Apple Makes GREAT Gaming Computers - Gaming on M1 Macbooks

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Believe it or not, after the switch to M1, there has never been a better time to game on Mac. With powerful CPUs and GPUs these new MacBooks and iMacs can game better than pretty much any computer Apple has produced in the past decade. These new devices would make for excellent gaming machines... if it wasn't for Apple's crappy behavior preventing it from happening.
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:06 The MacBook Air M1
2:09 The MacBook Pro
3:40 Alternatives to Native Support
5:35 Adam’s Game Corner: Native Mac Gaming
6:52 Apple’s Biggest Obstacle: Apple
9:36 Conclusion

[@heskrthmatt]

Funny story, my girlfriend wanted me to check something on her Mac Air. I noticed that Steam was installed. This was confusing to me because she’s not a gamer. When I asked her about it she said “ The kids said they needed it for school.’ I said “ Oh, really?”

[@mikeloeven]

Given the state of today's schools your kids might actually learn more playing (hopefully educational) games during class :'D

[@Priyajit_Ghosh]

Wait a min... Girlfriend or wife?

[@niccolo_tommasi]

@@Priyajit_Ghosh they may not be married

[@user-mv3qm4qh8l]

@@Priyajit_Ghosh you don't have to be married to have kids.

[@heskrthmatt]

Ok… 1. We’re not married. 2. They’re her kids, not mine. 3. MY kids wouldn’t have been able to pull that off because I know exactly what Steam is.

[@Grif91]

An important footnote in the world of “What could have been”: Bungie was originally a Mac game dev studio, and Halo was originally announced at Macworld Expo 1999.

[@Dave.83]

and now they have specifically said they will not allow the game to be run even on Steam Deck through Proton. If only I could run D2 on my Macbook Air...

[@FlameForgedSoul]

And I'm still salty about it😤

[@terrasai2857]

Oh wow that’s insane. I never knew that! Steve Jobs cared a lot more about gaming than Tim Cook 😥

[@kmoecub]

@@terrasai2857 It was Jobs that decided to use Nvidia GPUs on MacBooks and Desktops, and negotiated with Bill Gates to develop Bootcamp so Windows could be run natively.

[@klh_io]

@@Dave.83 That's just bad "journalism" clickbait titles. The support page says that because it's true (at this point in time) - their anti-cheat probably doesn't work through Proton so you will get banned. They have not officially said anything on the topic.

[@pendaranroberts4350]

College students love Macs in my experience, so I'm surprised Apple doesn't care more about gaming. They have so much money they could just pay to have some games made or make it enticing in other ways.The M1 Pro would be great for gaming. Yea, not as fast as PC gaming laptops, but good enough for a good experience, and you could actually game on battery and/or without making a ton of noise.

[@thealexliang]

Did you know that Apple made more gaming profit than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Activision Blizzard combined in 2019 (WSJ)? The App Store 30% cut and micro transactions is such an easy way for Apple to churn money through gaming. Apple does care about gaming in that they have the Apple Arcade subscription for “hardcore” iPhone gamers, but it’s also clear that they would rather be the middleman than the developer of games. I’d also wager that more college students have iPhones than Macs so the opportunity cost of investing in games towards Macs doesn’t seem beneficial.

[@LITRLG0D]

college students love Macs because they're a fashion accessory. They only really care about being seen with an iphone or a macbook at the local starbucks.

[@PasteurizedLettuce]

@@LITRLG0D there's no need to be this condescending, Macs are perfectly capable machines, it's mores that apple offers its best discounts and deals to education markets for the clout of being associated with students.

[@LITRLG0D]

@@PasteurizedLettuce fair enough. I got caught on on a bad day and was being immature.

[@jimmyp.1788]

@@LITRLG0D they are good productivity machine my 2009 polycarbonate MacBook still runs very good a can’t said that about my premium Asus laptop …

[@rollingrock5143]

I use a Mac M1 Max as a professional workstation and would LOVE to be able to open up a game at the end of the day on the same machine I paid a lot of money for... even if the FPS isn't great, I just wish I could. Apple and game companies alike assuming there's "no market" is just so sad.

[@AugmentedGravity]

Are you struggling to run games on your Max?

[@rebekah3745]

You certainly can though

[@RealestDave]

Same here, but just wish there were mora available games

[@microcolonel]

Apple's failure to provide native Vulkan drivers is even more silly when you find out, from reverse engineers, that their hardware actually has features intended to support their (awful) OpenGL drivers, that would help a lot with Vulkan implementation... if they were at least exposed through Metal, which they are not.

[@marcello4258]

this is also why proton will not really work..

[@mskiptr]

Thankfully there's some excellent progress in Mesa for these machines (So native Vulkan and OpenGL are coming - under Linux and maybe even under MacOS)

[@dfjab]

The problem is that vulkan was too late. Metal came before it. We don't see the same amount of bitching for games supporting DirectX which is the _exact same kind of API_. Game devs should just build in the support for Metal, it isn't even that massive of an investment. Most engines support multiple rendering stacks, even going as far back as World of Warcraft.

[@RandomUser2401]

what the heck? how is openGL realted to Vulkan? if you have any clue about graphics APIs, you'd know how different the two are. They are literally as differnent in terms of API philosophy as possible.

[@mskiptr]

@@RandomUser2401 You still implement both with (mostly) the same hardware features

[@underdog9785]

Would have been interesting to see M1 against XPS with Nvidia GPUs for gaming tests and both target similar markets.

[@jasongooden917]

Watch "Max Tech"

[@agenericaccount3935]

@@ianvisser7899 wat

[@noventay4]

You know this is an apple ad right?

[@arahman56]

Would be even more interesting to test them out against the RDNA2 APUs (as of right now, the Steam Deck).

[@Lee.S321]

@@noventay4 Apple doesn't give test items to LTT, so they have to pay out of pocket to buy every Apple device they review (or D-Brand sends them a review sample), & Apple will likely never sponsor an LTT video because they (Linus most notably) dump on so much of the stuff they release. LTT have an Apple focused channel, Mac Address, which is staffed by fanboys, so they'll always review a MacBook through rose tinted glasses, but it's unlikely Linus here would do the same, he sh*ts on Apple quite regularly.

[@ThreeDee912]

Apple’s had a bit of a strategy shift over the years it seems. They literally developed OpenCL and pushed it hard in the 10.6 Snow Leopard days, only for it to kind of flop with minimal adoption by developers. I think the failure of the 2013 “trash can” Mac Pro that was designed around multi-GPU OpenCL compute cemented the decision to shift to something different, hence the new push towards Metal. The head of Mac OS software development also left Apple after 10.6 was released which some people believe may have had something to do with it.

[@BrBill]

It's not surprising, since game developers basically told Apple to GFY with OpenCL, then Apple said, fine, we'll do something else.

