That depends on what you want to play and what other things that suck that you’re willing to tolerate.
The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Steam Deck can run then that’s about what you can expect to run on a newer Mac.
Installing Steam or GOG Galaxy with something like Whiskey.app (which leverages the game porting toolkit) opens up a large number of games on macOS. Games that need Windows root kits are probably a pain point, and you’re probably not going to push all those video setting sliders to the far right for Ultra graphics on a 4K screen, but there’s a lot of games that are very playable on macOS and M chips.
Wow, had no idea this worked as well as it does. I remember the initial hype when this showed up but didn't follow along. Looks like I don't have to regard my Steam library as entirely gone.
Steam Deck-level performance is quite fine, I mainly just want to replay the older FromSoft games and my favorite indies every now and then.
Fair warning, I haven't dug that deep into compatibility issues or 32 bit gaming compatibility but it's definitely something to experiment with and for the most part you can find out for free before making a purchasing decision.
First and foremost, it's just worth checking if your game has a native port: https://store.steampowered.com/macos People might be surprised what's already available.
With Wine syscall and Rosetta x86 code translation, issues do pop up from time to time though, like games that have cutscenes that are encoded as Windows Media Player specific formats, or any other media codecs which aren't immediately available since it's not like games advertise those technology requirements anywhere and you may encounter video stuttering or artifacts since the hardware is obviously dramatically different than what the game developers were originally developing against and there's things happening in the background that an x86 Windows system never does. This isn't stuff that's overly Mac specific since it usually impacts Linux equally but it's a hurdle to jump that you don't have to deal with in native Windows. Like I said, playing Windows games outside of Windows is just a different set of pain points and you have to be able to tolerate it. Some people think it's worth it and some people would rather have higher game availability and keep the pain of Windows. Kudos to Valve with creating a linux based handheld and the Wine and Proton projects for improving this situation dramatically though.
Besides the Game Porting Toolkit (which was originally intended for game developers to create native application bundles that could be put on the App Store), there's also Crossover for Mac that does their own work towards resolving a lot of these issues and they have a compatibility list you can view on their site: https://www.codeweavers.com/ and alternatively, some games run acceptably inside virtualization if you're willing to still deal with Windows in a sandboxed way. Parallels is able to run many games with better compatibility since you're actually running Windows, though last I checked DX12 was a problem.
In addition to Whisky, it seems to not be well known that VMWare Fusion is free for personal use and can run the ARM version of Windows 11 with GPU acceleration. I tried it on my M1 Pro MBP and mid-range Steam games ran surprisingly well; an M4 should be even better.
Gaming isn't just about hardware, it's also about software, economics, trust and relationships.
Apple has quite impressive hardware (though their GPUs are still not close to high-end discrete GPUs), but they're also fast enough. The problem now is that Apple systematically does not have a culture that respects gaming or is interested in courting gamers. Games also rely on OS stability, but Apple has famously short and severe deprecation periods.
They ocassionally make pushes in that direction, but I think they lack the will to make a concerted effort, and I also think they lack the restraint to not try and force everything through their own payment processors and distribution systems causing sour relations with developers.
They’ve always been good enough for gaming. The problem has just been whether or not publishers would bother releasing the games. It’s unfortunate that Apple can’t seem to really build enough momentum here to become a gaming destination.
Apple's aggressive deprecation policies haven't done them any favors when it comes to games, they expect software to be updated to their latest ISAs and APIs in perpetuity but games are rarely supported forever. In many cases the developers don't even exist anymore. A lot of native Mac game ports got wiped out by 32bit being EOL'ed, and it'll probably happen again when they inevitably phase out Rosetta 2 and OpenGL support.
It has always baffled me why Apple doesn't take gaming seriously. It's another revenue stream, it would sell more Macs. It's profit.
Is it just some weird cultural thing? Or is there some kind of genuine technical reason for it, like it would involve some kind of tradeoffs around security or limiting architecture changes or something?
Especially with the M-series chips, it feels like they had the opportunity to make a major gaming push and bring publishers on board... but just nothing, at least with AAA games. They're content with cartoony content in Apple Arcade solely on mobile.
I always assumed it was the nature of the gaming workload on the hardware for why they don't ever promote it. AAA games pegging the CPU/GPU at near max for long periods of time goes against what they optimise their machines for. I just think they don't want to promote that sort of stress on the system. On top Apple taking themselves very seriously and seeing gaming as below them.
