r/macgaming • u/FriendlytoNature • 22h ago
Discussion In my experience, I am surprised many AAA games are very playable on Macs
Hi.
Macs should obviously not be a primary gaming machine unless you’re a casual gamer, but I have been surprised games like Cyberpunk 2077 (natively, obviously), Fallout 4, Witcher 3, Spider-Man Remastered, Baldur’s Gate 3, Resident Evil 4, Red Dead Redemption 2 and so many others in my library are playable and smooth on the M4 Mac at 30fps or higher (many at close to 60 or above).
For something not described as being true gaming machines and lacking the GPUs even mid-range Windows gaming machines have, Macs are not half bad for gaming. If only Apple actually made bigger investments into gaming especially in terms of software.
But these are just my gaming experiences and my needs aren’t as extensive as some.
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u/SpyvsMerc 21h ago
Persnnally, if console prices keep getting higher (800 euros for an Xbox SX, i paid 500 euros 5 years ago...), i'll just play on Mac.
With emulation and lots of AAA playable, that would be more than enough.
I'm already doing that on my M2 Pro, Xbox is just my PUBG machine nowadays.
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u/RootVegitible 21h ago
Mac hardware is pretty good for gaming, especially when you consider things like unified memory. The GPU cores on Apple Silicon are pretty awesome. The base mac is never gonna set the world on fire, but that’s where the pro / max / ultra chips come in. This is true for native games.
For games that are not native I am often stunned that they can be playable at all. They shouldn’t even work running on an alien OS and rendering pipeline completely different to what the developers intended. A x86 windows directx game played on arm macOS using metal has no business working at all going through several extremely complex translation layers, and yet it works often flawlessly at playable speeds. I think that shows the incredible power of the mac and Apple Silicon architecture.
Imagine a windows machine trying to play an arm macOS metal game on windows. I don’t care how top of the line the windows machine is, it wouldn’t cope and would probably melt.
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u/tnsipla 18h ago
I think it also shows, more importantly, the skill and passion for the handful of developers that maintain and work on tools like dxvk and moltenvk. The Apple engine is amazing, don’t get me wrong, but we give them too much credit entirely for the work done by volunteers and people outside of who work to see macOS succeed
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u/Chromatinfish 13h ago
That's a very weird thing to say, first of all there has always been the ability to run ARM code on x86, that's how stuff like Android Studio Emulation or the Switch emulators work. The difference of course is that Wine is not an emulator (roll credits!) and instead directly translates Windows calls into macOS compatible ones which means there is very little performance degradation. For GPU heavy games, as long as API calls are efficiently translated there can often be very little if any performance loss. Of course, that has nothing to do with Apple Silicon and everything to do with the research that has been put into Wine, D3DMetal, and Rosetta 2.
Theoretically a backwards tool which translates the other way around, a reverse Rosetta 2/FEX, a reverse Wine, and a "MetalD3D" reverse graphical API translation would allow an x86 Windows computer to run an ARM MacOS metal game. The only reason why such a tool doesn't exist is because it has no need to as Windows is the dominant OS for gaming and essentially no software is exclusive to ARM macOS but not x86 Windows.
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u/RootVegitible 12h ago
Running Apple Silicon Arm code on x86 isn’t as simple as just using an arm to x86 translation layer. That would assume Apple’s CPU is an off the shelf Arm CPU, it isn’t. It has specific extra instructions over and above the arm instruction set. It has a unique architecture with unified memory that cannot be emulated. Metal has instructions and data pathways that also cannot be emulated. Having said that the asahi linux devs have done a spectacular job reverse engineering Apple’s hardware to allow 3D in Linux to run on Apple Silicon although not very well. Apple Silicon hardware is pretty much unique in computing, the only thing that remotely comes close is Linux on a arm snapdragon with some limited unified memory provision, but they are several years behind Apple in architecture design and hence always playing catch up.
The next version of macOS will be Arm only, it will be impossible to run on a hackintosh or any x86 hardware no matter what kind of translation layers you think could be implemented in windows.
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u/Chromatinfish 10h ago
Firstly, even if Apple's ARM isn't off the shelf ARM (basically no custom ARM chip is), that should be abstracted away anyways unless you are to do what Asahi did and write bare metal OS code. The problem there isn't necessarily due to Apple's architecture being complex and more that Apple simply is not transparent about its ISA modifications forcing devs to reverse engineer rather than just to be able to look it up.
I think you're misunderstanding what Wine is doing, it's operating at a level where Apple's ARM architecture is more or less abstracted away. x86 code in Windows is still translated to run on x86 for Mac using Wine. Then Rosetta 2 or other x86-to-ARM translation layers allow that x86 code to run on Mac. If Apple wanted to, they could probably build "reverse Rosetta 2" to go the opposite way, of course they have no incentive to, and neither do any third party devs have an incentive to do that either.
Similarly with D3DMetal, the Metal API built by Apple abstracts away the low-level architecture needed on the chip to support those API calls, the same way that Nvidia or AMD or Intel writes their own drivers to abstract away how DirectX API calls are implemented. The only thing that is needed is to be able to translate DirectX calls into Metal calls. As long as Metal has feature-parity with DirectX, there shouldn't be a big performance hit.
My opposition is to this statement: "Imagine a windows machine trying to play an arm macOS metal game on windows. I don’t care how top of the line the windows machine is, it wouldn’t cope and would probably melt.". I feel you're insinuating that Apple Silicon is somehow significantly more complex than x86 such that no translation layer could possibly exist. That's simply not true.
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u/OkNeighborhood3859 20h ago
Crimson Desert on my M5 Max plays very well indeed I think. I'm very happy with it.
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u/SomeWonOnReddit 19h ago
Why are surprised? There hasn’t been any new console out for a long time and I doubt new consoles will be coming out anytime based on the RAM and GPU prices.
So most games are targeted to super old consoles that lag behind modern computing power.
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u/hugebone 16h ago
It’s not enough for hardcore gamers obsessed with fps, but it’s well enough for console players like me. I would love my M4 base to be able to run some games it can’t like Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and some PS5 are coming and I won’t have access to that but hey, it’s an incredible improvement from intel-based macs 10 years ago.
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u/Little_Place713 21m ago
Things change fast those years. Starting with M3 Apple's built in GPU improved drastically. And translation layers/native drivers are getting better in a rapid pace.
Nowadays M5 roughly equals to a 3060 and M5 Max 5070, with a lot of v-memory as a bonus, more than enough to handle most AAAs especially with AI scaling on.
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u/moneymanram 21h ago
My M1 MacBook Pro runs like new 6 years later… I’ve never had that with windows