Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I tried GAMING on Mac in 2023…”.
Gaming gaming gaming, At Apple’s event where they announced this, the 2023 Mac Mini. They were very clear on one thing: Apple Macs can game. Now as someone who has tried to game on Mac a fair few times over the years I wan na actually find out here in 2023, with the newfound power of Apple silicon and an Apple M2 chip. Can you actually game To see how feasible this entire idea is to begin with, I actually wan na start with the lowest common denominator, a 13-inch 2020 MacBook Air base model..
My theory is this.. If I can game at all on this MacBook, then it is 100 % going to be better on a more powerful system like the Mac Mini or the new MacBook Pros, or the Mac Studio or whatever the case is.. If it works here, then it sort of proves the case that gaming is remotely feasible.. So, first of all again I’ve got my MacBook Air here, but I need some peripherals. Kinsey.
What do I need? Well you’re, not gon na game, on a touch pad.. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you’re not gon na plug, that in because the thing’s got two USB-Cs., I think for best results.
I should probably get a power adapter.. First up, we have what might be the poster child for Mac gaming, “ Resident, Evil Village.”. Now this is a game that Apple specifically called out in their keynote and with one copy purchased from the Mac App Store important, because I think that you have to get the Mac App Store version to have the full Apple goodness..
The whole reason I wanted to do this video is cause. I saw a Digital Foundry video where they looked at playing “ Resident, Evil, Village” on M1 Macs on ultra, and it was surprisingly good.. They were really impressed..
I was like “ Huh, maybe it’s time I should give Mac gaming a second try.”. I will say this does look like a more traditional PC game.. So I’ve got a wide variety of settings in the game. V-sync on.. I’M gon na turn that off just to see. And MetalFX upscaling., So MetalFX is one of the main selling points of running a fully native game., Because essentially it’s very similar to something like NVIDIA’s DLSS, where we’ll use some of that neural engine processing to upscale your Image to get surprisingly close to native results, but with a far better frame rate than if I was actually running at say like 1080P or something., So we’ll try it.. Supposedly this is going to be very helpful. Aw, it’s a baby. Whoa. Whoa. Did you see that It literally loaded instantly. The loading screen was up for like a second., So I’m playing it 1080P.? I will say I can see a little bit of upscaling, but honestly the scene is so dark.
It does not look bad., But I will say to my eyes: this is very smooth.. If this is the kind of performance that you can expect out of a base model MacBook Air, it is incredibly impressive. All right, goodnight, baby., [ Assistant, ] Press F to put asleep ( laughs, ) (, Kinsley, laughs ). If only were that easy. Now next, I actually wan na try something that should work very well.. “ Dolphin” is an incredibly popular emulator for a wide variety of devices and from what I’ve heard it works very well on M1 Macs.. So let’s launch it.. Let’S see what we got., I’m gon na leave most of these things to default’cause, I’m not entirely sure how to set it up, but let’s just see what happens. I mean it’s working.. I will say, though running this at 3X resolution looks really clean..
Okay, I don’t know how to do anything besides, walk left and right, but it’s fine though. Frame rate, I will say we’re not locked at 60. We’re losing a little bit, but also I can just not run it at three times native resolution too.. This is very, very solid.. Now there are other larger games that are being optimized for Apple Silicon, but that list is incredibly small right, now.
“ No Man’s Sky” is something that Apple has talked about, that is on the way., But one of the actual best ways of playing games which are 100 % certified to work is actually again through the Mac App Store, but playing iPhone and iPad games.. Now, unfortunately, the majority of games that are made for iOS and iPad OS do not work, but some do including “ Asphalt, 9.”, Okay, controller connected., So I’m definitely playing it in like windowed mode.. So wait is really the only thing you do.
Is you just hit? Nitro and then you drift, There’s no other controls of any kind [ Assistant ], It’s like “ Temple, Run ,”, but cars. “ Asphalt, 9”, technically works., Maybe not like a hardcore game, but we’ll put that in the category of things you can do on a Mac. ( wondrous music, ) ( air whooshing ) Now Austin has clearly forgotten one crucial thing when it comes to Mac gaming, that’s Apple Arcade, which can work on any Mac, regardless of whether it’s an M1 M2 even works on your phone. (, wondrous, music ).
So now my friends, we have moved on to Steam., Oh yeah, so it automatically sorts it by games that are supported., So “ War Thunder ,” “, Rust, ,” “ Elder Scrolls ,” “ Civ.”. I mean there are a fair few “ City Skylines.”. There are a fair few games that do have Mac support.. Now I will say that a lot of what we use for this video was based on the Apple Gaming Wiki, which we’ll have linked in the description., Let’s start out with “ Hades.”.
