so the title it's a good question because apple directly compared their new macbook pros
to machines with the highest end nvidia 3080 mobile gpus now yes apple fanboys they didn't
specifically state that they meant in gaming but like it or not and i don't apple is one of
the biggest players in the gaming industry by net profit they might be the biggest but that's
in mobile gaming stupid little kid games real gamers play an rgb laden battle stations with
custom water loops g-fuel and hot enemy body pillows okay maybe that's just me but let's
be frank here apple computers have never been the best option for gaming the commodore 64 had
a better looking video output and significantly better sound capabilities than the apple ii the
1990s apple pippin gaming console was a total flop see my video on that here if you haven't already
and halo was destined to be a mac exclusive that's right at least until microsoft swept in and bought
bungie but then in 2005 apple announced that it was moving away from ibm's powerpc architecture
in favor of x86 by way of intel processors the same chips that were put into the majority of
competing windows pcs and for a good many years apple computers could game
even though they weren't made to game bootcamp brought support for native booting into windows
increasingly competent gpus made games run adequately on the majority of apple computers and
some models especially more recent ones run games legitimately great you get it great because cheese
the problem is that apple's machines have never been price competitive and gaming on a mac was
always a well if you have a mac you can game on it more than it was ever a legitimate recommendation
against the same priced gaming pcs max were never value kings well at least not until apple silicon
ships which have perverted pervasive price to performance perceptions pertaining to apple's
computers the new macbook pros ship with chips that unlike the m1 before them are anything but
polite retaining the m1's efficiency strengths but beefing up the quantity of cpu and gpu cores
to make hotter faster meaner machines and look you've already seen a number of reviews
and you've seen that yes these chips are fast and the m1 pro and max gpu cores in particular
can blaze through compute benchmarks but compute benchmarks and real work is lame okay yeah look
games are fun and we're going to get to those in a minute but you do need to get real work done and
that's where today's sponsor setup comes in setup simplifies and streamlines software acquisition
on the mac without having to go out and find stuff on the web let me show you how let's say i
accidentally deleted a file from one of our memory cards this happens more often than you'd think all
i have to do is type data recovery i guess and uh yeah check it out it suggests disk drill which is
a very popular mac app i press install and i get instant full functionality there's no trials no
more credit card numbers that are strewn across the web no more license management check it out
boom we're done setup provides full access to over 200 of the mac's very best apps using multiple
apps i can revamp my workflow from productivity to utility task management and so much more
think tasks with setup and try it free for seven days by clicking the link in the video description
to game on a pc you typically install steam from the launcher of your choice
you download your games and you're done on a mac it's not even remotely that simple now
make no mistake you can go out and download and install steam and acquire a number of games but
the quantity of binaries compiled for mac are few in my library of 408 games just 93 of them offer
native mac support and of those 93 just 14 of them are aaa titles now i'll talk about the performance
of the few resource intensive mac games in a bit but first what if you want to play games that are
not supported by mac os on old intel machines this was easy open up bootcamp install windows
but on apple silicon that's a no go you can't virtualize x86 operating systems only those
compiled for arm now you might be wondering well why doesn't camp support windows for arm that's a
thing right well there's a lot of reasons from drivers to architecture but the biggest reason
is that it is literally against microsoft's end-user license agreement which is honestly
hilarious apple has stated that they're open to the idea but they just can't but anyone who's
built a hackintosh knows that just because you can't doesn't mean you can't parallels for mac
supports the installation of windows 11 for arm now that's an iso that you can only get upon
acceptance into the windows insider program but it's pretty easy to get in and once you do it's
windows as of last year windows for arm brought support for 64-bit app emulation
and this year they announced arm 64 ec which is kind of similar to mac os's universal binaries but
for all intents and purposes what we have here is a mac virtualizing windows arm which when it plays
games emulates windows x86 it sounds like a recipe for disaster but it's kind of not at least not 100
of the time select titles like overwatch performed surprisingly well and even older more demanding