Apple has one of the, if not the biggest gaming platforms in existence (the iphone and ipad), but everyone seems to have a blind spot for that and disregards it. Sure, the Mac isn't a big gaming platform for them because their systems are mostly used professionally (assumption), but there too, the Mac represents only 1/10th of the sales they get from the iPhone, and that's only on the hardware.
Mac gaming is a nice-to-have; it's possible, there's tools, there's Steam for Mac there's toolkits to port PC games to Mac, there's a games category in the Mac app store, but it isn't a major point in their marketing / development.
But don't claim that Apple doesn't take gaming seriously, gaming for them it's a market worth tens of billions, they're embroiled in a huge lawsuit with Epic about it, etc. Finally, AAA games get ported to mobile as well and once again earn hundreds of millions in revenue (e.g. CoD mobile).
I feel like for myself at least, mobile gaming is more akin to casino gaming than video gaming. Sure, iOS has loads of gaming revenue but the games just ain't fun and are centred way too heavily on getting microtransactions out of people.
If you look at things like Game Porting Toolkit, Apple actually is investing resources here.
It just feels like they came along so late to really trying that it’s going to be a minute for things to actually happen.
I would love to buy the new Mac Mini and sit it under my TV as a mini console. But it just feels like we’re not quite there yet for that purpose, even though the horse power is there.
Apple owns the second largest gaming platform by users and games, and first by profit: iPhone.
In terms of gaming that's only on PC and consoles, I didn't understand Apple's blazé attitude until I discovered this eye-opening fact: there are around 300 million people who are PC and console gamers, and that number is NOT growing. It's stagnant.
Turns out Apple is uninterested by a stagnant market, and dedicates all its gaming effort where growth is: mobile.
But they are. They need to subsidize porting AAA games to solve the chicken-and-egg problem.
Gaming platforms don't just arise organically. They require partnership between platform and publishers, organized by the platform and with financial investment by the platform.
Apple does take gaming seriously. They've built out comprehensive Graphics APIs and things like the GPTK to make migrating games to Apple's ecosystem actually not too bad for developers. The problem is that a lot of game devs just target Windows because every "serious" gamer has a windows PC. It's a chicken-and-egg problem that results from Apple always having a serious minority share of the desktop market. So historically Apple has focused on the segments of the market that they can more easily break into.
They do take gaming seriously, that's likely the bulk of their AppStore revenue after all.
They just don't care about desktop gaming, which is somewhat understandable. While the m-series chips have a GPU, it's about as performant for games as a dedicated GPU from 10-14 years ago (It only needs a fraction of the electricity though, but very few desktop gamers care about that).
The games you can play have to run at silly low resolution (fullHD at most) and rarely even reach 60fps.
I think they will get there in time. They like to focus on things and not spread themselves thin. They always wanted to get the gaming market share but AI is taking all their time now.
Given that a Mac mini with an M4 is basically the same size and shape as an Apple TV, they could make a new Apple TV that was a gaming console as well.
Why is the Apple TV only focused on passive entertainment?
Is this one of those cases where "flop" means "this product would have a billion dollar market cap if it was a company, but since it's Apple, it's a flop".
No they haven't. For years the best you could get was "meh" to terrible GPUs at high price points. Like $2000+ was where getting a discrete GPU began. The M series stuff finally allows the entry level to have decent GPUs but they have less storage out of the box than a $300 Xbox Series S. Apple's priorities just don't align well with gamers. They prioritize resolution over refresh rate and response time, make mice unusable for basically any FPS made in the past 20 years and way overcharge for storage and RAM.
Valve has/continues to do way more to make Linux a viable gaming platform than Apple will likely ever do for mac
I get it, you want to leave windows by way of mac. But your options are to either bite the bullet and expend a tiny bit of your professional skill on setting up a machine with linux, or stay on windows for the foreseeable future.
Well we're about to find out now that CDPR have announced Cyberpunk 2077 will get a native Metal port. I for one am extremely curious with the result. Apple have made very lofty claims about their GPU performance, but without any high-end games running natively, it's been hard to evaluate those claims.
That said, expectations should be kept at a realistic level. Even if the M4 has the fastest embedded GPU (it probably does), it's still an embedded GPU. They aren't going to be topping any absolute performance charts.
The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Steam Deck can run then that’s about what you can expect to run on a newer Mac.
Installing Steam or GOG Galaxy with something like Whiskey.app (which leverages the game porting toolkit) opens up a large number of games on macOS. Games that need Windows root kits are probably a pain point, and you’re probably not going to push all those video setting sliders to the far right for Ultra graphics on a 4K screen, but there’s a lot of games that are very playable on macOS and M chips.