[@AJ-bd9nr]

i have a 14 inch m1 pro (don't use it for gaming but do sometimes when i get bored) and running metro exodus on it at high frame is amazing and exciting to see what apple could possibly do, still use a pc to game at home

[@Pyr0CF]

Ironically War Thunder hasn't been great on Mac since the graphics engine updates. They also don't support the notchless resolution on the MBP so important UI elements are cut off!

[@floorgang420]

You can set to ignore the notch on get info as I remember. Not that I own a macbook pro tho.

[@person6171]

@@floorgang420 aspect ratio stays the same though. It makes it fit under the notch, but the side bezels get thicker. Whats funnier though is that game has native 16:10 resolutions, yet those get stretched behind the notch

[@knightsljx]

The stupid notch is 100% Apple's fault, and no software developer should ever be blamed for their stupidity

[@pedromendes8101]

Which elements? the crappy compass? i cant even remember what is usefull where the notch is located, and no i am not joking

[@alexatkin]

@@knightsljx Disagree, they included the option for a notch-less resolution which matches the aspect ratio of pre-notch Macbooks. I don't think you can say fairer than that, the notch is literally free space when on the desktop for stuff you don't want wasting usable screen space.

[@royz_1]

If you consider streaming services then a samsung fridge with a display is also a great gaming device.

[@marioguy119]

On the emulation side, I'll also note macOS is home to OpenEmu, which imo is one of the best emulator frontends in existence. Loads of cores, beautiful layout, intuitive menus, and active updates. They even added a Dolphin core recently, and while it doesn't work too well yet it could soon give Mac users a one stop, great solution for game emulation

[@BrBill]

I am super happy about these developments!

[@minhnguyen5888]

I don't use Mac in general but hands down they nailed this generation, lower consumption doing heavy task like editing and gaming without a charger, silent, awesome screen.

[@heasterian2508]

Well, gaming on ARM is looking better on Linux than on Mac as box86, box64 and FEX can have native Vulkan and OpenGL and DXVK and Proton are already working. Rosetta can be 50% faster than box'es, but with this CPU's it's still overkill for most games.

[@heasterian2508]

@keithsze001 I don't care about M1. I'm looking forward for mainline linux kernel support or newer Snapdragon SOC as GPU of 845 is a bit too slow for gaming. You can see small sample of Linux games on my channel (I tried also some Windows games). In many cases it's much better than ARM Windows.

[@heasterian2508]

Reusing mainboard of phones in some DIY Linux notebook or handheld would be great and Steam is already working.

[@kazioo2]

@keithsze001 It will in a year or so. Some of the best GPU brains of this worlds are working on open source drivers. Linux in 2 years will game better on M1 than MacOS - out-of-the-box thanks to Steam Play Proton and it's gonna be hilarious. People asking online about gaming will be getting answers like: just dualboot with Asahi and almost all your steam games will magically work.

[@klauskitkat9280]

@@kazioo2 This will be magical if it's really going to happen 🙏🏻

[@cnr_0778]

@@heasterian2508 Both. Both are good. But if you're interested in high performance Linux SOCs you should take a look at Rockchip's SOCs.

[@dhuwdhuwdhuw]

Man, 5 years ago I was so sure apple will go to amd cpu first before going to their own. Oh well, gotta hand it to them, the transition is hella fast and relatively seamless.

[@cameron8619]

i work alot with logic pro x and i can say it definitely has not been seamless. so many plugins became incompatible as we waited for companies to either make it work for Rosetta 2 or run natively. apple has introduced strange security features for their AU plugins which many of them would freeze up logic and you had to force quit it and go find the plugin in components folder. Apple has had little regard for anything third party and don't get me wrong their own plugins are great but it's really annoying and it makes me wish i had gotten a windows Machine and ran reaper or studio one on it instead.

[@NotTheHeroStudios]

I feel like they have been working behind the scenes on the idea for a while now. Intel up until recently was the definition of stagnation for a while and I'm positive Apple was done with them for a while. And it's not as seemless as it seems on the surface, Lotta little issues that from my understanding haven't been ironed out yet. And even small issues can cause big problems depending on the use case.

[@xxanimexnerdxxkelson]

Thanks for the video. This was the rabbit hole I had to go down in my first 2 weeks with a Macbook pro. I do most of my gaming on my windows desktop, but having the option to play some things through VMware is what saves it.

[@lifeofdarshit]

Great video. While the new chips are really having the potential to run AAA games I truly believe that Apple will not open up for the developers just because of their principles. But I do believe that in the near future they are going to acknowledge the gaming community and as their hardware is getting capable as well they are going to promote and support more and more developers who are going to develop applications on Metal API. Because after all they like creating their own ecosystem for everything.

[@GyroCannon]

I had to keep my eyes from rolling to the back of my head when they started discussing Apple Arcade's indie offerings and cloud services. And I say this as someone who bought an M1 Air for the battery life but made sure that it could run Factorio. The end of this video is what we should really take away from it: Macs aren't gaming machines, and no one should buy them solely for gaming, because you'll be sorely disappointed.

[@cnr_0778]

*Macs aren't great gaming machines as long as they're running MacOS. Asahi Linux already provides a massive performance boost for the CPU and will soon get proper GPU drivers.

[@HyperSnypr]

Not that I disagree, but is anyone really buying a Mac solely for gaming?

[@RandomUser2401]

@@cnr_0778 that's not the issue at all for M1s. You need native ARM support. Installing Windows will only make the gaming situation worse.

[@ignoto82dr]

please bru. this video lost credibility when he compared a more costly machine with gpu to a cheaper one without gpu. Then he added another machine that have double the ram and a gpu with double of the cores. Always pushing the comparison with the first machine that dont have a proprietary gpu but just an integrated one (so one that use CPU cores). This? this is an ADS video for Mac, no more no less. Oh, I get that he have to pay bills, server and so on. I dont dubt it. But if he wanted this video to be taken seriously he should have put down a laptop with a GPU and the same starting price of the mac.

[@TrueJamo]

@@ignoto82dr In all fairness, Apple says they can beat a GTX 3090. Kinda have to use the more expensive PC to compare.

[@DeusinMachina]

Been excited with the progress on Asahi Linux. Hope one day it will run Linux just as well as some other computers. Then these macs will be incredible Linux Machines

[@FluffyPuppyKasey]

It already does, even without graphics acceleration

[@sunderkeenin]

@@FluffyPuppyKasey and that's the thing, GPU acceleration is of *extreme* importance. The GPU is being applied in the processing of more and more programs and while CPU is ok for most non-gaming and even some productivity tasks it's simply worse and less efficient. Until GPU acceleration is fully functional(not necessarily well-optimized, just working), that should be considered a hard blocker for anyone who wants to use a linux m1 mac as their primary machine or even just as their main movable workhorse device. This isn't to say Asahi Linux isn't one of the most impressive, high quality, and fast displays of reverse engineering seen in recent years and that its future isn't incredibly bright, but that the blockers which are still present are extreme and that there is a reason it's still alpha software.

