The OP should buy the M4 Max because I want to create disarray in this thread.🤡
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How foolish would it be to buy an M4 Max MBP for gaming ?
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...I did it.
Well, I did it a couple of years ago so it is M2 Max.
I got fed up with the direction that Windows is going, already had one foot in the door being an iPhone user for many years, and basically that was that.
Granted, gaming is not my *primary* use case for my laptop ... I do many things, including coding and some light photo work ... but I still spend some time gaming almost every day in the evening.
No Windows gaming for me anymore, my only gaming systems are this MBP and a Nintendo Switch.
What other users mention above is true — you can expect "most games" to not be available on macOS.
You can bridge the gap somewhat with translation layers, emulators, etc. if you are willing to tinker with that stuff. (And some patience, waiting for compatibility solutions to catch up with new releases.)
I make heavy use of CrossOver to run Windows games ("most" single-player games work — by that I mean "most" overall, but not necessarily "most" of the newest AAA releases).
I disagree with the above that M4 Max will perform like a GeForce 4090. It will perform fine, and you'll be able to have a decent gaming experience (for titles that can run to begin with), but it won't be able to do 4K/60 with max settings in the most graphically-intense games, and a high-end gaming laptop will still win out in terms of performance. (...But not without compromise in the form of weight / heat / noise / high power use / low battery life.)
Well, I did it a couple of years ago so it is M2 Max.
I got fed up with the direction that Windows is going, already had one foot in the door being an iPhone user for many years, and basically that was that.
Granted, gaming is not my *primary* use case for my laptop ... I do many things, including coding and some light photo work ... but I still spend some time gaming almost every day in the evening.
No Windows gaming for me anymore, my only gaming systems are this MBP and a Nintendo Switch.
What other users mention above is true — you can expect "most games" to not be available on macOS.
You can bridge the gap somewhat with translation layers, emulators, etc. if you are willing to tinker with that stuff. (And some patience, waiting for compatibility solutions to catch up with new releases.)
I make heavy use of CrossOver to run Windows games ("most" single-player games work — by that I mean "most" overall, but not necessarily "most" of the newest AAA releases).
I disagree with the above that M4 Max will perform like a GeForce 4090. It will perform fine, and you'll be able to have a decent gaming experience (for titles that can run to begin with), but it won't be able to do 4K/60 with max settings in the most graphically-intense games, and a high-end gaming laptop will still win out in terms of performance. (...But not without compromise in the form of weight / heat / noise / high power use / low battery life.)
It would be foolish to spend money to upgrade a Mac specifically for gaming and gaming only IMHO.
I'm old enough to have mac experience data back to macOS 7. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa 6400/200 and I was a teenager at the time. I remember having to go to the back of the computer store in Philly to find a game or having to go to Bundy to see what games were available... Mostly Star Wars games... Far fewer games than were on Windows machines at the time. Definitely not the stuff on the cover of and demo CD of PC Gamer (yep, I'm so old I remember when you got the latest game demos in the mail on CDs with magazines!).
That's a long way to say... Mac gaming is small potatoes. Apple has pushed it in their marketing lately, but they do that every so often. Showcase gaming on Macs and push that Macs can be taken seriously in that space. The truth doesn't align with the marketing though and likely won't for a very long time... If ever... Hasn't in my some 30 years of computing experience.
The biggest impediment is simply the way games are focused. If you're writing a AAA game today you're going to be able to largely use the same code targeting an XBox (which basically runs Windows with DirectX) and PC. PlayStation is an outlier, but Sony will pay handsomely and has a decent sized market to sell to. Then you get the second layer of it and you're now dealing with the financing from Nvidia and AMD to optimize games for their hardware AND the immense investments they make in driver optimizations for those games to make them run even better on their hardware.
It all boils down to a simple reality. Apple isn't willing to adopt industry standard graphics APIs like Vulcan nor is Apple wiling to spend heavily to attract AAA game companies. As a result, gaming on a Mac will always be a niche endeavor with few exceptions to that rule.
Obviously, we'll all spend our money how we like, but investing in a Mac purely for gaming is a fool's errand if you ask me.
