New Apple Macs for Gaming

[beau21]

So, I do most of my gaming on my XSX. It's just convenient for me and my house. That being said, I've been anxious to see the new Mac releases, especially the new Mac Mini, because of the small form factor and ability to easily connect it in a discreet place like a living room. (And, frankly, I just like the Apple infrastructure and connectivity among devices)

Well today is unveiling day from Apple. I'll be curious to see the benchmarking. Personally, from a gaming standpoint, I'll mostly be interested in the CPU speeds because I could see myself using it for a lot of emulation gaming. Maybe some of the newer console emulators lean more heavily on GPU, but I believe CPUs (esp single core speed) are maybe the most important factor for that.

What do you guys think about the new Mac Mini w/ M4 and M4 Pro chips? I know going Apple is not the most cost effective route, and doesn't have the ability to upgrade parts over time, but for someone who prefers the Apple UI and isn't a heavy modern gamer, I think they're attractive.

M4 chip ($599+):

• 10-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores
• 4.30 GHz maximum CPU clock speed
• 10-core GPU
• Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
• 16-core Neural Engine
• LPDDR5X memory
• 16GB+ memory
• 120GB/s memory bandwidth

M4 Pro chip ($1399+):

• 12-core or 14-core CPU with 8 (or 10) performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
• 4.30 GHz maximum CPU clock speed
• 16-core or 20-core GPU
• Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
• 16-core Neural Engine
• LPDDR5X memory
• 16GB+ memory
• 273GB/s memory bandwidth

[KSUowls]

I know you say that you're not a heavy gamer, but what kind of games do you want to play? From a strictly hardware perspective the CPU on the cheaper one may be a bit underpowered, based on basic specs, depending on what you're looking at playing.

That being said, hardware certainly can be a limiting factor for Mac with gaming, but software support is the bigger one. Not a heavy mac user myself so I can't speak with too much authority on this. However, I remember being generally curious a few months ago about this very question "why aren't Mac's good for gaming" and I did some light research on it. Others may be able to expand upon this more or offer alternative. From what I remember though gaming on Macs suffers from lack of DirectX/Vulcan support. Apple has their own proprietary version of this which is not heavily supported by game developers.

Not to discourage you from going this route. I'm sure that there are workarounds or maybe there have been some updates to make Mac gaming better. Just want to give a heads up that hardware may not be your only obstacle.

[beau21]

Certainly appreciate that perspective.

For me, personally, most of my PC/Mac gaming will be emulation. Hopefully everything X360/PS3 (maybe XBO/PS4 at some point?) and before. And hopefully with some upscaling or texture packs where possible. Anything newer than that will likely be if there's a modern game that I can't get on console and/or want to play with mods.

[doorknobb]

The M-series Macs VASTLY (and I cannot emphasize that enough) outperforms Intel Macs on Football Manager on release. It outperforms it so much that I had to slow the matches down just to make tactical changes in game. I average 4000 hours per FM release on Steam, and I have played every version since CM 03/04. I have gone so far as to write a tool (that needed to be altered every time it updates, so I really can’t release it because I can’t maintain it when I’m not using it, sorry. Also what loads on 96GB of RAM is likely to crash on other specs with less memory since the db is pretty huge) that dumps out the raw database in memory on the ARM platform. OOTP and FHM are similarly much faster but those weren’t necessarily slow to begin with so it’s harder to notice the difference.

The fact is I pretty much only play sports games and most don’t even run nextgen on PC. I can see the potential for a VR-enabled Mac powered F1 rig since in theory it can handle all that, except the peripherals needed aren’t in place. Until the likes of Fanatec starts to actually put out drivers for direct drive bases it really represents a waste of potential.

Whenever the Macbook Pro M4 drops I’ll be upgrading. I mean, it’s my main machine for work and everyday stuff. Most of my gaming are done on consoles, if nothing else because the monitors that Apple currently makes that takes advantage of a lot of QoS-ish features are really not gaming monitors. Games don’t run in 5k natively - the spreadsheet-based games I play are all in windowed mode - and on the flip side, no HDR, 60hz limit, native Thunderbolt are all not really things that are optimized, or utilized, for modern gaming. 5K is great for programming - all that space and if you customize it right you save a lot of clicks. But the spreadsheet-with-some-3D type games may just be the most optimal type of game to play (at least for folks who are on this site). Sometimes I have all 3 open on my second monitor. The machine is a beast that it could run all that and whatever crappy, probably memory-leaking code I’m writing. And yes, I have a PC that I access from the mac remotely because I need an actual video card to do the small amount of ML model training that I’ve been doing since 2017. The setup is good enough to play nextgen sports games, but just as I find playing shooters with a controller next to impossible, there’s so much muscle memory built into the sports games that I’ll stick with the consoles for now, even though I would love to mod the living daylights out of almost all of them.