M3 Max and Resident Evil 4 - Wow....

[dominiongamma]

We still have a few more years for prime iOS/Mac gaming, but this is promising if Apple continues investing in AAA games.

They’ve been saying this for the last 10 years I have no faith for macOS to be a true gaming system like a PC

 

[pacmania1982]

I'm not much of a gamer, but I was looking forward to the release of Stray. I have to say that the performance and graphics of that on my M2 Mac mini almost broke my brain a little. They're THAT good.

Nice to hear about another user being blown away by the graphics of Apple Silicon.

 

[Onimusha370]

I'm not much of a gamer, but I was looking forward to the release of Stray. I have to say that the performance and graphics of that on my M2 Mac mini almost broke my brain a little. They're THAT good.

Nice to hear about another user being blown away by the graphics of Apple Silicon.

Nice any tips for getting stray to run without lag spikes? I was trying to play the other day but I was getting regular 2-3 second freezes which was making it frustrating… not sure if it’s my settings or if it just needs tweaking for the M3 line

 

[toobravetosave]

Mac users will settle for anything in their futile dream for more than table scraps in gaming

 

[Onimusha370]

Mac users will settle for anything in their futile dream for more than table scraps in gaming

Think you might be on the wrong website!

 

[toobravetosave]

Think you might be on the wrong website!

Why’s that?

 

[Zdigital2015]

Think you might be on the wrong website!

Trying to talk positive about Mac gaming here will bring out the Team Green apologists every single time. Most toxic people on the internet besides movie fanboys. Seems like we have more than our fair share lurking on MacRumors.

Apple could literally creat a machine for a $1000 running a GPU at twice the speed as a 4090 and you would still have people trashing it because their precious NVIDIA is their god.

 

[Ethosik]

Trying to talk positive about Mac gaming here will bring out the Team Green apologists every single time. Most toxic people on the internet besides movie fanboys. Seems like we have more than our fair share lurking on MacRumors.

Apple could literally creat a machine for a $1000 running a GPU at twice the speed as a 4090 and you would still have people trashing it because their precious NVIDIA is their god.

Yep. And a lot of the time it comes down to optimization. There are some current PC titles that require FSR or DLSS with even a 4090 to achieve high res and high frame rate. That doesn’t mean a 4090 sucks.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

Nice any tips for getting stray to run without lag spikes? I was trying to play the other day but I was getting regular 2-3 second freezes which was making it frustrating… not sure if it’s my settings or if it just needs tweaking for the M3 line

It’s just shade compilation causing the small spikes. it only happens once then shouldn’t lag again in that area once all the shaders are in place.

 

[jimmy43]

This is great news (that it runs well). I just bought the game. I have an M3 Max 14 inch base config 14/30 cores and I'm planning to play on my Studio Display at 3200 x 1800. I'll write back here how it's going after some game time!

Just reporting back after playing the first hour or so (through the village square part). I'm playing at 3200x1800 as posted above, and I have almost all settings on Max (or ON if its a special feature). I was getting in the range of 50-75 fps with vsync off, and locked to 60fps with vsync on, so overall, i'm hitting the performance I want. Keep in mind this resolution is only about 70% of full 4K, so you may have to turn down some settings if you want to output to your 4K tv (as a previous poster put here).

Also, as far as I can see, there are no ray-traced (reflections), and I didn't find any setting for it, so I'm assuming it's currently not packaged into the mac version. I think apple's MetalFX upscaler is not quite as good as DLSS, there are some shimmering artifacts when you move the camera left/right which are more obvious than DLSS artifacts to me subjectively. I turned off MetalFX but the fps drops to the 30-40fps range, so I wouldn't recommend that either.

Overall as others have said, the fact that this is running (not just running really, it's maxed out) on a lightweight 14 inch 'business' laptop is pretty amazing. I got this laptop for work and it's great that I can do some occasional AAA gaming on it. I hope that Capcom is able to add ray-tracing in soon as well as I'm curious how the hardware would handle it.

