[mattcantstop]

I am at a weird spot right now, where I have teenagers who want to play games that are on Windows, but am not wanting to do that through emulation like Parallels. But I am also not willing to purchase a Windows machine as my primary machine. So it leaves me not moving to Apple Silicon and just keeping my old Mac despite wanting to upgrade.

[spaceguillotine]

What about a SteamDeck for the Teens? Add a dock and its a full desktop experience with support for dual monitors for around the price of a base level Mac Mini but also portable.

[zamadatix]

Yeah the hardware is fantastic but ARM->x86, Windows->Mac (or virtualization), and OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan -> Metal is just too many translation layers to give a quality or reliable experience unless you cherry pick titles. Not to mention you run into a lot of DRMs that don't work because they assume a x86 Windows kernel to interact with.

Of course if you're alternative is to remain on your current Mac then you could just as well upgrade to the new one anyways and leave the old one dedicated towards Windows based gaming.

[scarface74]

Where is the issue? Buy them their own computer.

[cloudking]

Have you looked at GeForce Now as an option?

[jmpman]

My kids have started in robotics competition. SolidWorks has provided incredible licenses for free. Can’t run SolidWorks on Mac. So I had to buy them a desktop with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, upgraded the RAM, got them a low latency 32” monitor. Found my old Steam account still works…

Kids…

[economist420]

Have you tried Crossover? It's a fork Wine with good support for lots of windows games. Very good performance on M1 for lots of games, even in benchmarks the m1 performs is comparable to the highest end windows machines.

[manmal]

Some games work great through Parallels, like Left4Dead 2. Others work via CrossOver. But support is not that broad unfortunately. I hope things improve vastly once Asahi Linux can run Proton - Valve has added Linux support to so many games already (for the Steam Deck).

[ozarker]

ARM support will be a hurdle for those games even with proton.

[bluetidepro]

As someone else pointed out, check out GeForce Now. It's cloud gaming, and works crazy good. Been using it for a bit now.

[drexlspivey]

The library is rather limited unfortunately

[hedora]

Parsec + paperspace would run any windows game the last time I checked. These days, I can say the same for my Linux box, so I haven’t checked recently.

[LightHugger]

Depending on the game, kids using that would be extremely disappointed at the input latency

[STRML]

You'd be surprised, on a solid connection the input latency is incredibly good

[jraph]

wine, on macOS or on a linux dual boot on your current Mac (with Proton), maybe?