hey guys it's video with max tech and welcome to our ultimate gaming review of
the m2 macbook air where i'm going to use different methods to play different
games like using native games like world of warcraft rosetta games like cs go and
i'm going to use crossover 21 from codeweavers to play some windows only
games like grand theft auto 5 and the witcher 3 to see if this macbook air can
give us some good fps and handle the heat as well and not only that but i'm
going to be monitoring the gpu frequencies and the wattage to see what
happens with any potential thermal throttling by using this power metrics
app called acetop and before i get started i do want to mention which
configuration of the m2 macbook air i have i have the 16 gig ram model as well
as the 512 gig ssd so that way we're not dealing with any of the single nand chip
issues and of course this model also has the 10 core gpu upgrade because if
you're interested in gaming you're likely going for that 10 core but just
as a little disclaimer i do want to mention that this configuration is
pretty expensive it's 1700 and it won't even ship until september whereas you
can go on amazon right now and get a brand new 14-inch macbook pro which is
much better in so many different ways in terms of the features and the
performance as well for only 17.50 so 50 bucks more compared to this model and of
course it has a fan for the gaming performance and everything else but if
you're looking for a very portable macbook like this m2 macbook air that's
what this video is for so let's see if you can get some decent fps and gaming
experience with this machine all right now getting right into it the first game
i'm gonna play is world of warcraft because it's one of the only fully
native and optimized games for mac os at least apple silicon right now and i do
have my power metrics asset top open right here and keep in mind that i have
the temps right here that's showing the gpu clusters so watch that as well and
let's get started alright so i'm in full screen mode but i do want to go into the
system settings switch it to windowed really quick and then i do want to set
my resolution to 2560 by 1600 and i do need to turn the resolution scale up to
2560 to match 60 fps let's look at the acid top it's using around let's see one
watt wow very efficient so far and it looks like the gpu is not being maxed
out we're sitting at 68 usage so it's not maxing out and that's because
my fps is limited to 60 right now so let me actually move this over and keep in
mind i have my gpu right here so pay attention to that number now the reason
i'm capped at 60 is because vertical sync is on so i'm going to turn this off
it's going to allow the fps to go wherever it wants to so it looks like 88
so it looks like at these recommended settings it's actually doing quite well
you can see it's got it set to four so they're turned down a little bit now i
want to see what happens if i turn up the graphics settings
to 10. there you go all right look at that 9.4 watts gpu it's definitely
turning up 10.5 watts gpu usage right over there look at that that is really
high 10.6 10.62 100 gpu usage you can see right at the top right there 10.58
and now our fps is actually down to under 60 so 55
fps ish ooh look at that 10.77 it's using more now 100 gpu usage this is
basically how a game should be reacting and look ooh look at that 58 59 fps so
between let's say 56 to 60 fps 10.5 watts used oh and now the chip is
starting to heat up look at that 92 degrees celsius now that we're walking
around a bit we're using a little bit of the cpu 21
temps are going down 89 degrees celsius now look at that what's up with that
looks like the gpu is using less wattage now 1400 is the max gpu usage you can
have back to 90 degrees celsius this is actually impressive performance so far
we're sticking to around 60 fps and that's at like
native resolution basically and fully maxed out graphic settings i just forgot
i should be using my mouse temps are heating up i just saw 97 degrees right
there so heating up now it drops back down to oh
there you go 97 again 100 degrees we just hit a hundred whoa right guys this
is very interesting i was at 100 degrees now i'm going down 95 94 it's like
rapidly decreasing the clock speeds are down under 1200 now they were at 1400
maxed out look at that 92 degrees oh look at the wattage
the wattage is going down it's under 7 watts it was at 10.5 almost the temps
are rapidly decreasing 89 degrees celsius now look at that it's limited
even though it says 100 gpu usage 99 right there the clock speeds themselves
are going down it's throttling itself and look at that you can see the fps
drop as well we're sitting at 50 fps 5152 now so it seems like
as soon as it triggered at a certain temperature it just started to slow down
almost like the chassis itself is a heat soaking which is something
that luke miyani noticed when he used his machine outside guys look at the
temps 84 degrees celsius oh the gpu is at a thousand fifty it is throttling
six watts all right what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna keep playing it's been around
i don't know 10 to 15 minutes that i've been playing so far and we're already
getting some significant throttling so i'm gonna keep playing to see what it
kind of stabilizes at over time oh and it looks like my resolution actually
wasn't full because i just kind of double
clicked on this screen and it went larger so it looks
like this is the proper resolution and we're down to around oh
look at that 35 fps it keeps dropping almost like it's
putting a bigger load now that we have more resolution
and the temp is down to 81. it's like it keeps dropping 4.8 4.3
