2026年Mac能玩游戏了吗？我们实测了300款游戏！ — Transcript

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1. 0:00Can Macs game now?
2. 0:03Seeing this title,
3. 0:04I wonder what your first reaction was.
4. 0:06If this were five years ago,
5. 0:07I think everyone would have said the same thing,
6. 0:10smiling knowingly like in this meme:
7. 0:13"Game on a Mac? Yeah, right."
8. 0:14Or they'd bring up the "uncle gaming on a Mac" meme.
9. 0:17Totally understandable.
10. 0:18After all, Macs had just moved from x86 to Apple's own ARM chips.
11. 0:22We were amazed by the unprecedentedly low power draw and heat,
12. 0:25and the unprecedentedly long laptop battery life.
13. 0:28But we also knew, more or less, that Mac software support would be lacking for a while.
14. 0:33But now, five years have passed.
15. 0:36Neither Apple nor the developer community
16. 0:38has been sitting around doing nothing.
17. 0:40They've genuinely done a lot of work.
18. 0:42The Mac software ecosystem is worlds apart from the early M1 days.
19. 0:46Gaming used to be the Mac's weakest area.
20. 0:50But if you look today,
21. 0:51I'm not saying it's amazing,
22. 0:53but at least it is absolutely not a joke anymore.
23. 0:55So today we decided to make a dedicated episode,
24. 0:57using a huge number of tests,
25. 0:59nearly 300 games, to be precise,
26. 1:02to take a deep look
27. 1:04at what gaming on a Mac
28. 1:05actually feels like in 2026.
29. 1:09First, some background for those who aren't familiar.
30. 1:12When Macs first switched to ARM CPUs five years ago,
31. 1:15why did their gaming ecosystem face such a serious challenge?
32. 1:19There were a few main reasons.
33. 1:20First, in the x86 era,
34. 1:22Macs could install Windows through Boot Camp.
35. 1:25That solved gaming needs to some extent.
36. 1:27But once Apple Silicon arrived, Apple officially ruled that option out entirely.
37. 1:32No more dual-boot safety net.
38. 1:33On the other hand,
39. 1:34while Apple killed the possibility of installing Windows on a Mac for games,
40. 1:38it also killed something else:
41. 1:39the ability to play old 32-bit Mac games.
42. 1:43Unlike Microsoft's hesitant, legacy-heavy approach,
43. 1:46Apple has always been decisive about this kind of thing.
44. 1:49Since 32-bit compatibility would make new systems and platforms bloated,
45. 1:54they simply cut 32-bit support in macOS Catalina back in 2019.
46. 1:59Apple Silicon never considered it from the start.
47. 2:02So even with the Rosetta 2 translation layer,
48. 2:04M-series chips can only translate 64-bit x86 apps.
49. 2:07Those old 32-bit native Mac games became unplayable.
50. 2:11On top of that, when M-series chips arrived, everyone realized Mac performance had suddenly come alive.
51. 2:16No more single heat pipe trying to tame an i9 while it throttled like crazy.
52. 2:21Mac users had solved the basics.
53. 2:23Naturally, they started thinking about
54. 2:25more luxurious, spiritual needs.
55. 2:27The calls for gaming on Mac grew louder and louder.
56. 2:30So gaming became a hurdle Apple had to clear.
57. 2:33Easy to say.
58. 2:35But what exactly could Apple do?
59. 2:37They did several things.
60. 2:38First, they actively reached out to major game studios,
61. 2:41trying to make developers willing to create native Mac ports.
62. 2:45That had to be feasible both technically and commercially.
63. 2:48Technically, Apple released GPTK, the Game Porting Toolkit.
64. 2:52It lets developers run existing Windows versions
65. 2:54directly on Mac with almost no code changes,
66. 2:57to quickly evaluate compatibility and performance.
67. 2:59If the results look good,
68. 3:00they can then invest resources into a native port.
69. 3:03Apple even provides Metal Shader Converter,
70. 3:05which automatically converts PC game shaders into Metal shaders,
71. 3:09lowering the porting barrier.
72. 3:11Commercially,
73. 3:12progress was honestly a little slow at first.
74. 3:14Games like Capcom's Resident Evil,
75. 3:16and Kojima's Death Stranding
76. 3:17landed on the App Store first.
77. 3:19But many players may not be used to buying full-price games on the App Store.
