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Apple Silicon Games - 400+ Game Performance Reports for Apple Silicon Macs
- Apocryphon 6y agoI guess Cyberpunk 2077 will have to wait for the M1X.
- fluffy87 6y ago0-1 FPS, playable.
- threeseed 6y agoIt works on the PS4 which is pretty old so M1 may be fine. Question is whether the M1X will support ray tracing.
- sjwright 6y agoOr a version that's optimised and natively compiled for the M1.
- tosh 6y agoas ultimate escape hatch it will be available via Stadia which also works well on the M1 Macs
- gamblor956 6y agoThis set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. It turns out the M1 is not the revelation Apple claimed. Great battery life? Maybe, when not running games or other CPU-intensive tasks. But performance champion? Not even close.
- sa1 6y agoI guess there were more reviews of the CPU rather than the GPU.
- gamblor956 6y agoReading through the performance reviews, it's clear that performance on M1 laptops is CPU bound, not GPU bound.
- Toutouxc 6y agoHow is that clear?
- dannyw 6y agoOr maybe graphics and gaming APIs haven’t been optimised in Rosetta2.
- tomc1985 6y agoOr maybe they optimized for specific workloads that crossplatform, not-built-for-mac games do not hit very hard Something I read stated they spent a lot of time optimizing the CPU for specific bottleneck scenarios, like NSObject creation. I don't know how that would map out to apps not written in Swift or Obj-C but my guess is "not very favorably"
- sjwright 6y agoIt’s astonishing that this reply is being voted down. It is surely improper and unreasonable to judge a CPU architecture based upon code running predominantly through emulation layers on an architecture for which few if any serious optimisations have been attempted. It’s worth remembering the experience of first generation Ryzen which had good general compute performance hampered in games by micro-optimisations for Intel chips.
- epaga 6y agoKeep in mind that many of these values are for a laptop (MacBook Air) with no fan at all (the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are only marginally better even with a fan). I doubt there is any other fan-less laptop in the world which can run Baldur's Gate 3 smoothly at 30 fps without a hitch.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- discordance 6y agoYou really think so? There are some very decent FPS recordings on Macbook Airs. Remember, that's a passively cooled 10W TDP chip. That's pretty incredible imo.
- m_eiman 6y agoWe’re not going to see the real capabilities of these devices until the apps and games have been optimized for them, and I’d guess that most developers won’t have the resources to do so when porting from somewhere else. The big game engines like Unity et al probably will though, so it’ll be interesting to see what they manage to do in the coming year or so.
- ajconway 6y agoKeep in mind these are benchmarks done on low-priced entry-level models of Apple hardware (about one third of them on a fanless MacBook Air), while running translated x86-to-arm binaries and probably translated direct3d-opengl (correct me if I'm wrong). Aside from that, the M1 would have been great even if Apple hadn't done the x86 support. The performance at native CPU-bound tasks is still incredible.
- coldtea 6y ago>This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. Yes, like running regular workloads for coding (compiling, etc), video editing, audio editing, photoshop, full Windows virtualization getting better scores than a Surface X, and other such "artificial" stuff. No, it just means the games are GPU heavy, and haven't been written natively for Apple Silicon, nor they take advantage of the graphics APIs, plus the GPU is lightweight (nobody said it's not in any review). Not to mention the performance is a huge improvement over the exact same Macbook Air's Intel model (with Intel GPU).
- numpad0 6y agoI’d interpret this as M1 Macs is still limited by iGPU and lacks proper dedicated GPU.
- sjwright 6y agoI'd interpret this as the inherent limitation of emulation and compatibility layers. It's pretty clear that the A1 GPU is pretty good as long as software natively targets it. Obviously it's not going to come close to dedicated GPU hardware, but I dare say it's going to be more impressive than people realise once we start seeing a few native ports.
- ralfd 6y agoYou miss that most games are listed as running under Rosetta 2, not natively. This is very impressive and you now can play games you couldn't before on the Air or mini! Yes: The M1 is not beating a dedicated GPU, but it does beat other integrated graphics. The next challenge for Apple is to provide similar performance to dedicated GPUs in the MBP and iMacs. This will be interesting as NVidia and AMD have tons of experience and IP. (IF Apple decides to make their own GPU, maybe they won't.)