I'm old enough to have mac experience data back to macOS 7. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa 6400/200 and I was a teenager at the time. I remember having to go to the back of the computer store in Philly to find a game or having to go to Bundy to see what games were available... Mostly Star Wars games... Far fewer games than were on Windows machines at the time. Definitely not the stuff on the cover of and demo CD of PC Gamer (yep, I'm so old I remember when you got the latest game demos in the mail on CDs with magazines!).
That's a long way to say... Mac gaming is small potatoes. Apple has pushed it in their marketing lately, but they do that every so often. Showcase gaming on Macs and push that Macs can be taken seriously in that space. The truth doesn't align with the marketing though and likely won't for a very long time... If ever... Hasn't in my some 30 years of computing experience.
The biggest impediment is simply the way games are focused. If you're writing a AAA game today you're going to be able to largely use the same code targeting an XBox (which basically runs Windows with DirectX) and PC. PlayStation is an outlier, but Sony will pay handsomely and has a decent sized market to sell to. Then you get the second layer of it and you're now dealing with the financing from Nvidia and AMD to optimize games for their hardware AND the immense investments they make in driver optimizations for those games to make them run even better on their hardware.
It all boils down to a simple reality. Apple isn't willing to adopt industry standard graphics APIs like Vulcan nor is Apple wiling to spend heavily to attract AAA game companies. As a result, gaming on a Mac will always be a niche endeavor with few exceptions to that rule.
Obviously, we'll all spend our money how we like, but investing in a Mac purely for gaming is a fool's errand if you ask me.
You need to be careful if you're getting a laptop with a 4090 as in some slimmer chassis it can throttle due to overheating, in a lot of cases the mobile 4080 can outperform the 4090 in extended use, best to look at some benchmarks on whatever laptop you intend to buy. As far as performance is concerned a good rule of thumb is that an NVIDIA mobile chip is roughly equivalent to the performance of the previous generation desktop card, so a 4080 laptop will perform like a 3080 desktop. If you're a serious gamer that plays a lot of different games then you really need to go PC over Mac. My Steam library has just over 1000 games playable on PC, but the same library only has around 225 when I look on my MacBook Pro.
Or get a notebook that has Thunderbolt and put a 4090 into that external GPU enclosure. At least you'll still have a mobile computer. Some years ago it was an effective solution, but I am not sure now whether the connection bottlenecks game play.
What you really need is a notebook with oculink. That promised a robust external PCI capability. Evidently PCI itself is distance sensitive, and highly vulnerable too, hence notebooks don't have external PCI connections (as far as I know). I think Lenovo was going to show a notebook with oculink but I don't know if it happened. Edit - they do sell some with oculink. But they say it provides 3080 performance. In a light notebook. They call it Thunderobot. If Lenovo do it, then maybe Razor etc might do it, and eventually it may be common. It sounds a great solution.
There is also the enabling of that port ie someone making an external PCI case that was compatible.
Of course putting in such a port would cost notebook makers money. So I checked Framework notebooks and they don't have such an option! Yet? Edit - they do seem to have a module for it. Whether it takes full advantage, I don't know. The Framework is a great idea IMO. Who else can buy a machine this year, and still have it performing great a decade from now? If some oligopolist PC maker doesn't buy them and shut them down.
Another thing: ensure the notebook you get has accessible CPU and GPU because the heat sinks are likely attached with cheap conducting paste and replacing them with top draw materials could make a big difference. Look too at ways to improve the cooling when playing. Both heat and power supply are the main bottlenecks that kill notebook performance.
I'm no expert either and you'd need one. I reckon a PC gamer site is the place to go to find out your best PC notebook solution. Such gamers would know all sorts of solutions. Few of us here would IMO.
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Thunderbolt is literally almost PCIe on a cable (with a couple of extra features).
Thunderbolt 3/4 40 MB/s
PCIe 4.0: 2 GB/s per lane (total 32 GB/s for x16).
PCIe 5.0: 4 GB/s per lane (total 64 GB/s for x16)
So PCIe is 60% faster than Thunderbolt 3 (4 is not relevant here)
Thunderbolt 5 80 GB/s - and there are not external PCI docks with T-5 yet and very few drives etc.