gpu usage so all in all it looks like if you wanted to get perfect 60fps at
native resolution you wouldn't be able to play at the uh maxed out graphics
settings at first it was fine but then when you start heat soaking the chassis
it just starts throttling down the clock speeds throttling down the wattage
bringing down the chip temperature and of course bringing down the fps which
now that we're in the full native res it's now below 40. look at that 37 fps
so you'd likely have to turn down the graphics quality to get a
solid 60 fps and you should probably also turn on vertical sync
because that'll cap the frame rate and it'll uh cap your gpu usage as well but
overall for a game like world of warcraft it's actually pretty good as
long as you don't max out the settings you can probably achieve a good solid
60fps and now let's move over to the next game which is csgo which is running
on mac os under rosetta all right so right now i'm going to try to switch to
full screen window 2560x1600 unfortunately i still don't see what i
have at the top like my temps menu bar and let's see what happens if i get out
of it yep it looks like it does cut the gpu power when you're not looking so
i'm gonna have to go back and look at like the average usage over time we have
our settings set to auto with a bunch of this stuff set to high shader detail
very high all right i don't know if you can see that fps but right there we're
looking at a 91 71 45 so it kind of fluctuates
ah okay 67 70 so that's pretty good fps so far so i also wonder if we'll get
heat soaked over time and we'll see how the fps reacts
49 right there 47. so far it hasn't been the smoothest
experience i don't know like the fps is still fine it's like above 40 a lot of
the time but there's some weird like glitchiness and i don't know what that's
from i don't know if it's from like rosetta or it's unoptimized
i'm not sure [Music]
yo come on so close but i don't think the system is heat soaking so i'm going
to try and see yep 75 degrees it was running at low gpu usage
no it wasn't really that bad now with that said csgo worked pretty well
without heat soaking the whole system so it didn't really throttle much which is
very interesting and it was a decent gaming experience it was a little bit
glitchy i don't know if it's from rosetta or whatever else but you could
probably turn down your graphics settings and get a decent gaming
experience with cs go and now let's move on to another light game which is league
of legends running on mac os using rosetta once again so let's see if this
m2 macbook air is just good enough to run this alrighty we're in game i do
want to go over to the video and see if i can switch it to uh windowed and i
could actually switch and see my gpu wattage as well so i'm going to set it
to uh 2560 by 1664.
and let's max everything out since league of legends is a pretty easy game
look at that fps 180 170 okay now that we're fighting a
hundred i mean like what more do you want temps are still staying down
this is excellent oh i forgot to buy stuff looking at our wattage oh it's
barely using any gpu wattage at all like this game is cake even without the
frame rate capped to 60 gpu is barely being used
i mean look at that 80 gpu usage 70 percent red
all right look at that 83 barely any gpu usage like i don't know
it's crazy so it looks like
if your game isn't using 100 of this gpu
it's not to heat up i mean 73 degrees celsius no issues with fps no issues
with nothing right now i forgot to buy stuff again all right well that settles
it over 100 fps fully maxed out we got native resolution basically so
no issues temps basically no issues they're slowly
climbing 71.72 but still
i think it's fine but now let's jump into something a little bit more
difficult which is playing windows based games like grand theft auto 5 and
witcher 3 using crossover 21 now if you don't know what this app is it basically
translate the windows based apis into apis that mac os
can read and play and as far as i know this is the most reliable way to play
windows games on mac os right now because bootcamp is no longer available
so you get a 14 day free trial but if you do want to purchase the full version
you can use the coupon code max tech 25 for 25 off your first purchase so
definitely do that you can find the links down below so before i get into
grand theft auto 5 let's do the witcher 3 first and here we are in the settings
i've set the frames per second to unlimited vsync is off i set it to
windowed mode to a lot lower resolution this is 1470 by 918 because this does
take extra processing as you can see just as processing taking up to 45 of
the cpu now down to 40 percent so it kind of goes in waves so we'll see how
it reacts in terms of temps while playing it at these lower resolution
settings so far already i just started i'm looking at like 90 degrees celsius
92 it's heating up fairly quickly because it's using oh my goodness 100 of
the gpu and a good amount of the cpu as well 102 degrees now so it's definitely
heating up opening this up it looks like it's already throttling looks like we're
under 1200 gpu clock speed around under 6 watts as
well so it's already throttling down
the gpu because you can see average was just at 7 watts peak at 8.83 and just
like that first time it is throttling down the temps are going down to 85
degrees right now looking at the terminal oh my goodness look at that the
gpu is down like crazy 690 700 under 3 watts right now it is seriously
throttling it because of course this is using crossover which also has the
translation going on using up what 45 percent of the cpu and 100 gpu this is
where you're gonna see major throttling i could definitely tell that the fps is