titles like the witcher 3 were perfectly playable at least in so much as you looked
at the fps counter and not the game the issue we ran into with a lot of titles and apparently it's
a pretty common one is that the game will just get hung up sometimes north of a second on what seems
like nothing it's usually when it tries to load a new asset into memory now i'm not sure if it's the
way that parallels works with directx or what but it's really weird let me give an example the first
time i perform a move or an attack in overwatch it's super slow it freezes but then once i've done
it once it's fine for the rest of the gameplay experience it's bizarre now is it game breaking
yeah it can be but it's usually just an annoying thing that fixes itself once the game has been up
a few minutes it's certainly playable even though it's not ideal now a more popular
method of gaming on mac os historically has been using a compatibility layer like wine now
the advantage to a compatibility layer as opposed to something like parallels is that it translates
system calls from a foreign system windows to mac os using native system calls rather than emulating
hardware in software and the theoretical advantage of this is better performance but here's the thing
using crossover an app built on wine resulted in some issues now the app has a perfectly nice gui
and there are a few options for enhanced gaming performance and there were instances in which i
found performance was indeed superior but they are few grand theft auto 5 is one such game that can
actually run quite well in crossover at least in so much as you're using a controller and
the latest nightly build of the software for whatever reason a keyboard and mouse combo would
result in glitching and the public release just straight up wouldn't launch the game
here's the problem i had to use a pirated version of gta 5 because the official steam version
uses the rockstar launcher which is unsupported in crossover and results in the game crashing this
was an overarching theme that i found while using both crossover and parallels most games just don't
work and anything that requires kernel-based anti-cheat yeah that's not going to work either
so apex legends fortnite those are all out ah and all directx 12 games fail to work as well so good
luck playing any aaa title from the last couple of years oh furthermore any game acquired from the
microsoft store or from the xbox app those fail to launch because of drm so no game pass for you
oh and most vulcan games also won't work in crossover and none of them work in parallels
oh and last yeah any game that uses stream output which is all unity 3d games those are not going
to work and oh yeah last thing if you have a 32-bit vulcan game those are going to run really
slow because molten vk which is the compatibility layer that is available for macos that translates
vulcan to metal that only works with 64-bit apps as of mac os catalina so crossover has to use
wine's old directx to open gl translation which is notoriously slow are you seeing a trend here
yeah it's not great now look there are sites out there like apple gaming wiki amongst others that
have allegedly tested compatibility with these software titles and various mac hardware but i've
found almost all of them to be woefully unreliable and inaccurate games that state they're supported
just straight up won't launch they're they're not and games that say they aren't supported
sometimes are like gta 5. now look i don't know that i've been direct enough so let me put it
like this playing windows titles on apple silicon max is such a nightmare and it's so unexceptional
if you even can manage to get it working that it's literally not even worth your time to try
so then quinn what the heck is with the title is this just clickbait deception
no there are three different categories where these new macs really do excel at
gaming hope i didn't break the screen on this the first is emulation of retro game consoles
we ran both xmu and original xbox emulator as well as the excellent dolphin gamecube and wii emulator
and they both work in a word perfectly i was a bit shocked but elated to see even the base model
macbook pro pushing 4k 60fps in titles like super mario galaxy 2. there are only a couple of games
now that don't work with dolphin so to have such a vast library of games right at your fingertips
is pretty cool even if it's in a little bit of a legal gray area now obviously
a real kind of natural emulation candidate would seem to be the nintendo switch but sadly the two
emulators on the market that currently exist don't yet support mac os at all intel or apple silicon
though yuzu has said that they're working on it and it'll come eventually so at what else can
a mac gain well you're gonna laugh because it is pretty silly but apple arcade and ios apps we are
now to the point where there are some legitimately impressive games available via apple arcade and
the app store like the gorgeous the last campfire published by hello games of no man's sky infamy
now look in these types of videos we tend to get super bogged down with specs and performance