PCIe 6.0: 8 GB/s per lane (total 128 GB/s for x16)
So PCIe is also 60% faster than even Thunderbolt 5 promises to be.
PCIE is coming and following form, will double again, so that will be 256 GB/s for x16 so it will be 3.2 times faster. In a PC that also means less latency that externals.
The issue I presume is whether 40 MB/s is a bottleneck to gaming compared to an internal (but restricted and slower than its name or branding indicates) notebook GPU.
We're a fair way off the gaming topic here but...
It's not 40 MB/sec it's 40Gb/sec, so 4 gigabytes/second. roughly, for thunderbolt 4.
Opinion:
for most things, its plenty fast enough. SSDs can barely keep up, and with TB5, unless you've got 100 gig networking to your machine (I don't but I do have it between some of my switches), network connectivity is easily catered for.
for GPU, even high speed PCIe isn't fast enough - once you overflow VRAM your performance tanks hard anyway.
And this is where for high end (NON GAMING) GPU workloads, these Macs rock in certain workloads. I've got up to 60 GB of GPU memory due to unified architecture. Price up 64 GB of VRAM on a GPU in pc land
Makes the Mac look cheap!Again, irrelevant for gaming, but if you're doing actual serious things that need large VRAM... the Mac is currently in a pretty unique spot.
I'm really hoping Cyberpunk sells like hotcakes. If it does, maybe it'll signal to other studios that porting their games to Mac is worth their time and money.
I feel like historically it wasn't worth it at least in part because Apple usually never offered very high-end graphics cards, except for their most high-end offerings. But now with apple silicon, even the base $599 M4 is capable of running games smoothly. Every M4 owner from the Air to the Mac Pro is a potential customer. Hell, even a base M1 can run BG3.
I have an M4 Max and I've been blown away by RE8. I'm running it at native resolution with all the settings cranked to max and and it runs as smooth as butter.
To your point, I wouldn't say it beats a laptop 4090, but it's still an absolute beast. It's amazing how good natively run games will play.
some tests have shown comparable performance but only for non-crossover native games
Another important (to me) thing to note - noise. If you go for the max - all those extra cores will produce heat and make the fans spin when you game. One of the reasons i got the base 14" m4pro macbook (12/16 vs 14/20 cores ). It's still fast enough to play even modern stuff like Path of Exile2 but i don't hear the fans when you tweak settings a bit.
For the price of an M4 Max-based Mac, you'd probably be better off buying a M4 Pro-based Mac and a PS5 (or even a PS5 Pro, or, I suppose, an Xbox Series X, but I lean towards the PlayStation side). You'd get much better game support / more titles to choose from, and you wouldn't face the problem of, "well, I want to run my game now, so I should shut down all the other things I was doing on my laptop to improve performance".
The PS5 is a much bigger target for game companies than the Mac will ever be. A console has an enormous advantage for game companies because every PS5 is exactly like every other PS5, so they know exactly what capabilities and capacities they can count on being there, so they can arrange to wring all the performance out of that hardware. With PCs it's a pain for the companies because there's so much different hardware to deal with, but the market is huge, so that makes up for it. The Mac market is much smaller, and only a fraction of Mac users are gamers, and then there's a whole chicken-and-egg problem with developers not putting in the work to get their games on the Mac because the market is small, and then nobody buying the Mac for gaming because the games aren't there.
And a big problem is, Apple mostly doesn't pay attention to the needs of the game developers. Every 5 years or so, Apple says, "no, really, we're going to take gaming seriously, and we have projects X and Y and Z to support game developers, and this time we mean it", and then inevitably, in a year (or less), Apple gets distracted by something shiny and stops paying attention to the game developers again. And this has repeated numerous times. So a lot of game developers are extremely reluctant to embrace Apple's next iteration of, "hey game developers, we really want to work with you".