Hint: if you want to see your fps in game, run /bin/launchctl setenv MTL\_HUD\_ENABLED 1

For now I'm gonna stop messing with toggles and settings and just go back and enjoy the game

 

[Onimusha370]

Just reporting back after playing the first hour or so (through the village square part). I'm playing at 3200x1800 as posted above, and I have almost all settings on Max (or ON if its a special feature). I was getting in the range of 50-75 fps with vsync off, and locked to 60fps with vsync on, so overall, i'm hitting the performance I want. Keep in mind this resolution is only about 70% of full 4K, so you may have to turn down some settings if you want to output to your 4K tv (as a previous poster put here).

Also, as far as I can see, there are no ray-traced (reflections), and I didn't find any setting for it, so I'm assuming it's currently not packaged into the mac version. I think apple's MetalFX upscaler is not quite as good as DLSS, there are some shimmering artifacts when you move the camera left/right which are more obvious than DLSS artifacts to me subjectively. I turned off MetalFX but the fps drops to the 30-40fps range, so I wouldn't recommend that either.

Overall as others have said, the fact that this is running (not just running really, it's maxed out) on a lightweight 14 inch 'business' laptop is pretty amazing. I got this laptop for work and it's great that I can do some occasional AAA gaming on it. I hope that Capcom is able to add ray-tracing in soon as well as I'm curious how the hardware would handle it.

Hint: if you want to see your fps in game, run /bin/launchctl setenv MTL\_HUD\_ENABLED 1

For now I'm gonna stop messing with toggles and settings and just go back and enjoy the game

Thanks for reporting back - interesting that there is a reasonable difference between the 14/30 and 16/40 configs as expected, your fps at 1800p is similar to the 16/40 at 4K (even slightly lower as I never saw it dip below 60!). How is the fan noise/heat situation with the 14 inch? My fans were around 4000rpm throughout my 1 hour session last night on the 16 inch 16/40 config.

 

[Onimusha370]

It’s just shade compilation causing the small spikes. it only happens once then shouldn’t lag again in that area once all the shaders are in place.

Okay thanks, hopefully it will settle down, seemed pretty constant the other day!

 

[toobravetosave]

Trying to talk positive about Mac gaming here will bring out the Team Green apologists every single time. Most toxic people on the internet besides movie fanboys. Seems like we have more than our fair share lurking on MacRumors.

Apple could literally creat a machine for a $1000 running a GPU at twice the speed as a 4090 and you would still have people trashing it because their precious NVIDIA is their god.

I own exclusively Apple devices lmao I’m sorry you are deluded as to the state of gaming on Mac for the past however long and however longer

 

[richard371]

Anyone tried on a 14" m3max 16/40. How are the fans etc?

 

[Zdigital2015]

I own exclusively Apple devices lmao I’m sorry you are deluded as to the state of gaming on Mac for the past however long and however longer

Mac gaming has always been a crap shoot. Some years and periods have been better than others with some good game ports and reasonable game play along with some top tier titles, but most years have been lean and inconsistent. Twenty plus years ago, Mac gamers pinned their hopes on HALO and then MS bought Bungie and, well, look how that turned out for Mac users.

I’m not going to tout some grand beginning of a Mac gaming renaissance because there was never an era of “Mac Gaming” anyways. My point was that every time someone has anything positive to say about their experience gaming on a Mac, out come the toxic creeps who shill for NVIDIA like it’s their religion. Apple “fanboys” have nothing on NVIDIA zealots who have the absolute thinnest skins I’ve ever seen. Not just here but on gaming and tech enthusiast websites. So many d*ck swinging contests it’s insufferable. No rational discourse, everyone seems to be stuck developmentally at around age 12.

 

[jimmy43]

Thanks for reporting back - interesting that there is a reasonable difference between the 14/30 and 16/40 configs as expected, your fps at 1800p is similar to the 16/40 at 4K (even slightly lower as I never saw it dip below 60!). How is the fan noise/heat situation with the 14 inch? My fans were around 4000rpm throughout my 1 hour session last night on the 16 inch 16/40 config.

Measured it at about 40db, not silent but not the loudest fan setting. For reference the gameplay was at 45-50db when I unmuted it. The laptop is in clamshell mode and its warm, but not hot. I also saw some spikes which are probably shader compilation or traversal stutter, but it disappeared after I went past a certain area. The game continued to stay at 60fps going through 2 enemy populated areas.

