Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Game On Mac?”.
Hey everyone Travis here and Max King game. Now ever since the switch to Apple silicon, we’ve been getting some massive upgrades in the CPU in GPU department on all of these new computers in the last 3 years, and it’s really beged. The question for me can Max actually game now. Ultimately, this comes down to not a lack of Hardware, but a lack of software developers need to make a Mac specific version of their game and with Mac as a platform being less than a fraction of a percent. Being used for gaming, why would you want to invest in such a small Market? More recently, Apple has had a push into the direction of being a better platform for gaming, to name a few things that Apple has released to be more gaming oriented is the metal 3 Graphics API, which provides more features for gaming, such as upscaling upscaling, has become Very popular in the gaming world, as of late, and it offers the ability to run a game at a lower internal resolution requiring less power and be able to Output a higher resolution for better quality, or at least in some cases.
It says that it’s better quality, but you can still tell that it’s upscaling and additionally Mac OS Sonoma has more gaming specific features like a gaming specific mode when a game is launched and even more first-party controller support. Since software is the biggest problem for Mac gaming, where are we today? Well, it’s quite a bit better than it has been in a long time. We actually have some Modern Mac games that are not old titles that are a ailable in the App Store and in Steam. One of those examples is Resident: Evil, 4 remake, which came out on December 20th.
This game originally came out in the first quarter of 2023, so it still makes it within the last year and balers Gate 3, which got a Mac version in the same release window as the windows and PlayStation version. Alongside with these games are some other titles. Like lies of PE and stray that are also more modern titles now to test current MAC gaming performance, I did have a few options and I chose one that might surprise you. I wanted to test the lowest common denominator out of the newest set of machines, so I went with the M2 15-in MacBook Air.
This machine has a vanilla, M2 Chip with 16 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, and the Hope here is to get a steam deck like experience from a machine like this. Now, of course, there are much more powerful Maxs in the lineup like a Mac Studio or an M3 Max MacBook Pro, but if it can run well on an M2 air it’ll run great on any of those, and I think it’s much more likely for someone to Have a MacBook Air than it is a maxed out Max studio. First up is Resident.
Evil 4, which, like I said, just came out, and this is not a light title. This is a full-on remake of the 2005 original in the newer Capcom engine. This title is available on PS4 as well as PS5 and windows and Xbox, of course, but if we could get at least a PS4 level experience out of the MacBook Air I’d be happy with that. Ps4 itself doesn’t quite hit 1080p at 60 frames per second. So this should be a decent goal to hit I’m targeting 1080p with medium settings with metal upscaling set to Quality, and let’s see how it goes after playing this for a little while – and this is on the first level, of course, I am quite surprised. I do have to keep my expectations in check here. This is a MacBook Air that is fanless with a low TDP M2 Chip, and it is actually performing quite well. This brings in more than a playable experience. If I wanted to take this on the go with me, and it was the only device I had and I wanted to fire up some Resident Evil, it would be great.
Next up is balers Gate 3 via Steam, and this runs okay. You can definitely tell that this is much more of a demanding title than Resident Evil in terms of what’s going on in the world, but I’m not the most experienced with this game now I wanted to get some thoughts from someone that actually previously hosted on this Channel and someone that knows a lot more about balers Gate 3, so take it away Kevin. I don’t think I’ve been on this channel since, like 2012 for those of you who don’t watch my Channel or don’t remember me from the early early days of TLD uh, my name’s Kevin Kevin kinson uh. I used to do like app game reviews and stuff on this channel way back when uh, and nowadays I talk more about console Hardware on my main Channel. That’S just my my name. Uh and Travis does not play RPGs, so he wanted me to check out balers Gate 3 on Mac. So quick background on my previous experience with balers Gate 3 uh, I’ve primarily played this on PC as a platform steam. Specifically, I mostly play on my at home, PC that is a fairly up-to-date build, so I’m able to hit pretty high frame rates while running all the settings on high uh while running the game on 1080p, I’m using a 108p high refresh rate monitor generally there, but I’Ve also put a decent bit of time on some of the recent PC hand, s, namely the steam deck and the Rog Ally, which I think is actually a more interesting point of comparison as far as low power goes, because what I’m playing on right now is A MacBook Air, this isn’t exactly a top-of-the-line item uh, but it is something that is maybe a little more common in households versus a more expensive MacBook Pro – and I got to say I mean look – is this the absolute best looking version of the game or the Best way to experience it, no probably not but uh it runs, it’s actually running pretty well.
