BnB Gaming guest writer Sebastian Clarkin laments the dearth of Mac games available not only on Steam, but industry-wide. Won’t you damn well listen to him, developers? Sigh. Such is the life of a pseudo-PC gamer.
WordSpiral, a word puzzle game developed by Wireless Marvels, is now available for PC, Mac and mobile platforms.
Looking for the best Mac games available in 2021? We test and benchmark the top ones which can be easily filtered by genre and requirements.
How does the M1 Air compare to the new M1 Pro? Is the M1 Pro, which is twice as expensive as the M1 Air, worth its 2,000 dollars price tag?
“So is the M1 Pro worth double the cost of the M1 Air? The numbers themselves say yes. For the majority of the games tested, you can expect from the M1 Pro at least double the performance of the M1 Air”
Now test the M1 Max.
It’s a shame Apple doesn’t care more about gaming and getting devs to optimize for these chips because they’re impressive in every other regard, they could have the first laptops that can game unplugged with no performance dips with good battery life and stay cool/quite.
Yah. You can boot windows on this but then the processors are emulating. I hope apple starts courting more game devs.
Dedicated hardware support for laptops would get Apple a decent foothold in gaming. The logistics would be tough but Apple has the cash to carve out their own Steam or GeForce Now equivalents.
The level of performance is great at that level of power consumption. The M1 Pro is basically an Xbox Series S equivalent APU, but running at half the TDP (40w vs 80w) which is hugely important for laptop battery life (lasting easily into 10+ hours for most workloads compared to 3 - 6 for most other laptops). There's also the Max, which has 2x the GPU cores, but also a big increase in TDP (around 90w - 120w).
The processor is a great example of what Ultrabooks and Entry level laptops will soon become (which will eventually trickle down into handhelds like a Switch 3 / Steam Deck 2 / etc...). They've already had the Snapdragon 8cx on the windows side of things, and NVIDIA's attempt to buy ARM is specifically for this future and getting Tegra to be significantly more mainstream.
The problem with this specific processor, however, is the company behind it, Apple. Once again this is Xbox Series S performance (slightly better CPU, slightly weaker GPU) being sold in a $2000 laptop with bare bones upgradability unless you want to get scalped directly by Apple, and even worse repair options.
“Once again this is Xbox Series S performance (slightly better CPU, slightly weaker GPU) being sold in a $2000 laptop with bare bones upgradability unless you want to get scalped directly by Apple, and even worse repair options.”
This is a laptop coming with an industry leading 120 hz display and should not be compared to a home console. It compares favourably to its competitors in price per spec. The m1 Max would be higher spec than ps5 or series x while on battery. Not that those are it’s competition.
@Babadook7
Not once did I say it was in competition with the console. The reason I listed that was to give those without a tech background some comparable that they can comprehend performance wise.
And the value is definitely not there in comparison to it's competition which like for like performance wise would be the high end RTX 3050 ti laptops which are half the price, which offer once again similar CPU performance (considering that most of these reviews are the 10-core, not the base 8-core version in the $2000 Macbook), but a 3050 ti is about 30% faster in gaming on average, with it being nearly 2x as fast in some games due to the lack of optimization on MacOS games, and that's before adding Raytracing and DLSS into the equation.
It's a great processor for low power options, but it's also twice as much as comparable products in the market.
https://www.bestbuy.com/sit...
You can go up to the 3050 ti for an extra $100 - $200 and have 2x the performance and still be around 1/2 the cost.
“And the value is definitely not there in comparison to it's competition which like for like performance wise would be the high end RTX 3050 ti laptops which are half the price, which offer once again similar CPU performance (considering that most of these reviews are the 10-core, not the base 8-core version in the $2000 Macbook), but a 3050 ti is about 30% faster in gaming on average, with it being nearly 2x as fast in some games due to the lack of optimization on MacOS games, and that's before adding Raytracing and DLSS into the equation.”
If you want to claim that the value isn’t there… Show me a pc laptop that can compete with this M1 pro in performance on battery and with a comparable display. Make sure you don’t cheap out with a low quality display vs a 1600 nit 120 hz mini led display. If you cherry pick based only on gpu, it’s not a fair comparison, and you know that.
Now you're just being foolish lol
This is about:
1. "M1 Pro vs M1 gaming on Mac: Is the Pro worth it?".
2. "How does the M1 Air compare to the new M1 Pro? Is the M1 Pro, which is twice as expensive as the M1 Air, worth its 2,000 dollars price tag?"