78. 3:23If distribution is unnecessarily restricted,
79. 3:26developers not seeing benefits becomes a problem.
80. 3:28So you can see Apple becoming more flexible.
81. 3:32In the past two years, many native Mac releases have also come to Steam.
82. 3:35Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and so on.
83. 3:38That's great news for players switching from Windows to Mac.
84. 3:42Native is best, of course.
85. 3:44But what if a game isn't native?
86. 3:46Translate it, then!
87. 3:47The second thing Apple did
88. 3:48was make it possible for ordinary users to run Windows games directly on macOS.
89. 3:54This is where we should grandly introduce
90. 3:55the most important piece of software for Mac gaming: CrossOver.
91. 4:00It's a compatibility platform developed by CodeWeavers.
92. 4:02It lets you run Windows games on Mac with relatively little hassle.
93. 4:06Although it's third-party software,
94. 4:07CrossOver has actually received a lot of technical support from Apple.
95. 4:11The GPTK translation toolkit we mentioned earlier
96. 4:14borrows from and supports CrossOver technically.
97. 4:16They reinforce each other.
98. 4:17My take is that, from Apple's position, directly supporting Microsoft's ecosystem is a bit delicate.
99. 4:23But building low-level tools to help third parties handle compatibility is perfectly legitimate.
100. 4:28CrossOver is not a virtual machine.
101. 4:30Its tech stack looks roughly like this.
102. 4:32First, Wine creates a Windows-compatible environment.
103. 4:35For Windows games, things like
104. 4:37Win32, DirectX, the registry, and file-system interfaces
105. 4:40are reduced to only what's necessary to run the game.
106. 4:43They get placed into this little greenhouse we've built,
107. 4:45and Wine translates them into calls macOS can understand.
108. 4:48On top of that,
109. 4:49Rosetta 2 translates the x86 CPU instructions into ARM instructions.
110. 4:54That's the CPU side.
111. 4:55Then comes GPU translation, which is even trickier.
112. 4:59Because this involves graphics APIs.
113. 5:01How do you convert DX11 and DX12 interfaces into Metal?
114. 5:05When CrossOver first came out,
115. 5:07this was practically an uncrossable chasm.
116. 5:09DX11 first had to be converted to Vulkan,
117. 5:12and then to Metal.
118. 5:13Two translation layers stacked back to back.
119. 5:17The efficiency was just too low.
120. 5:19Not to mention DX12 support was terrible.
121. 5:22So how was this solved later?
122. 5:25Apple had to step in personally.
123. 5:27They built the D3DMetal translation layer into GPTK,
124. 5:30allowing DX12 to convert directly to Metal.
125. 5:33Game compatibility and performance jumped to a whole new level.
126. 5:37GPTK 4, introduced at the recent WWDC 26,
127. 5:41also supports the latest Metal 4.
128. 5:43In our tests, many games gained another roughly 10% performance boost.
129. 5:47While CrossOver brings all these translation layers together,
130. 5:50it also has another crucial job:
131. 5:52tuning each game individually.
132. 5:54Some games fail because of a very specific API issue,
133. 5:58or because a system file is missing,
134. 6:00or they suffer severe shader-compilation stutter.
135. 6:02CrossOver has to optimize around those problems case by case.
136. 6:06It conquers Windows games one by one.
137. 6:08That's how the Mac compatibility list keeps growing.
138. 6:11The third thing Apple did for gaming
139. 6:14was massively strengthen Mac performance.
140. 6:16CPU and GPU alike.
141. 6:19Apple's idea was:
142. 6:20since translation has overhead,
143. 6:22we'll make the chips strong enough to ignore that overhead and still fight Windows PCs.
144. 6:28In the end, at least on the CPU side, they absolutely achieved that.
145. 6:32Translation overhead often does come from the CPU.
146. 6:35So in many games you'll find
147. 6:37performance is still strong even through a translation layer.
148. 6:41For that, we have Apple Silicon's powerful CPUs to thank.
149. 6:44For GPUs, honestly, the industry is brutally competitive.
150. 6:46Especially compared with NVIDIA cards,
151. 6:48there's still a long road ahead.
152. 6:49Aside from constantly improving performance,
153. 6:51Apple can also keep improving the Metal API.
154. 6:54Metal 3 and Metal 4 over the past two years
155. 6:57have been actively adding features expected of modern graphics pipelines.