Now this is a game that is going to be running through Rosetta, correct, [, Kinsley, ] Yes., If you’re not familiar Rosetta, is the compatibility layer that allows non-optimized games to run on Mac.. Now, it’s more than just games right. A wide variety of software uses this.. Although at this point we’re over two years into this sort of M1 transition, most Mac apps are supported..
However, most games are not.. Oh dude, this is completely fine.. Now I will say without my frame rate counter, I don’t think we’re at 60 here. Now fair enough.
This is not the most demanding game in the world., But considering that this is a game which was never designed to run on M1. The fact that we are running through Rosetta through a translation layer to make this work two thumbs up.. This is totally solid.. [ Assistant ], It says a lot about Rosetta. It does. And again, keep in mind.
I got eight gigs of RAM, which is shared between my CPU and my GPU, meaning that none of these games have all that much headroom to work with and yet largely pretty good.. Now, my friends, let’s go a little spicy. A walk to the dark side. My friends. Using the power of Parallels.
We can in fact launch Windows 11, which actually launched very quickly. In the past. If you wanted to run Windows on your Mac, you used Boot Camp, which essentially would just create a separate partition on the drive.. So you’d split your SSD in half and then you would have Mac OS or Windows and you’d boot into one or the other, and it was all great.. However, when Apple made the transition over to Apple silicon, there was no longer the ability to run Boot Camp. And for a little while there there was just no ability to really run Windows at all on your Mac., However, Parallels now has surprisingly good support for Mac Os specifically on Apple silicon and Windows, 11.. Now the first thing I wan na try is pulling up Task Manager.. What is actually Parallel’s pass through. So Parallel sees four of my CPU cores four, my Apple silicon CPU cores 3 gigs of RAM plus an additional 1.5 gigs, that’s locked off for my virtual GPU..
This is not going to work well.. I will tell you this straight up., Hello. What is this? This is another SSD that one that has Windows games on it. Shout out to not having enough storage on our device.
Either. Look we’re just trying to make sure this works.. You know I will say before we even get into gaming. This Windows install running on Mac.
Actually, surprisingly, like not bad. “ Skyrim ,”, this seems like a bad idea. [ Kinsley ], Hey Bethesda., [ Assistant, ], Okay, It’s running in windowed mode, which I don’t like, but that’s fine, that’s fine. Is this actually gon na work, [, Kinsley, ], (, laughs, ), Maybe.
[ Austin ], Oh my god, it works. Oh, it works [ Assistant ]. Why is this surprising? Why would this work It’s running in Windows through virtualization, Like I’m legitimately surprised.? I did not think.. I thought that we were just gon na try this and it was just gon na immediately crash out.. So to be clear, this was not a plug-and-play experience. [ Kinsley ], It was not.. Kinsey definitely had to spend some time making sure the DirectX functions here.. All of those kinds of DirectX and things that you might just automatically have or expect to have on your gaming, laptop or PC would not be there., And so these games will be like “, Hey, where’s, this ?” And you’re like “, Oh !”.
So that’s definitely a consideration. [ Assistant, ] Yeah. You’re signing up for an adventure. [ Kinsley ] Yes..
Don’T come complaining to us when it doesn’t work. (, Kinsey, laughs ). So we know what the MacBook Air is capable of and while it’s not great it’s kind of better than I expected., Let’s try gaming on the new M2 Mac Mini..
So, actually, I have two different Mac Minis to test., So the one that’s connected right now is the base model.. So this is $ 600.. It’S got the M2 processor with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage.. Essentially, this should be a moderate step up from the MacBook Air..
I also have an M2 Pro Mac Mini.. Now this is significantly more expensive.. It is $ 1,300., But for that money we get not only 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gig SSD. But importantly, it has the M2 Pro chip., So I’m gon na start out by playing “ Resident, Evil, Village ,”, which again ran fairly well on the MacBook Air.. We also now have an actual heads up display, which is going to give us our frame rate and whatnot, which is gon na, be helpful, because last time I was kind of playing in the dark, quite literally..
Let’S just leave it on the exact same settings. It was on the MacBook Air. 1080P medium settings with MetalFX upscaling.
Seems reasonable. Okay instantly on the Mac Mini. We are pushing 93 frames per second. Wow, that’s smooth. Yeah. So looking at the baby, especially when you look at like the texture and the hair, I mean that’s still pretty good.. You know what I’ma do.
[ Kinsley ] Turn it up., I’m gon na turn it up exactly., Let’s see what we can do. Here., I’m gon na just turn off the upscaling.. Our frame rate has dipped, but still it’s 60 to 70 FPS right now. And mind you.
