I say that because of the Game Porting Toolkit Apple showed off at WWDC 2023 this year. It's on Apple to show developers why they should invest time and money into making their games sing on Mac, and it does seem like the company is stepping up to do that in a bigger way than ever before. I know there isn't always a good business case for a company to pour resources into porting its games and optimizing them for modern Macs. Resident Evil Village runs buttery-smooth on the Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which it should given the machine's high price tag and beefy chipset. These games are far too old to be held up as a good graphical showcase or stress test, but we still use them because we can reliably run them on both Mac and Windows PCs and compare the results. These promises gave many of us new hope for Mac gaming, hope that was dashed somewhat when we started seeing how well Macs with M2 chips performed in our gaming benchmarks, like the graphical performance tests in Borderlands 3 or Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. While Apple has historically been pretty quiet about games and Mac gaming in particular, in recent years we've seen the company take meaningful steps to improve the state of gaming on Mac.īack in 2022 the company was talking up the advent of the M2 chip, Metal 3 and macOS Ventura as watershed advancements in Mac gaming that would allow Mac fans to enjoy hits like No Man's Sky and Resident Evil Village with modern bells and whistles (like image upscaling and variable refresh rates) running natively on macOS. So while I've had a great time playing games on our Mac Studio M2 Ultra all week, and I think it's probably the best Mac gaming desktop yet, it's still hard to recommend if you only want to use it for games.īut while Apple could certainly do something about lowering that price a few notches, I can't chalk all the issues with gaming on Mac up to the folks in Cupertino. Even the maxed-out Mac Studio M2 Ultra we reviewed can't run games nearly as well as Windows gaming PCs that cost thousands of dollars less. And while you can get into a new Mac Studio M2 for as little as $3,999, that's still too much money for what you get if your chief concern is playing games. ![]() Unfortunately, it comes at a price of roughly $6k. The Mac Studio M2 Ultra is the first Mac I've used in a long time that feels like it could be called a gaming PC without stifling a laugh, and that's a nice feeling. Sure, you could get a 2022 Mac Studio M1 or a Mac mini, but neither really had the power to run games anywhere near as well as the best gaming PCs in the Windows market. This is nice to see because it feels like macOS fans haven't had any good options for a decent gaming desktop in a long time. While I did occasionally see some startlingly long load times and hitching when doing things like jumping between systems in No Man's Sky, I generally found these games run smoothly and look great in 4K with the power of a maxed-out M2 Ultra and 128GB of RAM behind them. I'm pleased to report the answer is quite well, in my opinion. ![]() And while I was a little disappointed to see how few modern Steam games have Mac-compatible versions available (more on that later), I was psyched to find out how well our maxed-out M2 Ultra could run games like Hitman, No Man's Sky and Total War: Warhammer III on a 4k gaming monitor. So when our Mac Studio M2 Ultra review unit arrived, one of the first things I did was download Steam and start pulling down all the Mac-compatible games my humble broadband connection could handle.
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