[@arpandhatt6011]

@@sunderkeenin GPU and power management support are probably the two most important things for M1 laptops. Arguably, the GPU is less important for one of the largest Linux communities: programmers, and if you’re using a desktop M-chip, the second is a non-issue. For projects I work on, compile times have decreased by about 15% on my M1 Air *just* by doing it on Asahi Linux instead of MacOS. Getting what is essentially a generational leap in performance by switching operating systems is fantastic, and there’s more yet to come. Regardless of GPU performance on M-chips, the CPU’s are absolute monsters.

[@klh_io]

​@@arpandhatt6011 I bet running the desktop with GPU acceleration is going to improve battery life, and that's the most important thing about it for me - if I want raw power my Ryzen desktop still runs circles around the M1 machines.

[@sunderkeenin]

@@arpandhatt6011 That's fair, and that's the particular exceptional use case that the m1 chip is known to already be a significant upgrade for. One of the useful parts of speaking in generalities is that exceptions to that generality mostly know they are.

[@jellybean2682]

I have an M1 Mac and played hollow night on it with 0 problems. Currently 10 hours in and an amazing experience. It does get a little warm but I don’t think it’s unmanageable

[@anata.one.1967]

I definitely agree, the pre release version of RPCS3 running on Rosetta2 and OpenGL still runs TTT2 at 52-60fps on M1. Something I cannot say about my 1600 x GTX 1050Ti combo, back home.

[@eliasbutcher859]

Is RPCS3 an emulator?

[@--2]

3:37, _Spoiler_ , the graph is a bit misleading. Apple was only comparing wattage to a certain amount of performance. The 3090 CAN though draw more power and perform better.

[@_sparrowhawk]

Yeah true, but at that wattage, they were totally right.

[@--2]

@@_sparrowhawk, Exactly.

[@marcelhenning]

Apple just tried to scam the lobotomized

[@shockwave4064]

sounds like something they made a video on.....oh wait

[@neoqueto]

And a tiny subset of those users can't afford a console despite owning a Mac. Honestly this is a cold war between Apple and non-mobile developers, Apple says "bow down to us and use Metal", developers say "you're not a significant market anyways". No one can make a move, otherwise Apple will be closer to dominating yet another market.

[@hishnash]

The API story is not the reason devs are not on the platform. Even if apple pays MS so that they could ship all windows apis (there is so much more to a game engine than just to graphics remember) devs would not ship games on Mac as the testing overhead is not worth the tiny market share (remember most Macs are purchased by companies as work machines and thus not used at all for gaming with many companies using MDM to stop you even installing games).

[@thebuddercweeper]

Ironically, the way Apple could get developers to support Metal would be by first supporting Vulkan to make it easier to port gamers to Mac, which would increase the number of people who play games on Mac, which would then encourage devs to optimise further by supporting Metal. They could even use it to demonstrate how much better Metal is - "here's the performance using Vulkan and here's the performance using our new version of Metal"

[@hishnash]

@@thebuddercweeper a VK port that does not take into account the hardware diffcnes between apples GPUs and the rest of the industry will not be any better than moltenVK.

[@KrishnaAdettiwar]

@@hishnash ummmm where did you get the stat that most macs are bought by companies for work devices?! Although companies buy macs for work devices, there are a LOT more Macs out there for personal use. Have you ever been to any public university campus? It’s like 80%+ Macs and they’re all personally bought by students. If people have the money and if they’re in the Apple ecosystem, they’re going to buy a Mac for their personal use as well. That stat you said about most Macs being work machines is totally false

[@hishnash]

@@KrishnaAdettiwar talking here about higher end Mac laptop configurations. Sure there are a lot of MBA and lower end 13 MBP sold outside of the work env but if your thinking of a gaming callable Mac your not thinking of those.

[@stringbreaker87]

Been using Parsec on my M1 pro to connect and game on my home PC when traveling for work and it's pretty amazing if you have a strong network to connect to.

[@TheoHiggins]

Wow that native Apple gaming roundup was an enormous "One of these things is not like the others" I suppose if I found myself for a week with nothing to game on but a Mac, another Disco Elysium playthrough would see me through alright.

[@geospacedout]

I played the entire mass effect trilogy on my 2013 macbook pro as they came out. Running windows on it was better than most comparable pc's and while framerates werent the best, it worked better than i expected. My brother and I dumped hours into Age of Empires III on our iMac's and it ran so well over LAN. Apple has always had gaming potential, but its been so stifled by their own corporate interests.

[@FireMrshlBill]

Ya, it was easier to game back then on them since it was just intel, AMD or nvidia gpu. Gamed a bit on my 2011 13" MBP and then on my 2011 27" iMac (windows installed on ssd via thunderbolt port). Played a bit of ME2 and other games on the MBP and played through the first Tomb Raider reboot game on the iMac. I was between gaming rig builds having moved was just gaming on laptops/consoles for a few years, and they did ok.

[@JohnnyWortel]

The sad thing at the moment is that MS is blocking windows for ARM and there is no more bootcamp on M1 :( I really want to upgrade to the new M1 macbook pro but I just don't know if I'm as comfortable with running a virtual machine instead of natively booted windows. Hopefully MS will open up windows for ARM and Apple can bring back good old bootcamp on the new chips

[@joeyl.3007]

If you’re interested in seeing some examples of gaming on macs via crossover or parallels, Andrew Tsai and the AppleGamingWiki channels have a lot of games showcased running on various App,e Silicon hardware. Ive been keeping an eye on what works because I’m expecting to get a MacBook Pro sometime soon, and it’s really interesting to see how many games work. It may never compare to my 3080ti desktop, but when gaming isn’t the reason I’m buying in the first place, having a handful of games I can run well on my laptop will be a nice bonus.

[@dantefekete7617]

Hey Linus, as always, thank you for being so informative as well as entertaining. I am confused, however. As a long-time mac user, and a Mactel user at that, how does the unified memory compare to ddr4 or ddr5? Is the difference a 1:1 ratio, or is it double? does an 8gb system equate to 16 Gb x86? Could you please clarify?

[@nullgenshin]

1:30 A small mistake it's supposed to be HP Envy, not OMEN. OMEN is their gaming laptop with completely different hardware spec.

[@SimonBauer7]

would be weird for a omen gaming laptop to get dropped this badly. has to be the envy ofcourse

[@TheOmegaRiddler]

With Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I managed to get between 40 and 70 fps on my M1 MacBook Air if I dropped all the settings but the framerate was up and down like a yoyo.

[@redocious8741]

If that was native you would’ve gotten 80-100 fps

[@DimitriMoreira]

Throttling make this "yoyo" effect on the fps.

[@joaofelipe2060]

does using a notebook cooler helps in some way with performance?