not 60 it's not smooth unfortunately i don't see
how much it is right now but looking at these clock speeds under 700 megahertz
that's basically two times throttling from the 1400
that it should run at at full load and look at that the gpu is under 3 watts
it's basically running in like low power mode right now and of course the temps
are down to 77 degrees celsius because i don't know it just heat soaked and it
throttled it's not letting it get more power to it to heat it up more and
i am getting some glitchiness as well nowhere near 60 fps so it looks like the
gpu is kind of stabilizing now around 750 megahertz and right under 3 watts
cools oh my goodness what is going on now that we're fighting people this is
not a good experience it's kind of like glitchy uh the fps is not good oh my
goodness you guys seen this this is not smooth this machine feels pretty hot
actually you know what i'm gonna grab my thermal camera look at that 45 46
degrees celsius right there in the center
this thing is heat soaked this is crazy that is very interesting because the
temps on the gpu clusters are only 77 degrees celsius so even though it slowed
down the clock speeds and the temps as you can see look at that 750 megahertz
that's almost two times throttling the gpu down a 3.3 watts even though it
throttled the actual chassis is still really hot 46 degrees celsius nowhere
near a solid smooth 60 but at least it's playable right now
in this case it's still playable but the chassis is hot so what this tells us is
that if you're gonna be doing some gaming like crossover something that's
more serious and not kind of a lighter load like those other games i played
you're definitely gonna want the m2 macbook pro so you can at least not have
up to two times throttling on this m2 macbook air and final update
you can see basically 700 megahertz three watts on the gpu like remember we
used to get up to 10.5 watts as soon as we turned on world of warcraft that's
around how much you should be running at full load on your gpu but look how much
it throttles this is just insane so it just sucks to see that
if you didn't have the throttling the fps would have been much better
in this case but it's not and now let's move on to playing some grand theft auto
5 that was definitely fun playing the witcher 3 once again crossover 21 is
basically the only way that you can do that playing windows games on mac os so
use that code max tech 25 if you want to buy crossover so here we are in grand
theft auto 5 playing through the very beginning which is a little bit
annoying but
so far it looks like the gpu is not going up to 100 usage it's sitting at 89
while the cpu is being used quite a bit 55
but the temps are not going up as i can tell right now let's
look at the terminal looks like the gpu usage is very low at least when i had it
open so the temps are not
reaching very high so far so the temps are now starting to heat up a little bit
80 to 83 degrees celsius but nowhere near as much as it had in a witcher 3
because i think the gpu still is not using 100 for some reason which
could actually be really good experience is definitely not perfect though i don't
know if this is from rosetta and now even in this section it looks like it's
able to handle the game without going up to 100 gpu usage which is not allowing
it to heat up that fast which is interesting so i do want to take a look
at the oh it does look like the gpu was not being used at maximo is only using
about 1.3 watts surprisingly so it might have actually been throttling already so
it seems like although gta 5 isn't running perfectly it's still running
decently well probably not perfect 60 fps with the little glitches but it is
not thermal throttling and heating up like the other game witcher 3 did so
definitely not bad all right now with all those games out of the way i'm
honestly pretty impressed because it handled world of warcraft pretty well it
did throttle down the clock speeds but it didn't lose that much in terms of fps
because the new gpu cores are pretty efficient so they do a decent job now
league of legends and cs go those games were fine especially league of legends
no issues at all so if it's any light game like that the m2 macbook air should
be able to handle it now when we started playing witcher 3 that is when we
started seeing some significant thermal throttling with the clock speeds going
down basically getting cut in half so if you're doing any kind of like extreme
aaa games especially stuff with crossover you do not want to be on this
m2 macbook air especially since this model right here has 16 gigs of ram five
12 gig ssd which is basically minimum if you're going to be doing gaming and it
has the 10 core gpu for 1700 so i'd recommend just paying the extra
50 bucks getting the 14 inch because you're gonna have the fan there's gonna
be no issues i would not recommend going with the base m2 macbook pro even with
the fan because you're getting the old design you don't want to deal with that
but with all that said here's my conclusion if you're doing light gaming
like league of legends and other stuff that's optimized well then this thing
should be fine you might experience a little bit of throttling but what you
could do is you can cap the fps at 60 turn down the settings you'll probably
be fine with this m2 macbook air but i still recommend going for the 14 inch
because it's only 50 bucks more than this model so hopefully you guys enjoy
this gaming review and if you did go ahead and click the circle about to
subscribe help us reach a million subs before the end of the month thanks for
watching guys and definitely check out those two videos we'll see you in the
next one [Music]