- Gaming, gaming, gaming!
At Apple's event where they announced this,
the 2023 Mac Mini,
they were very clear on one thing,
Apple Macs can game.
Now, as someone who has tried to game on Mac
a fair few times over the years,
I wanna actually find out, here in 2023,
with the newfound power of Apple silicon
and an Apple M2 chip, can you actually game?
To see how feasible this entire idea is to begin with,
I actually wanna start with the lowest common denominator,
a 13-inch 2020 MacBook Air base model.
My theory is this.
If I can game at all on this MacBook,
then it is 100% going to be better on a more powerful system
like the Mac Mini or the new MacBook Pros
or the Mac Studio or whatever the case is.
If it works here, then it sort of proves the case
that gaming is remotely feasible.
So first of all, again, I've got my MacBook Air here,
but I need some peripherals.
Kinsey, what do I need?
- Well, you're not gonna game on a touch pad.
- Thank you, I appreciate that.
- And you're not gonna plug that in
because the thing's got two USB-Cs.
- I think for best results,
I should probably get a power adapter.
First up, we have what might be the poster child
for Mac gaming, "Resident Evil: Village."
Now this is a game
that Apple specifically called out in their keynote,
and with one copy purchased from the Mac App Store,
important because I think
that you have to get the Mac App Store version
to have the full Apple goodness.
The whole reason I wanted to do this video
is cause I saw a Digital Foundry video
where they looked at playing "Resident Evil: Village"
on M1 Macs on ultra, and it was surprisingly good.
They were really impressed.
I was like, "Huh,
maybe it's time I should give Mac gaming a second try."
I will say, this does look like a more traditional PC game.
So I've got a wide variety of settings in the game.
V-sync on. I'm gonna turn that off just to see.
And MetalFX upscaling.
So MetalFX is one of the main selling points
of running a fully native game.
Because essentially it's very similar to something
like NVIDIA's DLSS
where we'll use some of that neural engine processing
to upscale your image
to get surprisingly close to native results
but with a far better frame rate
than if I was actually running
at say like 1080P or something.
So we'll try it.
Supposedly, this is going to be very helpful.
Aw, it's a baby.
Whoa.
Whoa, did you see that?
It literally loaded instantly.
The loading screen was up for like a second.
So I'm playing it 1080P.
I will say, I can see a little bit of upscaling,
but, honestly, the scene is so dark, it does not look bad.
But I will say, to my eyes, this is very smooth.
If this is the kind of performance that you can expect
out of a base model MacBook Air,
it is incredibly impressive.
All right, goodnight, baby.
- [Assistant] Press F to put asleep (laughs)?
(Kinsley laughs)
- If only were that easy.
Now, next, I actually wanna try something
that should work very well.
"Dolphin" is an incredibly popular emulator
for a wide variety of devices, and from what I've heard,
it works very well on M1 Macs.
So let's launch it. Let's see what we got.
I'm gonna leave most of these things to default
'cause I'm not entirely sure how to set it up,
but let's just see what happens.
I mean, it's working.
I will say though,
running this at 3X resolution looks really clean.
Okay, I don't know how to do anything
besides walk left and right, but it's fine though.
Frame rate, I will say we're not locked at 60.
We're losing a little bit, but, also,
I can just not run it at three times native resolution too.
This is very, very solid.
Now there are other larger games
that are being optimized for Apple Silicon,
but that list is incredibly small right now.
"No Man's Sky" is something that Apple has talked about
that is on the way.
But one of the actual best ways of playing games,
which are 100% certified to work,
is actually again through the Mac App Store,
but playing iPhone and iPad games.
Now, unfortunately, the majority of games
that are made for iOS and iPad OS do not work,
but some do, including "Asphalt 9."
Okay, controller connected.
So I'm definitely playing it in like windowed mode.
So, wait, is really the only thing you do
is you just hit nitro and then you drift?
There's no other controls of any kind?
- [Assistant] It's like "Temple Run," but cars.
- "Asphalt 9" technically works.
Maybe not like a hardcore game,
but we'll put that in the category
of things you can do on a Mac.
(wondrous music)
(air whooshing)
- Now Austin has clearly forgotten one crucial thing
when it comes to Mac gaming, that's Apple Arcade,
which can work on any Mac
regardless of whether it's an M1, M2,
even works on your phone.
(wondrous music)
- So now, my friends, we have moved on to Steam.
Oh yeah, so it automatically sorts it
by games that are supported.
So "War Thunder," "Rust," "Elder Scrolls," "Civ."
I mean, there are a fair few, "City Skylines."
There are a fair few games that do have Mac support.
Now, I will say that a lot of what we use
for this video was based on the Apple Gaming Wiki,
which we'll have linked in the description.