[@TheOmegaRiddler]

@@joaofelipe2060 I haven't tried that. I just wanted to see if I could get a playable framerate. what i got was impressive even if I had to drop all the graphical settings and resolution

[@Azeal]

I actually use a MacBook Pro for gaming in everyday life. I have a Windows gaming machine I keep at home, and I bought myself a base model MBP 13 Inch. When I'm away from home, I use Parsec (that game streaming thing Linus showed off a year or two ago) to "wire in" to that PC from it. I get the quality of a gaming pc, but the battery life of Apple Silicon! There's admittedly quite some delay depending where I am in the world, but it usually isn't too bad.

[@barretprivateer8768]

I can barely make that shit work within my own house

[@KarmaIsEternal]

I love you Azeal!

[@Armandoodz]

@@barretprivateer8768 lol

[@ronmaison8690]

They should do lot more thing like 4K resolution oled HDR screen for high end MacBook Pro ( 14 and 16) they should update their MacBook or Mac for gaming.They should have 5g modem so we can use faster internet gaming.They should also work with 3rd party software so all can be supported by apple.

[@eptometha2043]

Great video! One suggestion: you can try running X-plane on Mac next time when you are doing videos about Mac gaming. I think X plane is somewhat demanding of hardware specs.

[@jamesp5923]

Yeah I think it's really important to call Apple out on this. There are so many Mac users (including myself) that love gaming and if they did things like supported Vulkan and allowed a lot of the AAA titles to come to Mac, there would be a tangible increase in Mac sales. Of course Mac is probably never going to compete with windows in terms of gaming but for people who already like MacOS they could make the purchase a lot easier by allowing at least comparable game support.

[@velara314]

this. currently unless you own an m1, games aren’t even an option. adding support for vulcan would get more developers on the platform …and maybe then they might look into metal

[@fromryuk7785]

I think apple is the worst you can buy but as a fellow gamer i salute your struggle and hope for a swift resolution in your favor.

[@AlejandroLZuvic]

I'm with you in that I like macOS and want to game, but realistically I don't think there are many like us.

[@lobstahpotts]

This exactly. I don't need a Mac to be the equivalent of a purpose-built gaming laptop but as someone whose work involves occasional lengthy international travel, I would really like a personal device that is light enough to comfortably bring on trips with good battery life while still being able to play at least some of my usual games at decent framerates. I had been really hopeful that the new Macbook Pro line would fill this niche, especially with games that have dedicated OS X releases like Final Fantasy XIV, but real world performance across the world has been mediocre. This niche really seems to still be dominated by creator-oriented options like the HP Envy 14 at the lower end (with good battery life but worse discrete graphics) and the Razer Blade/Zephyrus G14 on the high end (great graphics and performance, but at the cost of battery life and remote work features like a quality webcam), but it's a place where I feel like Apple silicon is basically built to shine.

[@velara314]

@@DaveThePCGuy good idea. often people say macs are for design and video and audio but that's not what a computer is. a computer is multifunctionimg. it's hardware to run software. steve jobs even said he sold software as solutions to the problems his clients would describe to him. as a mac supporter it's a problem that macs don't support much games

[@NigelMelanisticSmith]

I wonder how the MX450 or newer Arc compares, since those are Discrete and can fit in Thin and Lights.

[@oksowhat]

they are basically same as rdna now

[@Hamox]

@@oksowhat rdna is a architecture not a gpu

[@Historymaking101]

there are even a couple thin and lights with 3050s

[@NigelMelanisticSmith]

@@Historymaking101 yep, you can make a good trade between battery and power in the thin and light space rn

[@oksowhat]

@@Hamox ik, i am lazy to type.

[@TGMacro]

I really do like apple now a days. I just wish they gave more af about features in general. I’ve been daily driving a iPhone 11 for a couple years now and honestly I’m really thinking about just going fully over to them. It’s just extremely easy to use and I hadn’t had ANY issue with this phone or even a my iPad I had gotten last year. Security is top notch, the screens are AMAZING and the batteries just keep kicking. My first smart phone was a Samsung that I had gotten in 2009. That lasted a looooong time. I still have it actually. Fully functional. But idk, I really do appreciate the cloud and knowing it’s there between my devices and there’s not ever any question about it. I can appreciate the indie games and that you can even play some older titles still. But like you keep mentioning there’s just little things they won’t give in on and it does annoy me. But it does tell me they are paying attention to what they are doing even if it’s biast.

[@casdragon_5939]

I've been gaming on my mac for years with Bootcamp. Finally built a PC a few months ago but still game on both.

[@blazeking6432]

"So what's your specs?" Apple users: it seems to run on some sort of electricity

[@why_so_areen]

EPIC COMMENT HAHAHA

[@michaelsoft1]

Soooo trueee

[@jaspreetmaan121]

I understood that reference

[@RyuSujin]

Well, you're not wrong.

[@jelanidacostabest8195]

Mac user here and admittedly, I loled

[@jared_schoeny]

Fully expected Linus to say, “Are you scared of us? Just like our sponsor!”

[@advitgarg399]

missed opportinity(please tell me how to spell that i can feel something is not right)

[@ubahnlexi]

@@advitgarg399 opportunity

[@king_blitz6479]

I game on my 2020 MacBook Air and it does surprisingly well actually lmao (Edit: it is a more expensive model I think the only shortcoming it has is storage)

[@lewisw.6768]

Hi, and I’ve just inherited a 27” 2013 iMac, 3.2 Ghz, 16/1TB (Mojave) and it works perfect . - . My normal daily workhorse is a 13” 2015 Retina MacBook Pro, 2.9 Ghz, 16/256 (Big Sur) - and it works perfect, too. The questions: which of these machines should I use as my daily desktop driver? And is it worth keeping them both?

[@nathanbrown492]

3:48 RIP Stadia. I like how he contrasts the Netflix style Xbox game pass and the DIY Geforce Now service, but just glossed over Stadia sinces it's the worst of both worlds ("you don't own your games in any real way" & "you don't get many free games") Edit: What about MoltenVK?

[@PeakKissShot]

It's a shame cause stadia has by far the best ux

[@DevTNT]

I mean, stadia games can be played without a subscription. That's as far as "owning your games" you're gonna get on a cloud platform

[@mackandelius]

@@DevTNT which isn't true since making use of Geforce NOW allows you to keep your games even if it ever shuts down, you got a gaming PC or just wanted to use another service, like Shadow or Plutosphere.

[@DevTNT]

@@mackandelius the whole point of playing on cloud is you don't have a gaming system, or not one capable enough. On GeForce Now, if you stop paying you can't access your titles to play online; or tbf, you can if you queue up and are fine with playing 1 hour max

[@YourBlackLocal]

@@DevTNT Do you understand what ownership is? If Geforce Now disappears you still own those games. Doesn't matter if you don't have hardware, you can eventually get the hardware to play the games you bought. If Stadia closes you have to hope Google want to compensate you with those games.

