Apple Makes GREAT Gaming Computers - Gaming on M1 Macbooks

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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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

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?”

[Grif]

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.

[pendaranroberts]

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.

[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.

[royz_]

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

[rollingrock]

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.

[underdog]

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

[PyrCF]

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!

[ThreeDee]

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.

[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.

[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.

[marioguy]

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

[heasterian]

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.

[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.

[minhnguyen]

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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[michaelsoft]

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

[jared_schoeny]

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