Let's start out with "Hades."
Now this is a game that is going to be running
through Rosetta, correct?
- [Kinsley] Yes.
- If you're not familiar, Rosetta is the compatibility layer
that allows non-optimized games to run on Mac.
Now it's more than just games, right?
A wide variety of software uses this.
Although at this point,
we're over two years into this sort of M1 transition,
most Mac apps are supported.
However, most games are not.
Oh, dude, this is completely fine.
Now I will say without my frame rate counter,
I don't think we're at 60 here.
Now fair enough,
this is not the most demanding game in the world.
But considering that this is a game
which was never designed to run on M1,
the fact that we are running through Rosetta
through a translation layer to make this work,
two thumbs up.
This is totally solid.
- [Assistant] It says a lot about Rosetta.
- It does.
And, again, keep in mind I got eight gigs of RAM,
which is shared between my CPU and my GPU,
meaning that none of these games have all that much headroom
to work with, and yet, largely pretty good.
Now, my friends, let's go a little spicy.
A walk to the dark side, my friends.
Using the power of Parallels,
we can in fact launch Windows 11,
which actually launched very quickly.
In the past, if you wanted to run Windows on your Mac,
you used Boot Camp, which essentially
would just create a separate partition on the drive.
So you'd split your SSD in half,
and then you would have Mac OS or Windows,
and you'd boot into one or the other, and it was all great.
However, when Apple made the transition
over to Apple silicon,
there was no longer the ability to run Boot Camp.
And for a little while there, there was just no ability
to really run Windows at all on your Mac.
However, Parallels now has surprisingly good support
for Mac OS, specifically on Apple silicon, and Windows 11.
Now, the first thing I wanna try is pulling up Task Manager.
What is actually Parallel's pass through?
So Parallel sees four of my CPU cores,
four my Apple silicon CPU cores,
3 gigs of RAM, plus an additional 1.5 gigs
that's locked off for my virtual GPU.
This is not going to work well.
I will tell you this straight up.
Hello, what is this?
- This is another SSD,
that one that has Windows games on it.
- Shout out to not having enough storage
on our device either.
Look, we're just trying to make sure this works.
You know, I will say before we even get into gaming,
this Windows install running on Mac,
actually, surprisingly like not bad.
"Skyrim," this seems like a bad idea.
- [Kinsley] Hey, Bethesda.
- [Assistant] Okay!
- It's running in windowed mode, which I don't like,
but that's fine, that's fine.
Is this actually gonna work?
- [Kinsley] (laughs) Maybe.
- [Austin] Oh my god, it works!
Oh, it works!
- [Assistant] Why is this surprising?
- Why would this work?
It's running in Windows through virtualization!
Like I'm legitimately surprised. I did not think.
I thought that we were just gonna try this,
and it was just gonna immediately crash out.
So to be clear, this was not a plug-and-play experience.
- [Kinsley] It was not.
- Kinsey definitely had to spend some time
making sure the DirectX functions here.
- All of those kinds of DirectX and things
that you might just automatically have or expect to have
on your gaming laptop or PC would not be there.
And so these games will be like, "Hey, where's this?"
And you're like, "Oh!"
So that's definitely a consideration.
- [Assistant] Yeah.
- You're signing up for an adventure.
- [Kinsley] Yes.
- Don't come complaining to us when it doesn't work.
(Kinsey laughs)
So we know what the MacBook Air is capable of,
and while it's not great,
it's kind of better than I expected.
Let's try gaming on the new M2 Mac Mini.
So actually I have two different Mac Minis to test.
So the one that's connected right now is the base model.
So this is $600.
It's got the M2 processor
with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage.
Essentially, this should be a moderate step up
from the MacBook Air.
I also have an M2 Pro Mac Mini.
Now this is significantly more expensive. It is $1,300.
But for that money,
we get not only 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gig SSD,
but importantly, it has the M2 Pro chip.
So I'm gonna start out by playing "Resident Evil: Village,"
which again, ran fairly well on the MacBook Air.
We also now have an actual heads up display,
which is going to give us our frame rate and whatnot,
which is gonna be helpful because last time,
I was kind of playing in the dark, quite literally.
Let's just leave it on the exact same settings
it was on the MacBook Air.
1080P, medium settings with MetalFX upscaling.
Seems reasonable.
Okay, instantly on the Mac Mini,
we are pushing 93 frames per second.
Wow, that's smooth.
Yeah, so looking at the baby,
especially when you look at like the texture and the hair,
I mean, that's still pretty good.
You know what I'ma do?
- [Kinsley] Turn it up.
- I'm gonna turn it up, exactly.
Let's see what we can do here.
I'm gonna just turn off the upscaling.
