- [Soldier] Contact, contact.
(gunfire)
(inaudible) move in.
A shitload of 'em.
We need that door open now.
Give us some cover fire.
Get inside, go go go.
- [Narrator] I don't know why ASPYR
ported Black Ops 3 to Mac,
because the game is four years old now.
Initially released on the 6th November 2015,
the team ported the game to MacOS on the 4th April 2019.
But regardless of this, I'm happy it's here.
ASPYR are known for their previous catalog of
Call of Duty Mac titles, including Call of Duty, Black Ops
and the Modern Warfare series.
In fact, the last COD to support MacOS was Modern Warfare 3
released back for Mac in 2014.
For this review, we have tested Black Ops 3
on two different Mac models in the office:
an iMac Retina 5K 27 inch from late 2015,
and a MacBook Pro 13 inch from late 2018,
which is connected to an eGFX Breakaway Box,
and RX560 GPU Card,
loaned to me by Intraware,
Australian Sonnet Distributor, and AMD Australia.
Thank you.
And Macdem HQ has showed his bashbox results
from a MacBook Pro 13 inch from late 2016.
Before we have a look at the performance,
let's go over the Mac features for Black Ops 3 on Mac.
So Black Ops 3 on Mac is a 64bit app
that is launched with Metal support.
In addition, Black Ops 3 is available for Mac on Steam.
There is currently no announcement
on the Mac App Store version yet.
The Steam version offers cross platform play between
Windows PC and Mac.
Plus it offers full controller support
Black Ops 3 for Mac supports
all the content available for Windows PC,
i.e. the multiplayer Starter Pack,
which is a Multiplayer-only version of Black Ops 3.
The Zombies Chronicles Edition,
which includes the full base game,
and the Zombies Chronicles content expansion.
And last, the Zombies Deluxe Edition,
which includes the full base game,
Season Pass,
and the Zombies Chronicles Content expansion.
Up next we have the Mac minimum system requirements.
The operating system needs to be 10.13 High Sierra or later,
Your CPU needs to be an Intel Core i5 with 4 Cores.
Your CPU Speed needs to be 2.3 Ghz.
Your RAM needs to be 8 GB.
Disk Space, you are going to need 150 GB of storage,
it's going to take up a lot.
The Video Card needs to be an ATI M290X or better.
And your video ram should be 2 GB.
Please note, NVIDIA and Intel GPU's
are not officially supported here.
Okay, so here we have the Mac performance.
First up, the iMac Retina 5K, 27 inch from late 2015.
So I'm playing it at a resolution of 1920x1080.
My quality preset is set to High,
Vsync is on, and my frame rate is about 60 fps.
Honestly this is really impressive.
I was really surprised that it was able
to run at this performance level,
if that's what you wanna say.
This machine is getting old now, and it's really impressive
that it is running this well here in the first place.
Up next we have my 13 inch MacBook Pro from 2018.
As expected, since this doesn't have an AMD graphics card,
it doesn't run great.
I'm playing it at a resolution of 1280x720,
the quality preset is set to Low,
Vsync is off, my frame rate is about 45.
So it is completely playable here,
but it just doesn't look very nice in my opinion.
However, when I connected the eGPU,
I am able to play it at a resolution of 1080p.
My quality preset is set to High,
Vsync is on, and my frame rate is about 60 fps.
So really great.
Since this an AMD eGPU it runs like a charm.
Really good.
And last, we have Mac Game HQ's
MacBook Pro 13 inch from late 2016.
Yep, it doesn't run great here.
The resolution is 1280x800,
the quality preset is Low, Vsync is off,
and the fps is about 20.4. So yeah.
Basically, in a nutshell, if you don't have
an AMD graphics card this game is not gonna run great.
And this is a shame, obviously,
I know a lot of you will want to play this game
on lower end machines,
but it's just not going to work well for them.
But we need to keep in mind that
this is a very graphically demanding game,
so it makes sense that
it will only support AMD graphics cards.
Moving on,
I noticed three problems with this game on MacOS.
The biggest issue with Black Ops 3 in general,
is that it is not very active today in 2019.
Which can be expected because
this game is four years old now
and people are more active in recent COD titles.
So, if you're looking for an active multiplayer game,
then you might be disappointed here,
however keep in mind that the Zombies Mode
is much more active compared to the main multiplayer mode.
Next, the storage space for this game
is incredibly large at 150 GB,
this means if you have a Mac model with a small SSD
you'll need to make plenty of space available for this game,
even worse if you have a 128GB SSD,
you won't even be able to download the game.
But then again, those Macs,
which have very small SSD capacity,
or 128GB of SSD,
which would be the baseline MacBook Air,
MacBook 13 inch MacBook Pro etc.
These Mac's won't even be able
to run the game very well anyway,
with their inbuilt integrated graphics card,
unless you have an eGPU connected,
and they support Thunderbolt 3.
And last, I noticed a strange texture issue
on my 5K iMac,
with the character models.
If you look closely you can see it on their bodies,
there's lots of black textures
that's just reappearing everywhere.
I don't know why this occurred on my Mac model here,
but I just thought I'd point it out.
It's not game breaking but it's there.
So, perhaps this release of Black Ops 3 for MacOS,
is to test the waters for more recent
Call of Duty Mac releases?
Or maybe Black Ops 3 was planned for MacOS much earlier,
but there was development issues.
All this is unknown. It's great to see that
Activision's partnership with Aspyr is
still active and well.
In my opinion, guys, if ASPYR was able
to port this Call of Duty game to MacOS,
then I believe they have the potential
to port other recent games to the franchise as well.
Regardless, I'm still happy Black Ops 3 is here for us,
as it is offers a solid campaign and online-modes,
however, those online modes aren't very active
so keep that in mind.
Anyway, are you guys going to
pick up Black Ops 3 for your Mac?
Let me know in the comments below.
If you found this video useful, you know what to do.
Please leave a like and subscribe
if you want to see more reviews for Mac games.
Thanks for watching.
Bye bye.