I will say perceptively, I mean. Maybe if I look at the baby’s hair yeah, it’s like a little bit more detail. But running that MetalFX upscaling is not bad.. I would play more, but I’m scared., I don’t it’s too spooky.
( spooky music ), It’s too spooky.! Next up, we are going to attempt to play “ Euro Truck Simulator 2.”. This is a game which is not optimized., So this is a Mac game, but it’s running via Rosetta., So we’ll see what we got. [ Kinsley ] You’re, currently on a mission to deliver. Some concrete stairs., ( laughs, ), Concrete, stairs, okay, well, the stairs must be delivered., So we are running at 1080P on high settings here and we’ve got 50 frames per second.. If I was a little bit more serious about this, I’d probably turn the graphic settings down. Just a little bit’cause, it does seem like there’s a little bit of latency.. I also would not be using W-A-S-D to control my truck on the streets of Europe, [ Kinsley, ], Luxembourg., (, laughs, ), Luxembourg, my favorite of the European cities.. So one of the big advantages of going from the MacBook Air to the Mac Mini in addition to the fact that the M2 is just an upgrade over the M1 is actually more so in the cooling.. So with the MacBook Air. There’S no fan whatsoever..
So while it had pretty decent performance, you know we were obviously gaming for a longer period of time. We were certainly leaving a little bit on the table., But with this Mac Mini with an actual fan, we should be able to play like this. I mean in perpetuity. What I really wan na do is fire up the M2 Pro Mac? Mini’Cause remember.
This has not only a lot more performance with the M2 Pro chip, but almost more importantly, it’s got 16 gigs of RAM, which means that some of those Parallels issues we are dealing with earlier should be much less noticeable.. Alright, we have got ourselves a copy of Windows, 11 running in Parallels now.. Now I’m curious if we open up Task Manager before I think we had what was it Like three or four gigabytes of RAM for Windows., It was not a lot.. This time Windows now has 6 gigabytes of RAM to play with, and the GPU looks like it has.
Yeah 3 gigs as well, which is shared. That is gon na, be a big difference.. Another upgrade with the M2 PRO is that it’s got a HDMI 2.1 port, which means that I’m pushing 4K at 144 hertz on this monitor right now., I’m not gon na game, it 4K 144. But I could..
I will just take 30 though. ( laughs ), So we’re gon na try to launch “ Skyrim” at 1080P, medium settings with TAA enabled.. So let’s do it. Before I would say we were running at like 480P or 554P and like less than 30 FPS..
Oh okay! That’S better. Wow Wow, This actually works. You can really run “ Skyrim” on anything Like okay yeah. Maybe we’re dipping a little to like the low 50s when I like start looking around but like compared to where the Mac Air was.
This is a night and day difference.. We can actually play Windows games via Parallel on a Mac. ( air, whooshing ). The proof of concept is here., There’s really only one more thing left to try..
Yes, my friends: it is time to build ourselves a PC in Windows on our Mac. ( laughs, ), It’s a little dumb., So “ PC, Build Simulator” is defaulting to ultra at 1440.. Sure, and this is at look that. We’re getting 40 50 frames per second..
Well: okay, a little choppy. And by a little choppy I mean very choppy.. You know what I’m gon na be honest with you. I’ve never played “ PC Build Simulator ,” ever., I’m gon na use the computer.
Whoa whoa whoa hold on hold on. Lem me just wrap my head around this for a second. ( Kinsey laughs, ) Okay.. So I am using Windows in a game running on Windows on a Mac., (, Austin laughs ).
Now I’m gon na go back out to my finder. ( laughs, )! Oh, this is great.. This is great.. Look.
Am I gon na tell you that you should go out and buy a Mac to game? No, I am not., But if you would’ve asked me a year ago, “ Could I game on Mac ,”, especially with Apple silicon. My answer would’ve generally been “, Not really.”. I would like to see a year from now or two years from now how far things go, but the potential is here.’Cause when you look at what we’ve got out of “ Resident Evil ,” for a game that they actually put the time and effort to design. Specifically, for Apple silicon, or at least to do a proper port of the performance is incredibly impressive..
It just comes down, I think, to whether or not developers want to spend the time the money and the effort to actually get it up and running.. If you’re interested in learning anything else about the new Mac, Minis we’ve actually done a video which is gon na. Go live very shortly over not only on Denki discussing a little bit more of the review side of things, but also we’ve done an entire.
This Is on why this specific M2 model of 600 bucks is an incredibly good deal.. My friends, it’s a brave new world of Mac, gaming., (, laughs, ) I’ll, go back to building my PC on my Mac via Windows’cause. It just makes me really happy.
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