Now that the Mac mini is available with an M2 Pro, Apple is claiming that it’s a great gaming PC. As the Mac mini site states, you can “jump into graphics-intensive AAA games as No Man’s Sky And Resident Evil Village with smooth frame rates and high fidelity, all made possible by the incredible GPU performance of M2 or M2 Pro.
And with great native support for Xbox and PlayStation controllers in the latest version of macOS, yes, you can definitely have a great time gaming on a Mac that costs less than $2,000. But after kicking the tires for a while and comparing them to PC offerings, it’s clear that Apple still has a very long way to go.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Apple executives admitted that upgrading the Mac “will take time.” Apple Silicon is fantastic, but the holistic gaming experience on a Mac is still so frustrating. If Apple wants to win over gamers, it has a lot of work ahead of it.
Performance is OK, but the price is not
To light up Resident Evil Village on our Mac mini – our $1,800 configuration has the M2 Pro chip complete with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD – and it’s clear the chip can handle modern AAA games. With the game Prioritize graphics Preset at 1080p resolution, performance varies from around 70 fps to over 120 fps, depending on location and action. Enable the new MetalFX Upscaling feature in Quality mode and performance increases by around 30% with no noticeable loss in quality. You can even upscale it to 4K resolution and play at 40-60fps in Prioritize Graphics mode.
That’s a perfectly respectable performance, especially for a computer as small and quiet as a Mac mini. But it becomes crushed by a comparably priced Windows gaming PC. A pre-built gaming PC like the one I frequently play on, with a Ryzen 9 5900X and GeForce 3070 Ti, currently sells for around $1,850 through Best Buy. And it absolutely destroys the Mac mini in gaming performance.
Resident Evil Village at the same parameters works at thrice the frame rate. The same strenuous outdoor court that hovers in the mid-70s on the Mac mini runs at over 220 frames per second on the PC. At 4K resolution with upscaling enabled, I got well over 120 fps, not 40-60 fps. Hell, the PC is running at 1440p resolution with ray tracing enabled at 160 fps here. Ray tracing is not even available on Mac.
It’s hard to find modern games to compare because the selections are so slim for the Mac. For fun, I ran our Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark on the Windows PC. At 1920×1200 with the High preset, the Mac clocks at 118 fps. The PC doubled it at 234fps!
Of course, these computers are only comparable in price. The Mac mini is a fraction of the size and mostly silent, while the gaming PC is big and full of fans. But performance is a major concern for gamers. Games should look good and work well, now and in the future. And the thing is, when it comes to playing games, you can get at least twice the performance of a PC for the same price, or match the performance of the Mac mini at a fraction of the cost. Of course, the PC will be bigger and more power-hungry, but also scalable (another major concern for gamers).
To put it bluntly: the gaming performance of the M2 Pro is GOOD but that’s nothing to brag about.
Where are the games?
Even if the Mac mini didn’t offer half (or less) the gaming performance at this price, it would be a poor choice because the games just aren’t there.
The large “AAA Gaming Experiences for Mac” section that Apple promotes on its Mac mini page proudly features No Man’s Skya PC and console game released over six years ago… and it’s still not released on Mac yet! Apple has it on its Mac mini hype page and it’s “still coming in 2023”.
Apple
Mac gamers could once rely on the latest Blizzard titles, but Surveillance never shipped on Mac, Monitor 2 doesn’t have a Mac version in the works, and neither Diablo IV. A look at Steam’s top sellers page is truly grim. Only two of the top 15 games have Mac versions, and they’re both over 10 years old.
Foundry
The thing is, the Mac isn’t any better off with the biggest game releases than it has been in the last decade: one or two big new games are coming to the Mac (where they’ve got the air and run worse than their Windows counterpart), a few other big releases come to the Mac a year later, and 90% of the games you want to play never come to the Mac.
A roadmap for gaming on the Mac
If Apple really wants to make the Mac a gaming platform worthy of attention, it will have to take drastic measures. Trying to build a little hype once a year around a new chip and “that big name game we got” isn’t going to cut it.
It’s probably asking too much of Apple to produce a Mac with good gaming performance that doesn’t cost a fortune. Windows PCs will enjoy a huge price and performance advantage for a long time. But Apple could at least do something about the software situation.
The company showed its willingness to embrace outdoor gaming devices by supporting Xbox and Playstation controllers natively in macOS (and iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS), leaving behind years of horrible MFi program controllers. Imagine what the same willingness to get along could mean in the software world.
Foundry
Valve’s Steam Deck is a hit with gamers, even though it runs a Linux-based operating system, and Linux is just as behind in gaming support as macOS. How is it successful? Because Valve and its partners have created a software compatibility layer called Proton. It takes Windows games and translates everything to run on Linux.
It’s even open source – imagine what the Apple engineers responsible for Rosetta could do if they were aiming to run Proton on a Mac! Apple should certainly do so and work with Valve to offer the same kind of compatibility list in Steam. It’s likely a six-month software project that could make hundreds of the best PC games instantly available now and in the future.
Foundry
But this is not enough. Apple can’t keep forcing everyone who builds native Mac apps to use their Metal graphics API. No one wants to do this for a platform as small (for gaming) as the Mac. Support for the more widely used (by game developers) Vulkan API for Apple silicon would go a long way in showing game developers that Apple is ready to meet them halfway.
Finally, there is the blunt instrument that always works: money. Apple is sitting on a huge pile of gold like a dragon, with more than $150 billion in cash and cash equivalents. It would have a huge impact to spend just one percent of that idle money on payments to publishers to make native Mac versions of their great games, available day and day alongside Windows releases.
That’s $1.5 billion in “create a Mac version too” kickbacks, enough to fully fund dozens of Mac versions of top upcoming games every year. Game development is a multi-year process, so this method would not have an immediate impact. The Proton for Mac initiative could make a huge difference in the short term, with paid versions taking over after a few years.
Whatever Apple decides to do, it’s clear that its current path has fallen short. The Mac as a gaming platform is in as bad a shape as it has been in the last decade.