And the PC comparisons come directly from the article
1. "But buying decisions are much more complicated than that. And let’s be honest here, if you’re looking for a pure gaming machine, you’ll be better off with a Windows laptop. That’s clear."
2. "So should you get the M1 Air or the M1 Pro? If you’re gaming, go Windows! But if you’re looking for the added grunt to power your creative projects, it’s well worth springing for a laptop packing the new M1 Pro chip."
Why get to a completely different topic to feed your preference. We aren't talking about display and battery life, and I've acknowledged those already away from the actual talking point GAMING PERFORMANCE. But if you want to go with those we can.
I can buy two RTX 3050 laptops and as a result have 2x the battery life allowing it to keep pace and exceed the Macbook.
or
I could buy the laptop and purchase 4K Editing / Gaming monitor or even a 48" LG OLED48C1 for the same price (considering LG makes the panel) and have a significantly larger editing display, as well as a significantly faster video rendering laptop and a gaming experience that can take advantage of actual 60fps performance across the board, and higher resolutions thank to DLSS.
or
You can simply buy a $2000 gaming laptop and get a RX 6700 / RX 6800 / RTX 3070 / some RTX 3080 level GPUs and blow it completely out the water.
I absolutely agree that windows is the way to go for gaming and no one on this page has questioned that. This is primarily because of software and optimization not hardware.
I said “It compares favourably to its competitors in price per spec. ” those specs include a lot more than just a gpu.
You responded “ And the value is definitely not there in comparison to it's competition”. Then you avoid any like for like comparison. Because these new macs do in fact perform very well overall vs the competition for the price. And you know that. You can’t lug around a c1 and say it’s a competitor to the best in class laptop display. You can’t run the pc at this performance when unplugged. Not even with three batteries. Your claims that this laptop lacks in value vs cheap pc laptops is false.
If you were going to buy one anyway yes but if your buying specifically for gaming no you're going to end up with more value for money by going to a PC or console for the price difference.
Anyone who knows about hardware would already know Apple stuff is very overpriced for what it is.
Seeing that it took Intel's latest $600 i9 to beat the base M1 chip recently in single and multi-core benchmarks, we can clearly see how much value the M1 brings. I guess it's still cool to hate apple.
@Angyo
Performance has little to do with Value when it's clear that the 5800H and Current Intel i7 10000 series processors are still running neck and neck with the M1 and come standard in computers that cost half the price of the ENTRY M1 Pro. Not to mention the entry M1 Pro is actually the 8-core version, while most reviewer are reviewing the 10-core version in their comparisons for the 16" which starts at $2500. That's before you even get into the upgrade option which are abysmal on Macbooks and borderline a scalping directly from Apple. A decent $1000 gaming laptop is all that is needed to offer this level of performance in production alongside a much better gaming experience.
32GB RAM upgrade
PC: $150 self install
Apple: +$400 soldered onto the board, if it dies 99% of people have to buy a brand new Macbook
2TB NVMe upgrade
PC: $200 Gen3 / $300 Gen4, self install
Apple: +$600 Gen4 soldered onto the board, if it dies 99% of people have to buy a brand new Macbook
These are standard upgrades for anyone doing production work, and now you're at $1350 - $1450 for a gaming laptop vs $3000 for a MacBook Pro and both are in the exact same ballpark. Now the MacBook does have much better battery life and a significantly high resolution screen, but those things aren't worth $1550.
The value is awful, the performance considering the TDP is what's good. And this is coming from someone typing this on their MacBook Pro.
Love how one person on here says apples are overpriced and they’re labeled a hater. But hey that’s the age we live in.
I own a Mac yet I have to admit that Mac gaming sux. There is so little available for the platform and the prices tend to be shamefully high. Games that now sell regularly for $5 on PC still retail for $30 on Mac. As the piece says: "What I’m saying is, there’s a certain psychological torture that comes with being a Mac gamer."
That is why I also own a gaming PC.
little by little it's getting better. thanks in large part to steam.
there are mac gamers?
other than expensive outdated graphics cards, and then horrible support?
i wish gaming on a mac was a real option.
Not all hope is lost, you just have to use bootcamp and play games properly in windows. I use osx for work and browsing and windows mostly for gaming. Other than casual app games I wouldn't waste my time with mac gaming when it's so easy to utilize the hardware properly in windows.