 

[toobravetosave]

Mac gaming has always been a crap shoot. Some years and periods have been better than others with some good game ports and reasonable game play along with some top tier titles, but most years have been lean and inconsistent. Twenty plus years ago, Mac gamers pinned their hopes on HALO and then MS bought Bungie and, well, look how that turned out for Mac users.

I’m not going to tout some grand beginning of a Mac gaming renaissance because there was never an era of “Mac Gaming” anyways. My point was that every time someone has anything positive to say about their experience gaming on a Mac, out come the toxic creeps who shill for NVIDIA like it’s their religion. Apple “fanboys” have nothing on NVIDIA zealots who have the absolute thinnest skins I’ve ever seen. Not just here but on gaming and tech enthusiast websites. So many d*ck swinging contests it’s insufferable. No rational discourse, everyone seems to be stuck developmentally at around age 12.

I don’t have any Nvidia hardware so…ok?

Conversely it is fair to balance the obvious and constant delusions that this is the beginning for Mac gaming

 

[Kingcoherent]

You need a desktop RTX 3080 or 6800XT to run RE4 at 4K@60FPS. Please at least look up some benchmarks before making baseless statements.

Resident Evil 4 Benchmark Test & Performance Analysis Review

Resident Evil 4 is new material for lovers of the action-horror genre. In our performance review, we're taking a closer look at image quality, VRAM usage, and performance on a selection of modern graphics cards.

www.techpowerup.com

Was just about to point out that 4k > 1080.

 

[Onimusha370]

Mac users will settle for anything in their futile dream for more than table scraps in gaming

I own exclusively Apple devices

Enjoy your futile dreams

 

[toobravetosave]

Enjoy your futile dreams

What dream? I don’t game on my Mac

 

[pacmania1982]

Nice any tips for getting stray to run without lag spikes? I was trying to play the other day but I was getting regular 2-3 second freezes which was making it frustrating… not sure if it’s my settings or if it just needs tweaking for the M3 line

I can't I'm afraid - other than turning down something to medium - the rest of the settings are default

 

[neuropsychguy]

lmao those are old and cheap cards, they are low-end. I know you are comparing to a laptop, but still, those are low end cards and not exactly a incredible achievement that a $4k laptop performs the same as a $250 card...

Others already replied but you are misunderstanding the comparison. Those are the minimum recommended cards to run the game at low details at 1080p (60 fps). OP is running the game at maximum detail at essentially 4k resolution. That's about what a desktop RTX 4080 will do (people using 4090s are getting 100 to 120 FPS max quality at 4k).

Comparable performance to a desktop 4080 (a $1200 card if you can buy one [but you might be able to buy a used one for $1000]) in a laptop is very solid for a machine not really designed for gaming. Yes, it's a $4000 laptop ($3700 with education discount) but there's a lot more going on in that machine than just a GPU.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Mac users will settle for anything in their futile dream for more than table scraps in gaming

Relax. What is wrong with table scraps? Y'all can sit at the big girls' table with your furnaces and jet engines while Apple SoC quietly rocks the little kids' table with titles like Resident Evil 4 and Baldur's Gate 3.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Nice any tips for getting stray to run without lag spikes? I was trying to play the other day but I was getting regular 2-3 second freezes which was making it frustrating… not sure if it’s my settings or if it just needs tweaking for the M3 line

I am no gamer and no game performance optimizer. However when I study how Apple's UMA RAM functions it certainly seems to me that more RAM is likely to be a good thing. Moreso than in the past pre-UMA. Games probably do need tweaking for the new architecture.

 

[HawkTheHusky1902]

Others already replied but you are completely misunderstanding the comparison. Those are the minimum recommended cards to run the game at low details at 1080p (60 fps). OP is running the game at maximum detail at essentially 4k resolution. That's about what a desktop RTX 4080 will do (people using 4090s are getting 100 to 120 FPS max quality at 4k).

Comparable performance to a desktop 4080 (a $1200 card if you can buy one) in a laptop is very solid for a machine not really designed for gaming.

I see.