[@feederbrian9457]

This video explains the situation very well, but I am interested to see if WWDC brings fresh enthusiasm for gaming on the Mac. From what I’ve heard, another reason gaming isn’t as prominent on Mac (besides the smaller user base) is that Metal is a lower-level (hence the name) language that is harder to work with. Since it takes time to make things happen, most developers won’t see it as worth the time to make a Mac port unless they’ve produced the game in a cross-platform engine like Unity. Lastly, Dolphin’s developers HAVE been working on Metal optimization for some time and the performance increase shows that the potential is there. It just comes down to whether it makes sense time-wise.

[@AyaWetts]

Metal is different, not harder... but its not on feature parity with Vulkan or DX12, its like... out of date. Vulkan is the best right now, seems like everyone should be using it, but MS and Apple both have hang ups for their proprietary APIs... but at least you can actually use Vulkan on Windows, since MS doesn't have the level of control over all the hardware and software like Apple does.

[@microcolonel]

Metal is more abstract than Vulkan. The problem isn't so much that Metal is a restrictive or unhelpful API, but that it is proprietary and thus requires you invest specifically in Apple hardware and specialized software developers to work with it.

[@feederbrian9457]

@@AyaWetts Well that’s a shame. If Metal is that far behind the others, then I wonder if the hardware itself is not as conducive to gaming as I’m hoping, even with the games being in native form. When you mention parity, the first thing that comes to mind is ray tracing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but discrete graphics have dedicated bits to run those calculations; if we want that feature on Metal, it would come at a penalty.

[@ericw.1620]

@@feederbrian9457 It's not necessarily features in terms of consumer facing features. I'm sure ray tracing is one of them, but it's mostly different rendering/optimization techniques and whatnot that is missing from Metal. For example, let's say DX12 has a feature called drawSquare that draws a square. Vulcan might have an analogous feature called createRectangle that can be used to draw a square, albeit with some extra parameters. Metal would have features like drawLine, drawBox, and drawTriangle, all of which can probably be combined together to make a square but it's fussy and you have to either do extra work translating from DX12 and Vulcan to Metal, or you have to do extra work just to make the analogous API call. Obviously this is drastically simplified and not a real example but hopefully that gives you a picture of what the feature parity is like.

[@alexiscastro5055]

Been playing warthunder on my MacBook 14in. The battery life is insane, I wish other games would be ported

[@dekjet]

It's not just the Metal vs. Vulkan thing. That can be bridged quite efficiently with MoltenVK or similar. It's running tests and validation for a whole other plattform with it's natural own quirks. So you need Apple hardware of different Mac generations to find and reproduce bugs. You need develops who understand the plattform to fix those bugs and so on. Supporting "just one more" platform is huge task. This is why Proton for Linux is such a great solution.

[@blaymeister]

Speaking of gaming on Apple. I remember my first gaming experience was playing Ancient Art of War on the original Macintosh. 80s gaming. Longgg time ago

[@primus711]

Commodore Amiga FTW

[@primus711]

Aka fastest mac

[@alanhilder1883]

Gaming on apple, Space invaders on an apple II plus. ( early 80's ). The Amiga left the macs in the dust for both gaming and production applications. Shame the sales team at Amiga didn't know what they were doing, the hardware was leading the pack.

[@timgomez1084]

I love the balance view you give on your videos, this particular one gave me an idea. You should test gaming latency of games and see which is worse, server distance or gaming rig power/settings

[@Xaxxus]

The metal 3 changes make metal comparable to vulkan and directX now. Hopefully more games start coming to mac

[@simpleton7]

Great point at the end - apple tv and apple arcade cost the same five dollars, but the investment is leaps and bounds ahead on tv. Apple also invests heavily in prestige projects there without mass appeal, because it adds to the attractiveness of the platform (Macbeth). They just don't see traditional AAA gaming in that way.

[@michaelsoft1]

Never thought I would see those words. Apple and gaming computers

[@ethanvlogsgamesmore466]

No one did

[@TazerXI]

Other than "Apple doesn't make gaming computers"

[@algis-kun8777]

Its something rarely uttered since the early 90s

[@MrMoose-mf1oy]

Its sad cause they have the potential to perform much better than windows with their new chips, but apple just doesn’t care about the gaming community

[@richardaaron4454]

My game collection on Steam is huge as I’m sure all of yours are and not many at all are Mac Compatible.

[@Marlon-ld2jx]

I have an M1 Max MBP and I love it. I want more games to play on it. Maybe we need a native Vulkan driver or better MoltenVK support. Maybe Asahi linux will fix this

[@THE_TOOTH77]

What app do you use on the Mac to check temps? I'm looking to a good accurate one.

[@stephane5918]

hello congratulations for your video, if you have a chance in the next week can you test the new mac mini m2 pro for video games and which model do you recommend (10-16 or 19 Core GPU)???, moreover if you have any suggestions for a quality price monitor for the mac mini

[@mikeyhope7577]

I always thought Apple should reach a whole new market if they were to release gaming peripherals and work with developers and steam more to get more consistent support.

[@Telarin1]

I think they will do this with their VR product line honestly. Great time to enter into an emerging market and they can really show off a premium (albeit insanely expensive) headset. If they can fit a MAX or ULTRA M1 unit into a headset that could make for a very powerful standalone headset.

[@MarfYT]

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro with a Radeon 5600M. Even though it’s not the most powerful GPU, I am very pleased worth the gaming performance on BootCamp with Windows. I love how I can go from editing powerhouse in macOS to playing Battlefield at decent FPS in only a minute or two.

[@asutoshvariar]

@@TanksInSpace_ Some people prefer Mac-specific apps like Final Cut.

[@FrostyYoDopeMan]

@@asutoshvariar it's alot easier to run a sandbox with Mac os in it then to make sure everything is compatible with boot camp.

[@lilbaby4PF]

@@TanksInSpace_ Good for you, Mac is better for working and it still can do gaming so its a win either way

[@satyarth5747]

@@lilbaby4PF it ain't objectively better at work plus is doesn't even do the bare minimum when it comes to gaming, potatoe laptops 1/3rd the price have better support fir gaming

[@lilbaby4PF]

@@satyarth5747 Yeah you are right in terms of gaming, and better in terms of work is opinionated. From experience Mac wins for working, resale value, quality.

[@deltoncbaker]

I purchased Studio M1 Max. It has only ever been plugged into an power filtering UPS. I used the email, iTunes and KZbin with absolutely no problems. I installed Sudoku and it crashes regularly. I thought Apple tested all the products before putting them in their store. I also own a iPad and play Microsoft Solitaire Collection (MSC) regularly with no problems. The MSC is conspicuously missing from the Studio Apple Store.

[@MP-qo5vb]

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft casually on my M1 MacBook Air for the last year, plays great, battery life is awesome and it’s silent. Much better than my old blade 13 with the mx150.

[@bigshower]

I use my 2020 m1 mac mini for games using pretty much everything you talked about except streaming. If you intend on playing ALOT of games on your mac, unfortunately youll most likely have to buy crossover and parallels as they do have lots of uncharted ground. Another issue with these, especially crossover, is that sometimes updates will break previously compatible applications and games and getting games to run can take hours of trial and error. Despite these problems, i find my mac works great with emulation, alot of great emulators are available for Mac os and some even stay regularly updated along side the windows counterparts.

