But don’t worry – these games did push the boundaries of what my Mac was capable of (yep, it went about that well).
My initial goal was to test huge, recent AAA games like Elden Ring, Halo, Cyberpunk, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc. I’m going to try to cover everything in this post, starting with the games I tested. Gaming on M1 Mac: It works, but why not grab a gaming PC?.
Gaming on M1 Mac: Is it worth the effort?.Getting everything to “work” can be frustrating.There is some flickering, flashing, and lagging.Gaming on M1 Mac: How well do games run?.Gaming on M1 Mac: Using Crossover to play Windows games.Gaming on M1 Mac: There’s a big problem.Needless to say, I was hoping this would be an upgrade. The only prior experience I have with gaming on a computer is Terraria on my old 2017 MacBook, and it lagged so bad I gave up trying to play. But after watching gamers on Twitch, I think this is part of the PC gaming experience. There were a lot of issues with getting controllers to work, games not loading, etc. I feel it’s also worth pointing out that this is my first time gaming on a computer instead of a console, so there may be things that I complain about that aren’t exclusive to Mac. I don’t have any of the recent M1 upgrades (like M1 Max) nor do I have anything more than the basic amount of RAM. So you can consider this a very basic gaming on an M1 Mac experience. But I’ll get into both of those points later in the post.įor reference, I am running all of these games on a yellow M1 iMac with 1TB of storage and 8GB of memory/RAM. It was a lot of fun and, surprisingly, a lot of frustration. I logged at least ten hours on each of these games. And I didn’t just play through the beginning levels. In the past three weeks, I tested six different games. If the person in the ad can do it, why not me? During the M1 iMac announcement, it showed people successfully playing games like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (which we’ll be reviewing).
Part of the inspiration for this article came from Apple itself. Plus, I love playing video games, and since a PS5 isn’t going to arrive on my doorstep anytime soon, I wanted to see if I could treat my M1 Mac like a serious gaming machine. I’ve had my M1 Mac for about six months now, and as a writer, I don’t do anything on a daily basis that challenges it. A few weeks ago, I decided to give gaming on M1 Mac a serious shot.