I'd love to see Apple really put in the effort to make Macs a first-rate gaming platform (meaning not just having sufficiently capable hardware, but supporting the APIs the developers need and enticing developers to release games on the Mac day-of, rather than porting to the Mac a couple of years later maybe), and demonstrate that they're going to stick with it, so the game developers can come to rely on Apple's continued support.
So, as someone who loves Macs (and I'm typing this on a M1 Max MBP)... for the same money, get a PS5 Pro and a M4 Pro MBP.
The PS5 is a much bigger target for game companies than the Mac will ever be. A console has an enormous advantage for game companies because every PS5 is exactly like every other PS5, so they know exactly what capabilities and capacities they can count on being there, so they can arrange to wring all the performance out of that hardware. With PCs it's a pain for the companies because there's so much different hardware to deal with, but the market is huge, so that makes up for it. The Mac market is much smaller, and only a fraction of Mac users are gamers, and then there's a whole chicken-and-egg problem with developers not putting in the work to get their games on the Mac because the market is small, and then nobody buying the Mac for gaming because the games aren't there.
And a big problem is, Apple mostly doesn't pay attention to the needs of the game developers. Every 5 years or so, Apple says, "no, really, we're going to take gaming seriously, and we have projects X and Y and Z to support game developers, and this time we mean it", and then inevitably, in a year (or less), Apple gets distracted by something shiny and stops paying attention to the game developers again. And this has repeated numerous times. So a lot of game developers are extremely reluctant to embrace Apple's next iteration of, "hey game developers, we really want to work with you".
I'd love to see Apple really put in the effort to make Macs a first-rate gaming platform (meaning not just having sufficiently capable hardware, but supporting the APIs the developers need and enticing developers to release games on the Mac day-of, rather than porting to the Mac a couple of years later maybe), and demonstrate that they're going to stick with it, so the game developers can come to rely on Apple's continued support.
So, as someone who loves Macs (and I'm typing this on a M1 Max MBP)... for the same money, get a PS5 Pro and a M4 Pro MBP.
I dabble in X-plane 12 with a M2 Max Studio and a binned M3 Max MBP. It will use every graphic core you can throw at the simulator until you become CPU bound. I could use more than the 38 & 30 cores I have. Waiting for an M4 Max Studio as early M4 users are reporting respectable improvements in frame rates. Obviously not a cost effective approach to a flight sim
My advice is don't buy a device not designed for gaming... for gaming.
Nothing will beat dedicated hardware for the task, whether that be console or PC.
If you have a good internet connection and router to back it up, then you'll get a better gaming experience with Geforce Now regardless of which Mac you have. If you're on a recent MBP then you'll benefit from VRR and Nvidia Reflex as well, which help significantly.
Nothing will beat dedicated hardware for the task, whether that be console or PC.
If you have a good internet connection and router to back it up, then you'll get a better gaming experience with Geforce Now regardless of which Mac you have. If you're on a recent MBP then you'll benefit from VRR and Nvidia Reflex as well, which help significantly.
It depends on your method of playing.
Whisky and Crossover are great translation apps that can play Windows games. [Very well on a Max chip [M3 & M4 Max]]
If your looking to play native Apple Silicon games, the M4 max is a BEAST. It will shred Baldurs Gate 3, all Resident Evil games, Lies of P, Death Stranding, Layers of Fear.
Cloud may not be your cup of tea, however GeForce Now and Boosteroid can take full advantage of the 120hz mini-LED display. Visuals are fabulous. [Plus, both planforms have day passes]
2025 is going to be a great year for Mac gaming!
- Cyberpunk 2077 w/Path Tracing
- Assassins Creed Shadow
- Control Ultimate Edition w/Path Tracing
- Possibly Alan Wake II
Whisky and Crossover are great translation apps that can play Windows games. [Very well on a Max chip [M3 & M4 Max]]
If your looking to play native Apple Silicon games, the M4 max is a BEAST. It will shred Baldurs Gate 3, all Resident Evil games, Lies of P, Death Stranding, Layers of Fear.
Cloud may not be your cup of tea, however GeForce Now and Boosteroid can take full advantage of the 120hz mini-LED display. Visuals are fabulous. [Plus, both planforms have day passes]
2025 is going to be a great year for Mac gaming!