[@ithryn]

Id like to see an rog flow x13 with a 3050 ti up against the macs. It's honestly the best all around laptop I've ever used, decent dedicated GPU, great cpu, no thermal throttling (at least in any of my use cases) touchscreen, tablet mode, stylus support, all in an easily portable, relatively lightweight package. And you can hook it up to an egpu pretty easily if you need even more gpu grunt

[@alexatkin]

I was a big fan of touch screens, but honestly the Macbook touchpad is so many worlds apart better than any PC laptop I've ever used, I don't really miss it. Though obviously its a nice to have, but of course Apple want us to buy iPads for that. AFAIK no PC laptop comes close to matching the sound, touchpad and picture on the new Macbooks. Heck, the Macbook M1 Pro makes my LG OLED look bad for content consumption. Although the LG blows it away on pixel response and obviously really tiny highlights like starfields where even the best local dimming can't cope. Saying that as someone who is no fan of Apple, hates MacOS, but darn the Macbook Pro on a hardware level is an amazing device. Its just utterly let down by crappy software limitations, some in addition to mentioned in the video. I tested the Linux Alpha and that's looking awfully promising, its insanely fast even without any GPU acceleration yet. Drawback there being, you don't have Rosetta 2 for x86 support, though I wonder if they will tackle trying to implement it as some of that is done in the hardware I believe. If a gaming laptop came out with comparable screen, audio and battery life on the desktop to the Macbook Pro, I'd be all over it.

[@shzammpatapon9865]

horrible trackpad and speakers. bad battery life. honestly, abysmal build quality compared to anything from apple

[@aadeshsenthilkumar9080]

@@shzammpatapon9865 There is the acer swift x with a potent Ryzen 7 5800U and RTX 3050TI, 10 hour battery life, aluminum alloy finish, in a portable 14" chassis. You can add more storage (2 x PCIe Gen3) unlike the m1 where the SSD is soldered. The great thing is you can find them for around $850 on acer's certified refurbished site. This laptop is a dream for college students who want some graphics muscle in their Ultrabook.

[@julianrobin9390]

@@aadeshsenthilkumar9080 Still a worse battery life, lower performing CPU, worse speakers, trackpad, and screen and its more expensive than an m1 air.

[@aadeshsenthilkumar9080]

@@julianrobin9390 Um no it isnt more expensive than the m1 air, unless ur talking about the base model which would be unfair. Im pretty sure the 512gb 16gb model runs for at least $1350

[@RaceSimCentral]

If anyone is interested in retro Mac-only titles. I use vMac for OS6, Basilisk II for OS7, Sheepshaver for OS9. You can run PowerPC OSX titles on Intel with Snow Leopard. 32bit is dropped after Mojave. Though there are not many Mac retro titles not on other platforms way easier to setup.

[@techrev9999]

You, just can't argue that Macs are put together beautifully. Always been like that. Their notebooks are just so nicely built, but yeah, it's just such a horrible fight to get them to do what you want sometimes. Nice video.

[@malificajones7674]

Yeah, they're like a nicely polished turd.

[@erikreider]

Gaming on an M1 could be achieved if we manage to create a Vulkan M1 driver on Linux

[@AyaWetts]

and a high performance x86/x86-64 emulator?

[@erikreider]

@@AyaWetts There's Box86, Box64 and FEX. All of them are experimental but everything gets better with time :)

[@TheJackiMonster]

Even then you would run x86 instructions translated to ARM instructions and DirectX calls translated to Vulkan calls. So you lose quite a bit performance in translation, I assume. Then there's also the problem that Vulkan might have very bad performance in general on M1 chips because of the different hardware design for the GPU. Metal is focused much more on compute capability than rendering. I think they don't even support hardware accelerated rasterization but use a compute pipeline to support it via shaders as efficiently as possible with that approach. So that creates quite some overhead as well adding to the other translation. So while Linux being probably the best option for gaming on M1. It's still questionable if it's actually good.

[@erikreider]

@@TheJackiMonster According to the devs, Vulkan and Metal are very similar

[@TheJackiMonster]

@@erikreider Maybe in some ways but there are still quite some differences when it comes to their pipelines, extension and feature support, memory binding model... I mean MoltenVK doesn't support Vulkan 1.2 yet while newest drivers from Nvidia or Mesa on Linux support Vulkan 1.3. So I wouldn't be sure to have feature parity between Metal and Vulkan currently. The differences seem to be big enough that MoltenVK is 2 major releases behind in specs. Also one thing to mention is that MoltenVK only works properly when you enable a certain extension on application level using Vulkan. So it's not even the case that you can easily use MoltenVK as translation layer for Vulkan applications without the developers to put in a little effort on their side. I think it will take some time until we see ready Vulkan drivers for 1.0 but even longer until the drivers supports 1.2 or even 1.3.

[@Xavierpng]

I thought I could use my m1 air for some light gaming at work (using parallels) and it works, kindof... after about 15 minutes it was burning my hand. Would not recommend

[@Patrickdaawsome]

have you tried Crossover?

[@swaggitypigfig8413]

I play games on my m1 air all the time, it does get warm but doesn’t burn my hand lol. It’s totally fine.

[@jacobwonder6735]

Doing anything performance-intensive on a computer without a fan is a very bad idea…

[@txerapng]

@@jacobwonder6735 yeah, totally agree with you, the guy should not me blaming the MacBook Air for getting warm when he is doing something it wasn't designed to do.

[@zackpalmer3704]

@@txerapng They’re literally engineered to remain below a certain external temperature (as required by law), at the cost of performance. See the video Linus made about removing the insulation from the M1 Air and gained performance but increased external temps. To be fair, he should blame the laptop if it gets too hot under any circumstances, but it’s just not true that it does get too hot.

[@Brandyn0]

I play AAA games on my MacBook Pro. Steam remote play from my gaming pc, streams to mac over Ethernet/wifi. Xbox one controller connected to Mac for inputs. Been playing elden ring and everything else. 4K 120hz on the game pc then stream to the mac in 2k or to my bedroom thinkcenter pc at 1080p

[@brianzzzzzzzz]

this is exactly what i'm playing with MBP... stopped playing it for ages but it's one of the well-performing games on m1 series mac, so...

[@Chrisboy265]

1:26 Linus talks about the HP Envy, but the charts show the HP Omen. Is this an error?

[@Pyromaniac176018]

Had the same question, any easy explanation?

[@tamphamduy1307]

Yes it must have been editor's mistake between 2 distinctive series

[@ajfromca]

Software support has never been amazing on macOS. However, with the release of Apple Silicon I have never seen it so bad. I purchased a MBP14 back in November and took the thing back in 3 days. It was powerful, built well, and could functionally do nothing that I needed it to do that my 2019 MBP13 could not already do. That and my 2019 MBP13 running an intel CPU supports external GPU’s and boot camp. My main bread and butter as a MDM Administrator is Virtual Machines, specifically macOS VMs which are absolute garbage on Apple Silicon.

