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Yes and no. I see your point and I'm not disagreeing but the issue is, what class of Mac will be capable of playing games? For me, I bought a M4 Pro Mini at 1,300 (give or take), it was incapable of handling AAA titles adequately. So much so, I returned it, and bought the M4 Max Studio. I'm not a hardcore gamer but the performance was so bad, I felt compelled to buy the next more expensive model. Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the M4 Max Studio, its by far the best computer I've owned but if the Max or ultra are needed for many of the new demanding games, that doesn't bode well

I'm perfectly fine on my M3 Pro. And we're now seeing such gains in GPU performance that the M5 base model is a better gaming chip than the Pro from just a couple years back.

I'm sure the M5 Pro will outperform the M3 Max as well.

The GPU improvement is actually quite substantial.
 
Yes and no. I see your point and I'm not disagreeing but the issue is, what class of Mac will be capable of playing games? For me, I bought a M4 Pro Mini at 1,300 (give or take), it was incapable of handling AAA titles adequately. So much so, I returned it,

Do you have any examples? I have a M4 Pro and my experience has been different. I play the RE games, Control, CP2077 and get good performance. The only game with poor performance I’ve play is AC Shadows, but that seems to perform poorly on many devices.
 
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It would be great if we could get answers to questions without avoiding them and then trying to turn things around.
It is a part of the problem with performance being a personal preference. I am pretty sure @maflynn posted here about their issues with the M4 Pro and Fallout (or was it Skyrim). Maybe you would have been willing to put up with the issues they presented 🤷‍♂️.

Lol. There we go.
Yeah, it also highlights the "lack of games" on macOS that some folk play. But that is a conversation for a different thread, lol.
 
It is a part of the problem with performance being a personal preference.
Exactly. Much of this is personal preference. Making statements about a gpu being “good” or “bad” should be taken with this in mind.
I am pretty sure @maflynn posted here about their issues with the M4 Pro and Fallout (or was it Skyrim). Maybe you would have been willing to put up with the issues they presented 🤷‍♂️.
Perhaps
Yeah, it also highlights the "lack of games" on macOS that some folk play. But that is a conversation for a different thread, lol.
A completely fair criticism. The issue isn’t the gpu or hardware in general, it’s lack of the games that people want to play. Now I do think it has improved, but it’s easy to understand why it wouldn’t be enough for many.
 
Anything from Bethesda, it was completely unplayable on the m4 pro.

Well that's because you're running games through translation layers.

My point was related to there being a much bigger potential market for Mac gaming than people think - if only the compatibility was there.

Getting poor performance in Crossover isn't a good measure of how powerful Apple silicon is getting for gaming.
 
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My point was related to there being a much bigger potential market for Mac gaming than people think - if only the compatibility was there.
I don't think it is, not yet at least, the numbers don't lie. There's a thread in this forum that was started 5 years ago, stating that in 3 years 50% of AAA capable computers will be macs. Since that time, we've not seen any growth, or any embrace by game publishers. The biggest news of 2025, was that a 5 year old AAA game came to the mac (cyberpunk), that's really the biggest and probably only game related news.
 
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My friends play on whatever device is in front of them. They don’t wait to get behind a gaming rig.

They play games. iPhone, handheld, or MacBook Air. Doesn’t matter. They’re good.
 
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My friends play on whatever device is in front of them. They don’t wait to get behind a gaming rig.

They play games. Doesn’t matter much if what’s in front of them is an iPhone, handheld, or MacBook Air.
Casual gamers. They probably are running the games as is, not going into settings and tweaking things.

EDIT: Which is fine! No shame/shade on that.
 
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Casual gamers. They probably are running the games as is, not going into settings and tweaking things.

EDIT: Which is fine! No shame/shade on that.
Yeah my friends do a lot of gaming during breaks in conversation and in between tasks.

It’s what they do as long as they’re awake basically.

They play games. That’s 2025/26

The portable Mac I have in front of me most of the time…pretty good!
 
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60 FPS minimum

Nope, crossover.
Not much help for a Mac Mini or MBA, but I wonder if 40 fps on the ProMotion display will be a sweet spot. Although it seems like 40 fps is only slightly improved from 30 fps, the frame times are halfway between 30 & 60, making 40 fps seem much smoother than you might expect (30 fps: 33.3 ms frame time, 40 fps: 25.0 ms, 60 fps: 16.7 ms).

I've never used framegen so I don't know whether this gives a good experience with a 40 fps base (I know it's generally fine for 60 fps base and not for 30 fps base).
 
Not much help for a Mac Mini or MBA, but I wonder if 40 fps on the ProMotion display will be a sweet spot. Although it seems like 40 fps is only slightly improved from 30 fps, the frame times are halfway between 30 & 60, making 40 fps seem much smoother than you might expect (30 fps: 33.3 ms frame time, 40 fps: 25.0 ms, 60 fps: 16.7 ms).

I've never used framegen so I don't know whether this gives a good experience with a 40 fps base (I know it's generally fine for 60 fps base and not for 30 fps base).
Is there a way to see the displays current refresh rate in macOS? If it is adaptive, it should "always" be on as long as you are getting above whatever the min refresh rate for the adaptive sync part it.
 
A completely fair criticism. The issue isn’t the gpu or hardware in general, it’s lack of the games that people want to play. Now I do think it has improved, but it’s easy to understand why it wouldn’t be enough for many.
The fact remains, that Crossover is about our only option to play games, and while I understand your critism related to emulation, if someone wants to game on the Mac, Crossover is really their best option and as such the hardware requirements to get decent performance is such that the majority of Apple silicon is unable to provide the level of performance.

Edit: don't get me wrong, I absolutely love how the M4 with Crossover allows me to play the games I want - this is a huge game changer for me.
 
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