Crossover usually goes on sale on Cyber Monday
.The Samsung T9 external SSD works great if you bought the base MBP with limited storage.
Last edited:
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
- Thread starter senttoschool
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Crossover usually goes on sale on Cyber Monday
.The Samsung T9 external SSD works great if you bought the base MBP with limited storage.
This crossover, is it running windows on the SSD with the translation to MacOS?Crossover usually goes on sale on Cyber Monday
The Samsung T9 external SSD works great if you bought the base MBP with limited storage.
Crossover runs under MacOS and translates the code.
Essentially after launching Crossover, you can run Windows Steam (and Windows Steam games) or non Steam Windows games that you have installed under Crossover.
The SSD is just to hold the games since the internal storage in a base MBP isn't that large.
Your Windows desktop will run the Windows games much better but it's nice to be able to game when you only have your MBP.
Crossover can have issues but I'm always amazed at how well it works (note - performance will differ depending on what Mac you are running).
@maflynn (he is also a Windows user that recently picked up a Mac) installed Crossover so you might ask him his opinion.
Crossover is a commercial version of WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and its a compatibility layer that translates win32 system calls to macos compatible systems calls. Crossover is basically the older brother of Proton, the WINE layer used by Valve on their wildly popular Steamdeck.
As for how well it works - Surprisingly well. There can be occasional hicupp and odd occurance, but its an amazing piece of coding/technology to be playing a windows game on macOS. I will say that the games are highly dependent on the performance of your Mac. I found the M4 Pro lacking to run some games, but overall the M4 Studio to be perfect.
Another alternative one that I dabble in from time to time, is Geforce Now. Its a cloud gaming service, if you have decent internet bandwidth, it plays games on nvidia services. There's a free version that makes you watch some ads before starting a game, and I think it may place you on slower servers. I use the middle tier and find it runs games very well. I've not tried Starfield, I suppose I should.
Between the two, there's absolutely zero reasons in my book to fire up my PC to play games. It sits there unused and unplugged. Given Microsoft's latest moves at closing off ways for us consumers to use local accounts, I'm rather annoyed with MS and don't plan to return to windows.
Last edited:
I can't give you FPS numbers, I never really compared things, but yes. Running an emulation layer that translates win32 code to macOS system calls, that then go to the macOS subsystems is less efficient then win32 calls, going directly to the windows subsystems. There's also the overhead needed to accommodate win32 calls that may not have a direct macos API call and so there's some work needed to translate that into something that macOS can use.
Overall, given the complexity of both windows and macOS APIs, its really impressive this works as well it does.
Edit
I asked chatgpt, and for directx 11 (or earlier) we're looking at about 10 - 15% performance hit, and for directx 12 games 30 to 40% all things being equal, i.e., similar hardware specs.
Last edited:
Not really but native Win games will run better..
It's all dependent on the Mac hardware and how well the Windows the game is optimized.
Codeweavers offers a free trial of the latest version and, if you are interested, I would suggest downloading Crossover and trying all the games you might want to play on your MBP.
If money is a factor, Codeweavers usually has a sale during cyber Monday and Applegamingwiki has a coupon code.
The list of Crossover compatible games on Applegamingwiki is usually not up to date but it gives a rough idea of what will run. I find that the Codeweaver website gives the best compatibility results.
Note: Games that require anti-cheat programs will not run since these programs do not recognize Crossover or even the m series of processors.
Last edited:
Depends on the game. Some bad native ports will actually run faster in Crossover. People say Borderlands 3 and BG 3 runs faster. OpenGL games run much faster. Some games have only little performance hit, like 10%. Some native ports will run MUCH faster. Resident Evil 4 runs 60-110% faster natively than in Crossover.
Last edited: