Don't look now, but Macs are finally becoming suitable for gaming

We’ve come a long way since the days of Oregon Trail on the Apple II.

I know because I’m almost 40, which means I’m old enough that the first gaming PC I ever saw was the old Apple desktop we had in the back of my elementary school classroom.

Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail were the first PC games I ever played, and for a while I remember thinking Macs were the fun computers. Old people like my parents used Windows PCs at work, for boring work stuff; Macs were for cool kids who liked Maniac Mansion.

But then I grew up, and after Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, it seemed like Macs were never going to be a great gaming platform again. In the ’90s, games like Marathon and Myth made you feel like Macs were viable gaming machines. But by the time Bungie followed up Marathon in 2001 with the original Halo: Combat Evolved for Windows, the writing was on the wall: Macs weren’t a great place to play the latest and greatest games.

It seemed to remain that way for a long time. Through 2022, I felt like Apple wasn’t taking Mac gaming seriously, even though the company’s move to proprietary silicon with its M-series chips produced MacBooks that were more powerful than I ever expected.

But now we expect to see it Cyberpunk 2077 will run natively on Mac in 2025and even I have to admit that the state of Mac gaming has changed. Last year I spent a week gaming on the most powerful Mac At that time I once had the Mac Studio M2 Ultra, and I have to tell you: it felt good.

Not every game will run well (or at all) on these new M-Series Macs, but games optimized for Apple Silicon on the best MacBooks perform remarkably well. This is a result of Apple working to get game developers to embrace porting their games to its platform, and this started to take effect last summer when Apple announced its Game porting toolkit.

Since then, it feels like a huge shift has quietly taken place in the Mac gaming landscape. It wasn’t until this week that I turned up the heat Baldur’s Gate 3 on the MacBook Pro 16 inch M3 Max and played for 15-20 minutes before I realized that the game was running perfectly smoothly, without a hint of lag during hectic encounters.

MacBook Pro 16-inch (M3Max, 2023)

Modern hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 run remarkably well on today’s MacBooks, proving that they have quietly become great gaming machines. (Image credit: Tom’s Guide)

With so many of the best Windows laptops running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips, MacBooks are in some cases better gaming machines than their Windows 11 counterparts.”

In fact, I was surprised to see it Steam‘s in-game FPS counter clocked me at almost 90 frames per second while playing into the early hours of Baldur’s Gate. Once I turned the graphics and resolution up to the max, that dropped to a much more reasonable 50ish FPS, which still looks great on the Pro’s 16-inch mini-LED display.

Some of the beasts on our list of the best gaming laptops may deliver better performance, but the fact that the 16-inch M3 Max MacBook competes at all is a sign of how far Macs have come in recent years.

To get a concrete idea of progress, I dug into the lab’s test data from the past few years, and the results clearly show how far Macs have come.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

MacBook gaming performance (in frames per second)
Row 0 – Cell 0	Sid Meier’s Civilization VI	The Rise of the Tomb Raider	Shadow of the Tomb Raider
16″ MacBook Pro M3 Max	57 @ 2234p	DNR	119 @ 1200p
16″ MacBook Pro M2 Max	57 @ 1200p	91.7 @ 1200p	DNR
16″ MacBook Pro M1 Max	46.1 @ 1080p	73.8 @ 1200p	DNR
13″ MacBook Pro M1	38.2 @ 900p	25.7 @ 900p	DNR

As you can see in the graph above, the original MacBook Pro M1 struggled to run games like Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, even though the game was around five years old when the M1 Pro was released in 2020.

But if we move forward a few years, the MacBook Pro I’m writing this article on can run the game’s sequel, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at basically 120 frames per second.

Granted, that’s only at 1200p, which isn’t nearly as nice as the Pro’s 16-inch (3,456 x 2,234 pixels) mini-LED screen can manage. At native resolution, the laptop struggles to maintain a rock-solid 60 FPS when running the game on high graphics settings, which is why these MacBooks still can’t match the best windows laptops And best gaming laptops. Apple’s on-chip GPUs are good, but they can’t run modern games nearly as well as a discrete laptop GPU from, say AMD or Nvidia.

What are M4 MacBooks capable of?

Of course, I am writing all this on the eve of the arrival of new MacBooks with the Apple M4 chip inside. So while our test data shows that Macs have quietly become better for gaming than I ever expected, it’s also on the verge of obsolete.

Although I don’t expect the M4 MacBook Pros will deliver better gaming performance per dollar than their Windows counterparts, I think the gap between the two is about to narrow even further. And now so much of the best windows laptops walk on Qualcomm‘s Snapdragon Windows 11 counterparts.

We’ll have to wait until we get a chance to test and review them ourselves to know for sure, but our lab data clearly shows that gaming on the Mac has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years.

The only question that remains is: how well will Cyberpunk 2077 run on these new Macs?