What do you think? The MacBook Pro is a good enough gaming notebook for me

Mondo games Updated on 2024-02-15

New Year's goods are not closed

I'm not a hardcore gamer. But like a lot of people, I love dabbling in games everywhere, and I've found some of my favorite remote games lately, including Baldur's Gate 3 and Civilization VI.

When I fully converted from Windows to MacBook Pro, I didn't even expect my limited gaming needs to be met.

I found myself thoroughly enjoying the experience of playing games on the M3 Max MacBook Pro 16". It's not enough to please gamers, but it's enough to get me excited about the future of Mac gaming.

Historically, Macs weren't great gaming consoles. Part of the reason is that Apple has shied away from this issue in terms of both hardware and software.

One of the biggest changes to Mac gaming is the introduction of the Apple Metal framework, which gives developers access closer to GPU, potentially significantly improving gaming performance.

Metal has been around since iOS 8 in 2014 and first appeared on Mac in 2015 as OS X El Capitan. Metal launched its second generation in macOS High Sierra in 2017 and then released Metal 3 in 2022. The latest version adds MetalFX for high-performance upgrades, as well as anti-aliasing for the overall framework of graphics features. In addition, Apple is offering a new game porting toolkit that will help developers port their games to macOS more easily.

Metal 3 first appeared in macOS Ventura, just a year before the release of Apple's M3 chipset, with a major upgrade to the GPU section. In addition to adopting a new 3nm process and introducing improved CPU performance, M3 adds dynamic caching, mesh shader support, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

All in all, in theory, these developments should make it easier for game developers to attract the platform.

But hardware is also key. Until recently, Macs didn't have enough GPU power to run many of the most demanding AAA games. The M3 Max in particular changes that. With up to 40 GPU cores onboard, it's incredibly powerful. It's so fast that it performs up to twice as well as the M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores in some GPU-intensive benchmarks.

It's unclear how the M3 Max compares to the fastest NVIDIA and AMD discrete GPUs. In creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, it is faster than high-end Intel CPUs and high-end NVIDIA RTX 4090. This performance doesn't necessarily translate into gaming, but by all accounts, it's as fast as the mobile NVIDIA RTX 4070, capable of handling some 1440p games.

In addition to the raw performance, the MacBook Pro has two other major advantages over Windows gaming laptops. First of all, it's quieter and cooler than a regular gaming laptop. It doesn't sound like a jet engine and will ruin the immersion of the game. Secondly, you can play the game unplugged in and enjoy a longer battery life, which opens up possibilities for where you can enjoy the game. Add to that a gorgeous HDR screen and killer speakers, and you have an unbeatable machine that's as good for gaming as it is for movies.

Hardware and platform advancements like this take time to trickle down to developers and game releases. As a result, the number of AAA games arriving on macOS is still relatively low compared to Windows. But that doesn't mean the games on your MacBook Pro can't be satisfying.

Some people may think that Apple Arcade is the best Mac game**. However, as far as I know, this was accidental – and mostly by mistakes. When I did a quick search, I found a range of iPhone and iPad games that cater to casual gamers, as well as some older games like Resident Evil: Village, which was released in 2021.

If you're looking for the latest games like Assassin's Creed, Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto, and more, you won't find a game for macOS. First-person shooters seem to be the platform's biggest weakness, and it's a big hole in the ecosystem. They're the ones I play the least often, so I don't have a problem.

Right now, gaming on Mac is better than ever. Obviously, it still has a long way to go before it evolves into something as powerful as Windows supports. Until we see a wider range of games, hardcore and competitive gamers won't be satisfied. But as things stand, almost anyone can try something, and I'm hopeful that things will turn out.

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