but indie games are often some of the most fun out there and thanks to game engines like unity
and unreal many of these indie games have native mac binaries ready to go and they play amazingly
well on these new machines but look i know you've been waiting the whole video for the grand reveal
of aaa gaming performance on the mac or you just skipped here using chapter markers down
below in which case shame on you but with all the stars aligned so the m1 pro and ammo max hardware
with intentionally ported games to the mac so ones that run on apple's hardware accelerated
metal graphics api the question becomes can they match the performance of the best gaming
windows laptops and the answer is surprisingly yes and they actually do it so well that even a
disillusioned mac enthusiast like myself finds himself absolutely blown away in dirt rally at
4k ultra settings we were pushing well over 100 frames per second on the 16 inch macbook pro
with the 32 core gpu m1 max by contrast my aorus aero 15 with an nvidia 2070 super max q
wasn't even able to average 60 frames per second at the same settings moving to shadow of the tomb
raider we found that the 16-inch m1 max matched the performance of a razer blade with an nvidia
2080 max-q planet coaster a game ported recently to metal by asper runs like a dream as well as
i've ever seen it run on desktop pcs interestingly all of these games while still metal compatible
have not yet been ported to apple silicon they're running through rosetta so it's not unreasonable
given what we know about rosetta to assume an additional 10 to 15 performance bump from a
natively compiled binary amazing and that brings us to the most recent most tech demoy game of
them all mist which is natively compiled for apple silicon and uses metal now for a mac user like me
it's easy to be wowed by the performance of this machine i swear i don't have stockholm syndrome
but to a more discerning pc user you're probably thinking wow a mac finally matches the performance
of a gaming computer that's only several hundred dollars less expensive instead of several thousand
dollars less expensive great work guy but look i want to make a case for the macbook pro here
and that's in efficiency the total package tdp of the m1 is substantially and i mean substantially
nearly 200 watts less than the razer blade 15 advanced or gigabyte aero 15. i'm lucky to get
five hours of battery life on those machines just doing everyday computing
whereas on the 16-inch macbook pro i can get over 12 hours without a sweat and gaming
i was able to run the dirt rally benchmark on a loop at comparable brightness for hours and hours
longer than the other laptops and the last time i checked and i'm no expert the last
time i checked battery life was kind of important in a laptop but there are other advantages too
while other games or really any heavy gpu load can really get the macbook pro fans spinning
they are much quieter than the prior generation macbook pros and while they're absolutely audible
they are not anywhere near deafening like their pc counterparts factor in the significantly brighter
higher resolution higher refresh rate display amazing speakers that make her crystal clear
above the quietly worrying fan noise and suddenly this machine doesn't just look competent
but takes the crown for the most well-rounded powerful practical gaming laptop ever
until you remember the worst part of all of this and that's that the mac just doesn't have a good
catalog of games that support metal and even the ones that claim to support the mac via opengl
or vulkan through molten vk like cs go they often don't work on the m1 without googling for
weird fixes like modify and launch options this is insanely janky it doesn't matter how powerful your
hardware is and how streamlined your graphics apis are if nobody uses them and nobody does
apple has been pretending like gaming on macs has been a thing in their keynotes for a few years now
but that's a lie it's not if apple really wants to bring gaming to the mac and i think
that this hardware clearly demonstrates that they're capable of making that happen
then they need to pony up the cash and financially incentivize game studios like the rest of the
industry does to bring their games to the mac or they need to just accept defeat and re-implement
popular standardized graphics apis like vulcan which they have gotten rid of so that bringing
games to the mac isn't enormously tedious for game studios like it currently is today
because ultimately this has very little market share and very little return on investment now you
say that you care apple so show it because right now the only thing that you're showing is that you
like taking 30 of the mobile gaming industry's revenue in exchange for basically nothing
speaking of basically nothing i sure would like it if you basically gave me a like on
this video in exchange for nothing if you didn't like this video send it to someone
that you don't like because that costs you nothing and they're gonna hate it
thank you so much for watching this video please let me know have you been gaming on any macs and
if so what titles hello tomb raider i see you thank you so much for watching and as always
you