- Cyberpunk 2077 w/Path Tracing
- Assassins Creed Shadow
- Control Ultimate Edition w/Path Tracing
- Possibly Alan Wake II
I am in the same boat as the OP, but thinking of doing it in the future, with an M5. That is because as a long time Trek fan, I need The Ultimate Computer.
I am not, however, doing hardcore AAA games.
My last new game purchases were Fallout4 and BG III. I game on my homebuilt i75800K (6 core/12 thread) PC with 32 GB RAM, 512GB M2 SSD and GTX-970.
I periodically replay the older Fallout Games and Max Payne.
I recently bought and installed Underrail.
Everything was Steam/GoG. Now I just wait for what I want on GoG.
So I don't need massive framerates.
But I would like some gaming portability, video when travelling, etc.
My last laptop was a Dell Chromebook (i5, 8G RAM), which when I got sick of Chrome converted to a Windows box until the POS started overheating and warped. I subsequently performed a high speed horizontal drop test on it courtesy of the backyard fence.
My PC meets my needs for the gaming I do. Most of its CPU workout is Handbrake. I know the M silicon will fly compared to my box.
I am not, however, doing hardcore AAA games.
My last new game purchases were Fallout4 and BG III. I game on my homebuilt i75800K (6 core/12 thread) PC with 32 GB RAM, 512GB M2 SSD and GTX-970.
I periodically replay the older Fallout Games and Max Payne.
I recently bought and installed Underrail.
Everything was Steam/GoG. Now I just wait for what I want on GoG.
So I don't need massive framerates.
But I would like some gaming portability, video when travelling, etc.
My last laptop was a Dell Chromebook (i5, 8G RAM), which when I got sick of Chrome converted to a Windows box until the POS started overheating and warped. I subsequently performed a high speed horizontal drop test on it courtesy of the backyard fence.
My PC meets my needs for the gaming I do. Most of its CPU workout is Handbrake. I know the M silicon will fly compared to my box.
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Hi all!
I'm planning to buy a new 14" MacBook for my work. Gaming is not the main task for my MacBook, but I might be happy to play some AAA games like Cyberpunk and Baldur'sGate in the future.
Which option do you think will have better performance in games:
Apple M4 Max 14-CPU/32-GPU 36Gb
Apple M3 Max 16-CPU/40-GPU 64Gb
Right now I can get them for about the same price and I don't know which one to choose since both have enough performance for my work tasks.
I'm planning to buy a new 14" MacBook for my work. Gaming is not the main task for my MacBook, but I might be happy to play some AAA games like Cyberpunk and Baldur'sGate in the future.
Which option do you think will have better performance in games:
Apple M4 Max 14-CPU/32-GPU 36Gb
Apple M3 Max 16-CPU/40-GPU 64Gb
Right now I can get them for about the same price and I don't know which one to choose since both have enough performance for my work tasks.
Not sure I'd be much help, but I thought I would share how well my new M4 Pro Mac mini performs playing World of Warcraft or EVE Online. My gaming needs are not particularly demanding, compared to others, but I enjoy great frame rates and performance at decent graphics settings in game.
That’s a really good question, since there’s a massive spec difference between them (the RAM amount is irrelevant at that level, particularly if you’re playing on the laptop screen rather than a higher resolution external monitor).
The CPU difference is likely to be nil for gaming, slight advantage M4.
The superior M4 GPU (higher performance per core, better mesh shading and raytracing) has fewer cores than the inferior M3 GPU which means the M3 is faster for raster. Raw numbers: 14.8 TFLOPS M4 with 32 cores, 16.4 TFLOPS M3 with 40 cores
So the question is: how important are mesh shading and raytracing to your gaming? If those laptops both have the same size storage and price, the M3 Max is absolutely the better deal but perhaps not the better machine for you.
Follow this channel to see what's possible.
I use Crossover and run a couple of native games. They look pretty goon in the Macs screen and run well.
If you also install the Apple games kit you can then also enable ray tracing in Crossover games. Like Diablo and Cyberpunk. I have a 14" M3 Max MaxBook Pro.
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