Let's brainstorm: Macbook Air M1 2020 for Gaming

[macddy]

Hey all! My very first post here on macrumors.com, so i'm quite excited! Hope my first post will live up to the macrumor users' respected standards If not, please forgive me! Also because of long text my questions will be bolded, like this.

I've just watched the apple event and I have some thoughts and questions. I know that we don't know much about the Air and Pro in terms of benchmarks and tests other than what the announcers said during the presentation... But they certainly claimed some BIG things, and I guess they can't lie about what they say? So for this post let's say that what they said is true and let's brainstorm together... For fun!

The theme of this topic is Video Games. ((DISCLAIMER: I already own a gaming PC, so no need to tell me that I should buy one instead if I want to play games! I'm very well aware of this, but in their presentation they included video games in the presenting of their new M1 chip, which means it's also taking gamers into consideration, so it's relevant to discuss it in my opinion!))

So the presenters claimed (in different phrasing) that both the Air and Pro with the M1 chip will handle heavy programs much better. For now I can't "see" any difference between the Air and Pro when it comes to specs, but i'm guessing as well as other posters have speculated, that the Pro, since it has a fan, will allow for "high sustained loads on the M1".. Now what does that really mean?

Let's say I want to play World of Warcraft or the newly released (alpha) Baldur's Gate 3 on the new Macbook Air M1.. Without a fan but with the same specs as the pro, how much of a decrease in performance would you say I need to expect?

My follow up question is: Since the Air M1 is fanless AND the presenters claim it's basically a powerhouse, can we say for sure that this thing won't... Overheat under heavy load such as when playing video games?

Anyway thanks for induldging with me and my first thread/post.. This post is for pure speculation and fun and i'm looking forward to hearing from you all

Stay safe!

 

[darkmatter343]

Nobody knows yet... but my guess is we’ll find out a lot more within the next few days.
I too am interested in the gaming performance, although most gaming I leave to my gaming PC. The game SOMA by frictional games has a native Mac port and so I’m really interested to see how it plays on the M1 chip since it’ll have to be run under Rosetta. Worst case... terrible, but fingers crossed decent performance.

I get that gaming shouldn’t be the focus on these new macs, and even if we wanted it to be its waaaaay to early. But it will be interesting to see what can play under Rosetta.

 

[neinjohn]

Those are the FPS achieved on Ryzen 7 4800u from a notebookcheck test (here). Intel Xe integrated graphics pass this values on some games but they're all over the place on other games.

If the M1 promise as the fastest integrated GPU is solid then the question is to see how much better than this it can be. Certainly expect it to better then the low-end of NVIDIA dedicated mobile GPUs.

 

[acastic]

Larian is porting Baldur’s Gate 3 to the M1 Macs so with native support it will probably run fairly well vs those that have to go through the Rosetta emulation.