[@magsigea5477]

No nested virtualisation is a big wtf moment; hardware limitation on m1, no matter the type of m1 chip.

[@crt5866]

what software were you guys using to show the power draw and processor temps in the top bar? That is something that I have been looking for!

[@ioverdoneit]

I have an M1 Macbook Air with the 8 core graphics and 16gb ram, I'm curious how it preforms in gaming compared to the 7 core with 8gb of ram if there is any difference at all

[@adamrobinson3123]

I am honestly curious if somewhere down in the deeps of apples R&D labs, they have design for a dedicated apple gaming laptop or desktop. it would be interesting to see what they could do if they changed up their design principles. give it a funky name too, like the Apple Cider gaming PC .

[@TheDragonfriday]

Lol they rather over price it and no other accessories work beside apple products

[@adapalis]

That's interesting but if you think Apple R&D's any type of hardware for gaming, you really don't understand Apple's bottom line.

[@charliescene42069]

@@adapalis what do you mean by Apple’s bottom line?

[@SuperSkandale]

don't need to make any hardware with the name "gaming" in it. Just make a good pc that can game. Much cooler.

[@matthewoyan]

They'd probably name it Mac Arcade or something, definitely not to be confused with Apple Arcade

[@txriq]

Looking at the current market trends, I just hope that apple doesn't charge a monthly subscription to unlock the true 'gaming' capabilities in their machines. Just like how mercedes wants us to give a monthly subscription so that we can get an additional 10° turn, or how toyota wanted to us to pay a monthly just to be able to remote-start the car's engine.

[@YearsOfLeadPoisoning]

Tesla is by far the worst offender. If Right to Repair means anything to the tech community, we need to stop fawning over everything that company does, and stop giving them a pass we won't give other companies. They've had a horrendous effect on the industry as a whole, and are one of the corporations that has the greatest impact on the direction the industry is taking.

[@technomatic6285]

Electric Vehicles are not here to save the environment. They're here to save the auto industry. Car-centric infrastructure is dangerous and inefficient compared to public infrastructure. r/fuckcars

[@nonever5316]

tesla is shit tesla is shit tesla is shit

[@-SP.]

Toyota already reversed its stance months ago, it would be fairer to use a manufacturer who still does this, which there are plenty of.

[@killertruth186]

@@YearsOfLeadPoisoning It is quite sad that people had been like this for so long.

[@LivingImage]

Informative video, thanks.

[@thekwoka4707]

I'd like comparisons betweens m1 Macs and windows laptops to actually separate out on battery and plugged in. A major benefit of the m1 stuff is that it maintains that power on battery, while also maintaining a good battery life. The windows gaming laptops often do not at all. They throttle hard and have bad battery life.

[@mickmoon6887]

Get zephrus g14/ flow 14 instead of macbook if you want light portable gaming and set power mode to eco mode for higher battery life

[@patrickshaw411]

That’s what I did. No regrets! Honestly I would like to try Mac OS since I’ve been on windows my whole life, and their hardware is solid, but god damnit Apple! Give us some control already!

[@MrSmexy702]

Agreed got the zephyrus g14 ultra thin. Handles games better than my 2060 OC desktop. Temps get high though. Both laptops i havd of them will hit 100c in turbo.

[@nikoheino3927]

@@patrickshaw411 they will never do that, i think tim cook is a control freak. apple used to innovate technology but now they barely keep up (aside from m1, props to them for the efficiency) while trying to be as anti-consumer as possible.

[@bottomtext5872]

@Bear Spicer G14 refreshes are getting better screens

[@nikoheino3927]

@@MrSmexy702 underclock/undervolt a little bit and adjust fan curve to be more aggressive and use it so that the intakes on the bottom have easy access to air. or get a fanned stand.

[@cloggedaorta]

No 1080p testing on M1 Air? I think that's what most people do with laptops this size, no?

[@untitledsurfer8503]

The MacBook Air screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, unlike most Windows laptops with 16:9 screens. 1080p is a 16:9 screen resolution. Its equivalent on 16:10 aspect ratio is actually 1200p (yes, a higher resolution). If you did 1080p on the MacBook Air, the content would either be stretched (ugh) or have black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Also, the MacBook Air's native screen resolution is 2560x1600 (16:10). Apple's resolutions are, interestingly, the only ones that make sense, because they scale correctly to screen sizes keeping PPI the same rather than taking the "one-size fits all" approach from Windows manufacturers, which often use only 1080p and 4K screens regardless of the screen size.

[@cryzz0n]

It is worth mentioning that Unity has recently been supporting M1 and metal. This will allow many games to easily port to the new mac

[@shejan0986]

Quick little note on the OpenGL and OpenCL, Apple deprecated those APIs on Mojave like this video said, but they are not locked out at the system level, programs that make OpenGL 4.3 compatible calls will run properly as of right now. Apple will not continue to maintain those APIs however so as time goes on, it may completely outright not work in the future.

[@glebs.]

Why didn’t you test this with a thin and light with a mx450 or 1650 maxq?

[@riccardopezzani]

Man, I would love to play on my MacBook: the computer is solid and made with quality materials, have an incredible battery and best of all has that gorgeous lucid screen that it’s so hard to find on any other branded product; But it will never happen.

[@eulehund99]

I didn't test a MacBook Screen in depth but isn't an OLED Screen way better in a ZenBook?

[@riccardopezzani]

@@eulehund99 Well usually OLED screens are considered better than LCD, for vividness and contrast, but that's just part of the picture; Another question is the layer on top of it, if you have an anti reflective or glare filter it's gonna change how the light passes through both sides, but unfortunately that's not an info you see usually written down in the tech sheets so you need to watch a review and see how the display reflects lights and objects in the room; For this specific case of MBA vs Zenbook oled I just checked the land page and the screen can be brighter (but I don't care because mine it's always at 50% anyway), but you give up on pixel density, having a FHD instead of 2K, so even if both had a lucid screen the image would be sharper on the Mac also the battery reported it's with the screen at 27% so there are other elements in a laptop that matter other than the screen

[@eulehund99]

@@riccardopezzani Yes, I agree that there are more elements. Btw The Zenbook was just an example of a cheap OLED device. Here it costs 200 less bucks than the base model of a M1 Macbook.

[@Miss-Foe]

My personal gaming experience on my MBP is basically just game streaming and emulation. Stardew Valley and Sims 2/4 are about the only games actually designed for the platform that I play on it.

[@st33ldi9ital]

Well said, and thanks for putting it more in the spotlight. Maybe one of these days Apple will listen to their community.

