Gaming On The M1 Macbook Air
It’ll blow you away (without making a sound)
Alright, so I finally actually picked up an M1 Macbook Air (base model 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD) for about Thirteen hundred Canadian Rubles. Which for a high-end ultrabook is a pretty reasonable price. For context, I'm coming from a Huawei Matebook X Pro 2018 (16 GB RAM, 512GB SSD, i7–8550U, Nvidia MX150) which was about 1500 CAD. That machine is still running as smoothly and as good as the day I got it but… the M1 really intrigued me so I picked it up and handed my laptop to my younger sister.
Now that you’re familiar with that completely useless backstory of my purchase history let’s just cut the rest of the fat and talk about gaming.
Going into this I wasn’t expecting much. First off it's important to note that many of the games we’ll be testing out were made for the x86 platform and haven’t yet been ported over to Apple Silicon, so performance won’t be at its theoretical best. Rosetta 2 does however do an amazing job with x86 to ARM. Reading some articles it seems like you should see an average performance hit of 30%, but it's obviously very program-dependent.
The second big problem of the Macbook Air will be its fanless design. We can’t really get around this, the chip will throttle under load a lot faster than say the Macbook Pro.