Let me actually double check what settings we got going on right here, so we’re looking at 900 p as our base resolution FSR set to ultra quality, we’re doing medium preset for a lot of the visuals. I can definitely tell a little bit of where the FSR is putting in work cuz. It always just looks a little bit bizarre to me, but uh. We have a stable frame rate, we’re currently averaging around 50.
Honestly, with a game like this, we could probably adjust the settings to aim more like for 30 cuz. Don’T get me wrong. I, like a higher frame rate 60, always looks nice, but bers gate is not one of those games where, I would say it’s mechanically required.
Uh, you could definitely get away with the stable 30, and this would still look really solid. I will say One Thing Worth pointing out is that uh balers gate 3’s performance is, in general a little all over the place. Uh right now, I’m just playing through the opening area of the game, which is a little bit more forgiving uh act, three where you enter a city and there’s just a lot more stuff everywhere, uh a lot more NPCs uh buildings, all that kind of stuff performance Tends to take a little bit more of a hit there, so I would be curious to see how this holds up in those later stages uh, but considering that right now we’re working at 45 FPS and again, I think 30 is fine, for this particular title. Think you can handle it. Look I’ve kind of had this thought about M gaming in general for a while. Now that I wish more stuff was just readily supported or apple worked on their own way of being able to adapt games that aren’t built for it to run uh. At least you know semi efficiently, because you know I use a Macbook primarily for work and editing, but if it was able to also Run games well, I would be doing a healthy bit of gaming on there just because I have access to it and really need A gaming laptop so much as a result.
I would still be interested in PC handhelds, as well as having a dedicated like desktop gaming PC, but for a laptop solution. Uh, if MacBook just do both that’d be great uh and really the kind of games that I’m generally into on PC, particularly a lot of like isometric RPGs. A lot of those are Mac compatible right now and I have spent time playing them on my MacBook uh disco. Alium, I think, is a really good example of something that is not particularly demanding uh and runs perfectly fine and great on MacBook, all right after testing Resident, Evil, 4 and and balder’s gate.
It gives me a little bit of a better idea that we are in a good place for Mac gaming. Now we actually have some Modern titles. We have much better Mac OS integration and we have better gaming features. But what does the future look like for gaming? On the Mac we are in the third generation of Apple silicon with M3 and with those M3 chips, Apple added, Hardware, level, acceleration for Ray tracing.
So now that we actually have CPUs and gpus that can hang for Mac gaming. All we need is more games, and ultimately this comes down to Apple needing to build better relationships with game developers as they’ve done with coima and Capcom. If we could have Day One release of a game or a few weeks after release as it sits on other platforms on the Mac, this could definitely be a viable option. One of the biggest components that can make all this happen is a feature that Apple came out with recently called the game. Porting toolkit, which allows for much faster porting to Mac from Windows, requiring less investment from a developer, to get a game running on the platform and with some optimizations could get these games running, really good. A side phenomenon that’s happening outside of the Mac gaming world is the PC handhelds, the steam deck and the RG Ali are two examples of some PC handhelds that have lesser Hardware, but are getting more and more popular, resulting in games running at lower resolutions and frame Rates but people are enjoying them because they’re on the go and as time goes on and more game developers spend time optimizing their games for these lesser powerful pieces of Hardware.
That could be very beneficial in porting. Those games to Mac now referencing the steam deck and the Rog Ali, if develop, spent more time on optimization as they do with the switch let’s say and get a lot out of a little bit. This lines right up with Apple’s goal of performance per watt on Apple silicon, the most amount of performance out of the smallest amount of power, which, ultimately, with those two things combined, could make for the perfect storm for Mac gaming comment down below your thoughts on Mac Gaming and whether you think it’s crazy or not, thank you so much for watching this is Travis and have a good night. .