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Don’t look now, but Macs are finally getting good at gaming

Sakege November 2, 2024

We’ve come a long way since the days of the Oregon Trail on the Apple II.

I know this because I’m almost 40 years old, which means I’m old enough that the first gaming PC I ever saw was the old Apple desktop we had in the back of our elementary school classroom.

Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail were the first PC games I played, and for a while I remember thinking that Macs were the most fun computers. Older people like my parents used Windows PCs at work, for boring tasks; Macs were for cool kids who liked Maniac Mansion.

But then I grew up, and after Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, it seemed like Macs would never be a great gaming platform again. In the ’90s, games like Marathon and Myth made you feel like Macs were viable gaming machines. But when Bungie followed Marathon with the original Halo: Combat Evolved for Windows in 2001, the writing was on the wall: Macs weren’t a great place to play the latest and greatest games.

This seemed to remain the case for a long time. Until 2022 I felt like Apple wasn’t serious about gaming on Mac, even though the company’s transition to internal silicon with its M-series chips delivered more powerful MacBooks than I expected.

But now we’re waiting to see Cyberpunk 2077 will run natively on Mac in 2025and even I have to admit that the state of gaming on Mac has changed. Last year I spent a week playing on the most powerful Mac I had never seen at that time, the Mac Studio M2 Ultra, and I have to tell you, it felt good.

Not all games run well (or at all) on these new M-series Macs, but those that are optimized for Apple Silicon on the best MacBooks perform remarkably well. This is the result of Apple’s work to get game developers to embrace porting their games to its platform, and it started to gain traction last summer when Apple launched its Game Porting Toolkit.

Since then, it seems like there’s been a seismic shift in the Mac gaming landscape. Just this week I turned on Baldur’s Gate 3 in it MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max and I played for 15 to 20 minutes before realizing that the game ran perfectly smoothly, without a hint of slowdown during hectic encounters.

16-inch MacBook Pro (M3 Max, 2023)

Modern hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 run remarkably well on today’s MacBooks, proving that they have quietly become excellent gaming machines. (Image credit: Tom’s Guide)

Now that many of the best Windows laptops are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon

In fact, I was surprised to see SteamThe in-game FPS counter clocks me at almost 90 frames per second while playing through the first few hours of Baldur’s Gate. Once I turned the graphics and resolution up to maximum, they dropped to a much more reasonable 50 FPS, which still looks great on the Pro’s 16-inch mini-LED display.

Some of the beasts on our list best gaming laptops It may offer better performance, but the fact that the 16-inch MacBook M3 Max competes is a sign of how far Macs have come in recent years.

To get a concrete idea of the progression, I analyzed our lab test data from the last few years and the results clearly show how far Macs have come.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

MacBook gaming performance (in frames per second)
Row 0 – Cell 0	Civilization VI by Sid Meier	The Rise of the Tomb Raider	The shadow of the Tomb Raider
MacBook Pro M3 Max 16″	57@2234p	DNR	119 @ 1200p
MacBook Pro M2 Max 16″	57 @ 1200p	91.7 at 1200p	DNR
MacBook Pro M1 Max 16″	46.1 at 1080p	73.8 at 1200p	DNR
13″ M1 MacBook Pro	38.2 at 900p	25.7 at 900p	DNR

As you can see from the chart above, the original macbook pro m1 had trouble running games like Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, even though the game was about five years old when the M1 Pro launched in 2020.

But fast forward a few years and today the MacBook Pro I’m writing this article on can run the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game sequel at basically 120 frames per second.

Now, admittedly, that’s only at 1200p, which isn’t as pretty as what the Pro’s 16-inch (3456 x 2234 pixels) mini-LED display can achieve. At native resolution, the laptop struggles to maintain a solid 60 FPS when running the game at high graphics settings, which is why these MacBooks still can’t beat the best Windows laptops and best gaming laptops. Apple’s on-chip GPUs are good, but they can’t run modern games as well as a discrete laptop GPU like amd either NVIDIA.

What will the M4 MacBooks be capable of?

Of course, I’m writing all this on the eve of the arrival of new MacBooks with the Apple M4 Chip inside. So while our test data shows that Macs have become quietly better at gaming than you’d ever expect, they’re also on the verge of becoming obsolete.

Although I do not expect the MacBook Pro M4 will offer better gaming performance per dollar than their Windows counterparts, I think the gap between the two is about to narrow even further. And now that so many of best Windows laptops they are running QualcommSnapdragon windows 11 homologs.

We’ll have to wait until we get a chance to test and review them ourselves to know for sure, but our lab data clearly shows that gaming on Mac has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years.

The only question that remains is: how well will Cyberpunk 2077 run on these new Macs?

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Ourladyoftheassumptionparish

Don’t look now, but Macs are finally getting good at gaming

Sakege

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Don’t look now, but Macs are finally getting good at gaming

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