Our frame rate has dipped,
but still it's 60 to 70 FPS right now.
And mind you, I will say, perceptively,
I mean, maybe if I look at the baby's hair,
yeah, it's like a little bit more detail.
But running that MetalFX upscaling is not bad.
I would play more, but I'm scared.
I don't, it's too spooky. (spooky music)
It's too spooky.
Next up, we are going to attempt
to play "Euro Truck Simulator 2."
This is a game which is not optimized.
So this is a Mac game, but it's running via Rosetta.
So we'll see what we got.
- [Kinsley] You're currently on a mission
to deliver some concrete stairs. (laughs)
- Concrete stairs, okay, well the stairs must be delivered.
So we are running at 1080P on high settings here,
and we've got 50 frames per second.
If I was a little bit more serious about this,
I'd probably turn the graphic settings down
just a little bit
'cause it does seem like there's a little bit of latency.
I also would not be using W-A-S-D to control my truck
on the streets of
Europe?
- [Kinsley] Luxembourg. (laughs)
- Luxembourg, my favorite of the European cities.
So one of the big advantages
of going from the MacBook Air to the Mac Mini,
in addition to the fact
that the M2 is just an upgrade over the M1,
is actually more so in the cooling.
So with the MacBook Air, there's no fan whatsoever.
So while it had pretty decent performance,
you know, we were obviously gaming
for a longer period of time,
we were certainly leaving a little bit on the table.
But with this Mac Mini with an actual fan,
we should be able to play like this, I mean, in perpetuity.
What I really wanna do is fire up the M2 Pro Mac Mini
'cause remember, this has not only a lot more performance
with the M2 Pro chip, but almost more importantly,
it's got 16 gigs of RAM,
which means that some of those Parallels issues
we are dealing with earlier should be much less noticeable.
Alright, we have got ourselves a copy of Windows 11
running in Parallels now.
Now I'm curious if we open up Task Manager,
before I think we had, what was it?
Like three or four gigabytes of RAM for Windows.
It was not a lot.
This time, Windows now has 6 gigabytes of RAM to play with,
and the GPU looks like it has, yeah,
3 gigs as well, which is shared.
That is gonna be a big difference.
Another upgrade with the M2 PRO
is that it's got a HDMI 2.1 port,
which means that I'm pushing 4K at 144 hertz
on this monitor right now.
I'm not gonna game it 4K 144, but I could.
I will just take 30 though. (laughs)
So we're gonna try to launch "Skyrim"
at 1080P, medium settings, with TAA enabled.
So let's do it.
Before, I would say, we were running
at like 480P or 554P and like less than 30 FPS.
Oh, okay, that's better.
Wow!
- Wow!
- This actually works!
You can really run "Skyrim" on anything!
Like, okay, yeah, maybe we're dipping a little
to like the low 50s when I like start looking around,
but like compared to where the Mac Air was,
this is a night and day difference.
We can actually play Windows games via Parallel on a Mac.
(air whooshing)
The proof of concept is here.
There's really only one more thing left to try.
Yes, my friends,
it is time to build ourselves a PC in Windows on our Mac.
(laughs) It's a little dumb.
So "PC Build Simulator" is defaulting to ultra at 1440.
Sure, and this is at, look that.
We're getting 40, 50 frames per second.
Well, okay, a little choppy.
And by a little choppy, I mean very choppy.
You know what? I'm gonna be honest with you.
I've never played "PC Build Simulator," ever.
I'm gonna use the computer.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on.
Lemme just wrap my head around this for a second.
(Kinsey laughs) Okay.
So I am using Windows in a game running on Windows on a Mac.
(Austin laughs)
Now I'm gonna go back out to my finder.
(laughs) Oh, this is great.
This is great.
Look, am I gonna tell you
that you should go out and buy a Mac to game?
No, I am not.
But if you would've asked me a year ago,
"Could I game on Mac," especially with Apple silicon,
my answer would've generally been, "Not really."
I would like to see, a year from now or two years from now,
how far things go, but the potential is here.
'Cause when you look
at what we've got out of "Resident Evil,"
for a game that they actually put the time and effort
to design specifically for Apple silicon,
or at least to do a proper port of,
the performance is incredibly impressive.
It just comes down, I think,
to whether or not developers want to spend the time,
the money and the effort to actually get it up and running.
If you're interested in learning anything else
about the new Mac Minis, we've actually done a video,
which is gonna go live very shortly,
over, not only on Denki discussing a little bit more
of the review side of things,
but also we've done an entire This Is
on why this specific M2 model
of 600 bucks is an incredibly good deal.
My friends, it's a brave new world of Mac gaming. (laughs)
I'll go back to building my PC on my Mac via Windows
'cause it just makes me really happy.