[@wds4097]

As someone who’s, admittedly, pretty deeply embedded into the Mac ecosystem, it absolutely kills me that Apple sees gaming as little more than as a brief tangent in a footnote. Their “fun and casual” marketing kinda falls apart when one of the things you can’t really do with their systems is lean back and game on them, unless you can live with almost exclusively playing games that are already available on iOS, or are willing to jump through hoops to force compatibility through emulation. On top of that, it will never make sense to me for them to force everything to run through Metal. You already have to pay to be a Mac developer and use their proprietary IDE, why not just make theirs jobs easier so they can stop losing so much to Windows?

[@zackpalmer3704]

The yearly developer cost ($200) is a negligible amount for any actual game studio. The reason they care so little about whether devs make games for their Mac platform or not is because they already dominate the gaming industry with iOS, and in regards to their Apple Silicon hardware are basically just like “if you want it, come get it”. I don’t really blame them for not wanting to put in effort to convince people to make games since the gains would be near nothing, given that the price different between a base M1 and a base M1 Pro is literally the cost of a next gen console. I’m on the same page though, it’s a shame to see the potential of the hardware, given what’s being done with platforms like the switch and quest, which have much lower powered hardware, and is not being utilised to the same extent. I think they just see the best way of reaching that point is via the locked down and restrictive App Store/Arcade, since they can impose minimum performance requirements etc., like with the oculus store, which is also why a oculus PCVR games usually run pretty consistently on the posted minimum specs vs other platforms.

[@RK-252]

It's brand perception. Apple will remove/avoid features entirely rather than allow unfavourable comparisons to competitors. As the video showed, Apple's top end desktop computer get a mere 30% of the framerate of a midrange pc (rtx 3060). If more games came to MacOS, that's more complaints/negative reviews about their performance vs PC's at a fraction of the cost. By removing gaming from the picture, consumers simply don't consider gaming a feature of Apple computers and they avoid the negative brand comparison.

[@solarstrike33]

Plus, this mentality goes all the way back to Jobs; who famously nixed the idea of Macs as gaming machines in the early days, and has haunted them since.

[@wds4097]

That’s the thing for me personally, I find it worse to not be able to game on their machines than not being able to play triple-A games at ultra whatever whatever, and Apple would probably know that this is a sentiment amongst a significant portion of their Mac user base if they bothered to scroll through any of the several popular forums. Also, I hate to be that guy but… that was a base model MacBook Pro being compared to the RTX 3060, not a desktop. I’m sure the M1 Max 16” would’ve been able to put some better numbers in, but at that point the price comparisons becomes ludicrous.

[@zackpalmer3704]

@@wds4097 I think “significant portion of their Mac user base” is a bit of an overstatement.

[@djungelskog3434]

If Apple can optimize their chip designs into such small form factors and remain energy efficient, I hope this type of quality comes to affordable thin-and-lights or even results in thinner gaming laptops

[@YourLazyLawnDeveloper]

I wasn't satisfied about the native gaming but on emulation. I had so much fun playing Tekken Tag 2 or Persona 5 on a PS3 Emulator (RPCS3)

[@user-ed8ib3bk2h]

Super informative video. Thx!

[@MustachioFurioso9134]

I'm literally using my work MacBook to play games because gpu prices have been so high (my gpu died in my gaming PC). And to be honest...I've been surprised by the Mac. Definitely isn't a perfect experience but also...it's not been a bad gaming experience either. And that's nice...it allows me to keep playing games while my PC is down for the count

[@antonsrandomstuff]

Same here, my old MacBook Pro with RX460 surprised me by running Elden Ring at 30fps@900p in bootcamp Windows.

[@anissaxo2336]

@@antonsrandomstuff did you get a cracked version of eldens ring?

[@antonsrandomstuff]

@@anissaxo2336 official version from Steam, old MacBook runs Windows through bootcamp

[@Thorismo]

and for the heavy games, geforce now is also still an option.

[@Benjitsu_]

I remember my friend getting dolphin to run on his macbook in 2009 Was able to play smash bros melee with a dualshock controller That's about it when I think of Apple gaming lol

[@julianperry4767]

Blizzard has native Mac support for World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 through the Blizzard launcher. I can play WoW maxed out graphics settings on my M1 Pro Macbook Pro 14".

[@mariovidmar7]

They could published those games on coded SD cards as replacement media (biggest one format support 2tb of storage) to prevent piracy.

[@Isengardtom]

I was actually surprised to see some of my steam games run fine through Rosetta on my M1 iMac. I’m not a big gamer so I don’t really play AAA titles a lot so Apple Arcade on my iPad Pro is great for me but I love civ 6 on my iPad too and glad I can play 2 point hospital on my M1 24” iMac without problems

[@MustachioFurioso9134]

Same, I was pleasantly surprised by the games that do run on the M1.

[@Get-Rekt]

7:54 "And when Apple can't have control? Well, they can get pretty petty" I mean, they can have cmd

[@henrikasteberg1218]

Both me and my wife game on our Macs on Stadia. As very casual gamers it works great for us.

[@tamphamduy1307]

I think you guys meant HP envy 360x in the comparison graph instead of HP Omen. Since HP Omen is a gaming series, but that is only a minor mistake I guess

[@iamtheDrb]

Macbook air , should be directly compared to g14 base model , g14 provides great battery life and also has discrete and in my area costs less than a macbook air ..... i have to do 3d work so yeah i chose g14 ....

[@starshipupdates5217]

apple dominates performance in one key category, performance on battery power. the m1 max would be a beast of a chip for gaming if it just supported Vulcan as it keeps the same performance both on and off battery. you could also get decent gaming battery life with mac aswell due to the power drain being 50w at max power as shown in this video. this would mean two full hours of gameplay if the gpu was maxed out using the 16inmch with a 100watt hour battery. unfortunately it would appear that until tim cook retires, we wont see Vulcan or any other api for the mac but crossover emulation and translation to metal is getting better every day with games such as f1 2020 showing 120fps at 1080p max settings without stutters. i still wouldnt buy a mac for gaming even with that incredible 4k 120hz mini led 1000nit screen i want to badly in my laptop.

[@stevenhouren171]

I am really curious about something and I haven't found anyone who has done a video on this topic yet. I like Mac for music production but for Game production it has traditionally not been stellar. The laptop build quality is generally good but from what I understand you can no longer use an external GPU with any modern macbook pro. That being said I also do a bit of indie game development and I am wondering how good a top end macbook pro 16 inch would be at developing games with something like unreal game engine. Is the GPU in the m2 chips good enough to develop games?

[@sunflow57]

These are awesome. I've been looking for a good gaming PC

[@SuperCookieGaming_]

As a war thunder player i was happy to see it in a mac video. i always wondered how it performed on mac

[@QuentinDamour]

I switch to m1 air because of the lack of fan and low power consumption and never looked back (I'm in audio production) but I do miss a little gaming from time to time... Like the new Lego skywalker saga could totally run on this hardware if it was optimized for it !

[@mikeapb6211]

What app do you use to show the temperature in the status bar?

[@BuckieJr]

Has there been a camera upgrade for the videos? They seem.. smoother somehow lately.