- tosh 6y agoOne thing I'm especially fascinated about is that many gamers were sceptical about the 8GB and 16GB RAM and whether that will be enough for apps and specifically for gaming. The early reports show that when it comes to RAM there is no noticeable difference for most games regarding whether you have a M1 Mac with 8GB or 16GB. That in itself to me is remarkable and part of why I started the spreadsheet. To get to real-world performance for specific games/settings/specs and away to have something specific in addition to the (also interesting) theoretical discussions on what is enough RAM and whether you can game on an integrated GPU and so on. I hope this sheet helps answer some of it and will help more of it going forward.
- calcifer 6y agoThe games table seems to be very misleading. For example, for Alien Isolation you apparently get 7-12 FPS at 1440x900 resolution but somehow that's marked as playable. In fact, there are tons of entries for first/third person 3D games where <30 FPS is apparently playable.
- pwagland 6y agoThere are three entries for Alien Isolation, one gives a 30FPS (on a Mac mini), one gives 7-12FPS(on a MacBook Air) and a note of "Very slow and blurry, only 7-12 FPS, Effectively unplayable". The third says nothing useful. The game is rated as "playable". So you need to look at the notes and hardware carefully if this is important to you.
- LilBytes 6y agoThat's the point. Under absolutely no circumstance would any one (I mean this literally), describe a modern day shooter at 7-12 FPS to be playable. Does playable mean, it starts and loads? Or does it mean playable in the sense that, you feel satisfied and enjoy the experience? It's absolutely the latter when talking in the context of video games. And not the former. Edit: it even says so in the right hand side, Notes column. "Very slow and blurry, only 7-12 FPS, Effectively unplayable" That isn't "effectively", it absolutely _is_ unplayable.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simonh 6y agoPlayable just means it works at an acceptable performance on some hardware, which this game does. Yes there is some other hardware that it wont run acceptably on, but this is true of all games.
- tosh 6y agoGoing forward I think I will be able to provide personalized/contextualized views. Imagine: this is the list of games I own/care about: (5 games) this is the list of Macs I own/care about: (2 Macs) this would allow me to add a personalized view where you can compare performance for the games you care about across the Macs you own + the Macs or games you intend to purchase edit: This is part of the initial motivation for creating the spreadsheet people right now are wondering whether their games (and apps) will run at all on the new Macs and if so how that compares to what they see on their current Macs
- azalemeth 6y agoI really wish Apple would just sort out their graphics APIs. Proton & wine makes gaming on linux genuinely surprisingly performant: I have enjoyed several AAA games (and am continuing to do so). I really don't know why they do not like Vulkan or don't want to provide a compatibility layer for it. One of the games mentioned is Fallout New Vegas, which apparently gets 15 FPS outdoors, at the lowest graphics quality settings, in a game >10 years old. I've literally just finished that on my linux box, under proton, with the gog copy installing brilliantly under lutris and with a 3rd party higher-resolution texture pack. Apple are really shooting themselves in the foot. Also, from the article on a call of duty online game: > Everything felt smooth, works flawlessly in highest settings available, but only few minutes until your account get banned :( SoC power consumption is around 3.5W I'm not surprised that perhaps many devs naïvely assumed that if you're not running x64, you're a "cheater" [or in a VM, which apparently is often also "cheating"...sigh]. I'd be interested to know how many of the god-awful DRM schemes that BigGames like to run (like Denuvo) take to being emulated in crossover-or-wine-running-under-rosetta. I bet they don't like it!
- google234123 6y agoThey don't like it because allowing users to run in a VM would be amazing for cheaters. A VM provides direct memory access to the game frmo outside the VM and a trivial way to create a new computer if you are banned.
- tmpz22 6y agoDoes apple really care about cheaters in desktop games? That’s something for a games publisher or studio to care about. Especially in paid games cheaters would make apple money because they’d need to purchase new accounts to keep playing.
- google234123 6y agoApple doesn't care at all, game companies care so they block VMs.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
- unpopularopp 6y ago>15 FPS, playable That's funny.
- webmobdev 6y agoAnd most of these are at the lowest graphic settings.
- krzyk 6y agoIt is playable. Not great, but I managed to finish few 3D games with 15-20 FPS and it was fun. Not everything needs to be 120 FPS to be fun.
- krzyk 6y agoOK, so why would anyone think 15-20 FPS is not playable? Have you tried? I did and I assure you it is playable - I did it for few years, finished few games and wan enjoyable. So why I am downvoted?
