The state of gaming on the Mac.
Apple finally has the hardware, but is that enough?
Back in March, I wrote an article entitled “ Could Apple Gaming ever be a thing”. In it I wrote that there might be a possibility that Cupertino in it’s next iteration of the M1 processor would add enough horsepower to its Macs that they could effectively also be “gaming laptops”. Now that the new MacBooks are out, and I also bought one myself, I though it might be a good idea to delve into it a little more.
Mac Gaming!! (not exactly)
What follows is only based on my experience, and since there are multiple tiers of these laptops with a number of configurations, your mileage may vary. I bought the MacBook Pro 14' with 10 CPUs, 16 GPUs, and 16Gb of RAM. It’s not the base model but it’s not the highest end either but for all intents and purposes it’s a fantastic laptop, living up to and even surpassing most of Apple’s increadible claims. I use it mostly for Photoshop, and Lightroom. For these types of tasks you couldn’t ask for more Especially with these new screens. I will leave the general review for another day.
A week ago I decided I wanted to play some Grand Theft Auto V, partly because we’re headed back into a lockdown here in Europe and partly because of old times sake. The first and biggest problem I runned into, which is also true with basically 90% of games out there, is it does not come native to the Mac. So, I went through the moderately complicated process of downloading CrossOver and emulating the Windows version of the game. I connected a PlayStation 4 controller through Bluetooth and connected the laptop to my 50' inch TV using the HDMI port(no dongle, HALLELUJAH).
The results are amazing, I can play the game at above 50 frames per second, on medium settings, and the laptop doesn’t even get hot. I think I can push it more, but honestly, I don’t think it’s necessary. It might not sound on par with most gaming laptops out there, but keep in mind this game is not running natively. It’s in reality running on top of two emulation layers. One through Rosetta 2 since the game can only run on x86 chips which the M1 isn’t, and one through Crossover because the game is only native to Windows.
Is it a gaming laptop?
Circling back to the original question, where does this leave us? At a pretty great place to be honest. I have only tried one game but based on a number of Youtube videos out there, these machines can run a number of Windows games at respectable frame rates. I would say that this means that on a hardware level these Macs can more or less fight it out with the best of them, and with much lower power consumption.
Now whether you can truly call them gaming laptops, it just doesn’t seem appropriate at this point in time. The major issue is that Apple doesn’t seem too interested in investing in gaming, at least not traditional computer gaming.
Why Apple isn’t investing more into computer gaming?
Apple is probably making a killing from it’s iOS gaming ecosystem and seems more and more interested in developing that aspect of their business as much as possible, as it’s evident by Apple Arcade. It’s worth mentioning that all iOS games can run natively on the Mac as well since they changed to ARM chips, but whether true or not these games have never been thought of as true games.
The other reason Apple might not care might be a bit less intuitive but non the less true. Cloud gaming is slowly becoming reality. It might take another 2 or 3 years before it becomes a true competitor but platforms like Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Microsoft’s Project xCloud, and Google’s Stadia have made major strides over the last 2 years. In my opinion, they are a really good value proposition, if they ever deliver on their promises. These services are essentially going to do to gaming computers and consoles what Netflix did to blue-ray players.
With these services just around the corner, it would be unnecessary for Apple to develop a “Gaming Ecosystem” since any user could at the end of the day just stream a game to their heart’s content with a small subscription fee.
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