops. Firstly, it’s significantly quieter and cooler than your average gaming laptop. It never sounds like a jet engine that breaks the immersion of the game. Second, you can play the game without power and enjoy a longer battery life, which opens up possibilities for where you can enjoy your games. Throw in that gorgeous HDR screen and killer speakers, and you’ve got a pretty incomparable media machine that works just as well for games as it does for movies.
Where are all the games?
It takes time for hardware and platform improvements like this to filter down to developers and game distribution. The number of AAA titles that make it to macOS therefore remains relatively small compared to Windows. But that doesn’t mean gaming on the MacBook Pro can’t be satisfying.
I mentioned a few games I played, and one of them happens to be last year’s game of the year, In addition, I also loaded up Battle.net to see what was around. I saw Diablo III and Starcraft 2 used to play both older titles, but not Diablo IV, which I played on a Windows desktop. Some quick research shows Lies of Pi as a recent Mac release that I’ve never tried, along with a few other titles coming out in 2023.
Some might suggest Apple Arcade as the source of some of the best games for Mac. From what I can see, though, it’s hit-or-miss — and mostly miss. Doing a quick search, I found an extensive list of iPhone and iPad games that will please the casual gamer, along with some older titles like Resident Evil: Village, which was released in 2021 and recently got out of Windows. Not bad of course, just not up my alley.
In our own list of The 10 best PC games you can play right now, a reasonable choice can be played on Mac. These include the above Baldur’s Gate 3, Dave the Diver, Undertale, Dota 2, Fortnite, Counter Strike: Global Offensive handful of puzzle/platform games, and Rocket League.
But if you’re looking for titles like the latest Assassin’s CreedCyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto, and many others, you won’t find them for macOS. First-person shooters seem to be the biggest weakness of the platform, which is a big hole in the ecosystem. These are the games I play the least often, so I didn’t have a problem there.
To top it all off, even MacBook Air’s operation of the basic M2 chipset can be reasonably game streaming through Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, and other services. You will find a great selection of games that can be streamed for a price if you have a fast internet connection. If you’re really adventurous, you can try running games through a cross-platform tool like Crossover, which can install a good selection of Windows titles and run them at a reasonable frame rate. I used it for gaming Diablo IV, which was a decent experience once I dropped the graphics to High settings. However, you’ll want to skip this method if you’re using anything less than a current MacBook Pro.
For now, Mac gaming is better than it’s ever been. Obviously, it still has a long way to go before it evolves into something as robust as Windows. Hardcore and competitive gamers won’t be satisfied until we see a wider variety of titles available. But as it is, there is something for almost everyone to try, and I hope it can go from there.