- kllrnohj 6y ago30fps is widely regarded as the minimum playable FPS. If you personally found it OK that's great, but you're definitely in a small minority on that.
- krzyk 6y agoOK, for FPS maybe (but nowadays FPS games are slower than in the DOOM/Quake days - thanks to console controller), I only played DOOM (from 2016) on my laptop. I don't remember FPS, but I doubt it was better than in GTA V. For sure < 30fps is small for multiplayer games, but for single player is is quite enough (unless you get 1 FPS :)
- jasonmp85 6y agoI would straight-up get a migraine beneath 60fps at this point.
- hu3 6y agoarchived for future reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208065007/https://applesilicongames.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201208065007/https://applesili...
- dluan 6y agoThe only real benchmark for me is Football Manager, where M1 seems to do really well: https://community.sigames.com/topic/515765-fm20-performance-benchmarking-thread/ https://community.sigames.com/topic/515765-fm20-performance-...
- devwastaken 6y agoThis looks like a marketing piece. The M1 doesn't replace dedicated graphics power nor is the apple platform going to jump to 100W+ extra power usage to embed a proper nvidia chip. Unless a game performs at 60fps at the displays standard resolution without having to rip it's quality apart it is not an enjoyable experience. No doubt basic games like terraria or vanilla minecraft will work, same as intel HD.
- jrek 6y agoAs someone with a 2020 intel macbook air (i5) that uses it occasionally for gaming here and there, I can tell you that the reported performance in this database, if accurate, is a substantial improvement.
- gravelc 6y agoPlaying Batman Arkham City, which is a pretty 3rd person action RPG, at 1080p and 60fps on my base model Air. To me, that's astonishing.
- Toutouxc 6y ago> 60fps at the displays standard resolution This has been kind of problematic for MacBooks since the first retina model. They ship with HiDPI displays that are beautiful for text and video, but people don't seem to realize the resolution is just way too high for gaming on an ultrabook. I used to game in 900p comfortably on my Intel integrated 2013 MBP. In native 1600p the same titles would be a slideshow.
- sjwright 6y agoI don't understand the logic behind this complaint. What is so different about playing a game rendered at 900p on a 900p display and the same game rendered at 900p on a 1600p display?
- Toutouxc 6y agoExcept a minor loss of sharpness, no difference. I was pointing out the fact that expecting native-resolution gaming from a machine, whose display is totally overkill for its size (for gaming, that is), may not be the smart thing to do. And it was even more absurd in 2012 when people built gaming rigs with 1080p screens and suddenly there was an ultraportable with a 2560x1600 screen (that was so-so usable for 720p or 900p light gaming).
- unicornporn 6y agoSo the only native games are iOS games? We'll have to wait awhile for Silicon gaming...
- navjack27 6y agoIs something wrong with Rosetta for games?
- sjwright 6y agoThere is if your goal is to make judgements upon hardware performance.
- Liquid_Fire 6y agoWorld of Warcraft has a native version now, apparently. But that's not exactly a long list.
- tosh 6y agoRosetta 2 seems to work well for most games seeing performance way beyond what Intel Macs with integrated GPU were capable of. There are a few games like World or Warcraft that already come with native support and similar to apps there are many games where native versions are expected to become available within the next days and weeks. So yes, it is still early but out-of-the box the M1 Macs do really well compared to the previous models.
- unicornporn 6y ago> performance way beyond what Intel Macs with integrated GPU were capable of. That doesn't say much though.
- rodnim 6y agoDiablo 3, playable yes, runs well. Diablo 3, playable no, unable to launch. So basically your mileage may vary, alot, making this whole list a bit....questionable. =/
- tosh 6y agoYes, it is still early and "it depends" which is exactly why I started the spreadsheet in the first place. Some games like CS:GO don't start using Big Sur 11.0.1 but are playable using the Big Sur public beta 11.1 The idea of the spreadsheet is to provide this context and it gets frequently updated with more reports and more context (and as game developers ship new versions and as Apple ships new versions of the OS).
- rodnim 6y agoThen I would say THAT is the information you should highlight in the spreadsheet. THAT is actual, useful information. Two entries completely contradicting each other without any further information of why is not very useful. :)
- navjack27 6y agoYeah I played a bunch of games on my mac mini Check out my convoluted thread from a lil bit ago https://twitter.com/Jack_Mangano/status/1332852433308028929?s=19 https://twitter.com/Jack_Mangano/status/1332852433308028929?...
- tosh 6y agobtw Hades should work by now, I just got a report about it
- SigmundA 6y agoWonder if any of these are suffering from the high pooling rate issue for gaming mice on Big Sur[1]? Not sure if it affects M1's. Just ran into this on my 16" Intel MBP after upgrading to Big Sur and attempting to play a game while using a Razer mouse. Basically many gaming mice in including my Razer have upwards of 1000hz poll rate by default and apparently macOS does not handle that well causing high cpu in WindowServer, however in Big Sur it really doesn't handle it well hitting 150% cpu in WindowServer and games seem to be almost unplayable do to massive stutter. Supposedly some improvement in 11.1 but still recommended to lower poll rate. Had to plug my Razer into a PC to run their config software to lower the poll rate to 125hz. Now everything runs great, didn't realize how much it was effecting everything and now games are smooth and playable again. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/juqcrd/calling_all_big_sur_users_here_check_windowserver/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/juqcrd/calling_all_big...
- tosh 6y agogreat question @ input hardware. I also have a Razer on Big Sur right now and it "works" but I have no idea which polling rate is used and the official app by Razer seems unsupported. Going forward I want to add more context about peripherals as well. The section about supported controllers is a first start (e.g. I was surprised that some controllers are supported on Macs but aren't on iOS etc)
- tosh 6y agohi, I just woke up to this thread! I am maintaining the website and will ship a few improvements this week to make it more usable & improving context information (like OS version, game version, CrossOver version etc) Thanks a lot for the feedback and for checking it out. Two things I'm currently thinking about are a) how to further improve the site (what do you care about? which questions do you have?) b) how to reach people who might not be aware of the website yet (e.g. it got featured by @gruber on daringfireball recently and on /r/macgaming) but I guess there must be way more people interested in gaming on the Mac out there. Any ideas appreciated! I'm also on twitter at @__tosh (two underscores)
- neogodless 6y agoI was looking at this for StarCraft 2 and Diablo III. Both have conflicting reports. Until they have like 90% success, I couldn't risk spending the money on Apple Silicon and not being able to play. I also love playing these (rather older, now) games on modern hardware with very high settings and very fluid framerates. Definitely envy the battery life of the new Macbooks, but until they have proper gaming, I cannot "have my cake and eat it, too." I'm in the middle of trying to find a Ryzen/Geforce/huge battery combo that I like, knowing full well that I'll be lucky to get much more than 4 hours doing non-gaming things off cord (with brightness where I prefer it.)
- tosh 6y agoFrom what I can tell both run better on the M1 Macs than on previous Macs with integrated GPU (if that helps). Other Blizzard games run extremely well like World of Warcraft, others like StarCraft Remastered do not yet run at all though. I am working on getting more game reports as well as getting the accuracy (& confidence) of the reports up. Perhaps I should add a feature for getting notified once a playability status changes from not playable to playable?
- krzyk 6y ago> I was looking at this for StarCraft 2 SC2 works fine on non-M1 macs, so I assume on M1 it will run even better.
- kllrnohj 6y ago> knowing full well that I'll be lucky to get much more than 4 hours doing non-gaming things off cord (with brightness where I prefer it.) Finding it in stock is a challenge but the Zephyrus G14 is exactly this. RTX 2060 GPU pairs perfectly with a 120hz 1080p display, and it still gets >8 hours on battery doing normal non-gaming stuff
- neogodless 6y agoMy main problems are: * I don't like when laptops get (too) hot on your lap * Due to a medical condition 144Hz is now the minimum * And my eyes definitely prefer larger screens So I have an HP Omen 15 but I may return it. (I can play older games without getting too warm, but the screen is really good, but not excellent. The barrel port power on the side bothers me about 5 times a day.) And I have a Legion 5 17" on order... which may never arrive. (In which case I hope I still have the Omen.) In either case, the battery life isn't going to be great doing non-gaming things though. But a friend has the G14 and loves it!
- rchaud 6y agoJust a UX suggestion for the site: The header row of the table should be fixed when the user types in a game title at the top of the page. That way the column titles will be visible even as you scroll. When I typed in a game name and was immediately navigated to the table, I had to guess what the columns represented.
- tosh 6y agogreat feedback, thanks a lot!