156. 7:01To me, Metal 3 was the first time Apple truly got serious about a modern game API.
157. 7:06The other side has DLSS,
158. 7:08so Apple made MetalFX upscaling.
159. 7:11The other side made DirectStorage,
160. 7:12so Apple made Fast Resource Loading,
161. 7:15sending SSD data directly into GPU resources.
162. 7:17And modern DX12 Ultimate features like mesh shading and ray tracing?
163. 7:23Mac needs those too.
164. 7:25With Metal 4, Apple isn't even pretending anymore.
165. 7:27AI frame generation, path-tracing denoising, even Apple-flavored Tensor Cores are here.
166. 7:33Since the industry already has examples, there's no need to reinvent in isolation.
167. 7:36Humbly following the industry into advanced tech
168. 7:39is totally fine in my book.
169. 7:40So to summarize, Apple gaming is three things:
170. 7:43do native well,
171. 7:44do translation well, then aggressively push performance and features.
172. 7:49So how effective is the medicine?
173. 7:52We decided to test it ourselves.
174. 7:54This is an M4 Mac mini with 16 GB of memory.
175. 7:57Before electronics prices went up,
176. 7:59some channels sold it for under 3,000 yuan.
177. 8:01What a shame. What a shame.
178. 8:03Just one day before this video was about to go live,
179. 8:06it went up in price again.
180. 8:08Oof.
181. 8:10So if you bought this machine earlier,
182. 8:13go ahead and quietly feel smug.
183. 8:15But today, we'll still use it as our example
184. 8:17to run small, medium, and large games.
185. 8:21Alright.
186. 8:21Let's reveal the answer.
187. 8:22This
188. 8:23is our Mac compatibility list for 293 games.
189. 8:27It includes 162 medium-to-large single-player games,
190. 8:31including 111 AAA titles,
191. 8:32plus 37 online games, 15 anime/mobile games,
192. 8:3660 small indie games, and 19 visual novels.
193. 8:40To make playability easier to judge,
194. 8:42we gave each game a three-tier rating.
195. 8:45Green means "Perfect."
196. 8:46It means there are almost no playability bugs,
197. 8:49and no issues like memory leaks.
198. 8:52Yellow means "Playable."
199. 8:53There are usually some bugs,
200. 8:55major performance anomalies, or missing features like online play.
201. 9:00Red means "Incompatible," completely unable to run,
202. 9:03with all kinds of serious issues.
203. 9:05Most of these can't even enter the game.
204. 9:07Let me give you the overview first.
205. 9:09Among the 293 games we tested,
206. 9:1361 could not run at all.
207. 9:16The remaining 232 could at least launch.
208. 9:20Among them, 216 ran perfectly with no issues in our testing.
209. 9:26That means the "Perfect" rate has reached 74%.
210. 9:29And the playable rate is close to 80%.
211. 9:32So,
212. 9:32does that match your expectations for Mac game compatibility?
213. 9:36Let's talk about the different game categories.
214. 9:39Right now, the biggest compatibility problems on Mac
215. 9:42mainly come from online games.
216. 9:44In our tests, online games had only a 43% perfect compatibility rate,
217. 9:48far lower than single-player games.
218. 9:49Why do online games fail to run?
219. 9:52Anti-cheat.
220. 9:54I think many of you probably guessed that already.
221. 9:56Tencent ACE, EAC, BattlEye,
222. 10:00Javelin,
223. 10:00they're often completely incompatible with containers and virtual machines.
224. 10:05In our tests, these kernel-level anti-cheat systems could not run through CrossOver.
225. 10:11So Delta Force, Apex, VALORANT, COD, Battlefield,
226. 10:17and other popular competitive games can't run multiplayer on Mac.
227. 10:19Tencent's anti-cheat is especially strict.
228. 10:22So it's not just Delta Force.
229. 10:23The Chinese servers of LOL, DNF, and others are also unplayable.
230. 10:28NetEase games, by contrast, generally support Mac decently.
231. 10:32Translation may not be perfect, but at least it usually doesn't stop you from launching.
232. 10:37Given how many Tencent game players there are in China,
233. 10:40this situation hurts the gaming ecosystem quite a bit.
234. 10:43I wonder if there's any chance of cooperation later to solve the anti-cheat issue.
235. 10:47It feels like a tough one.
236. 10:49Fortunately, in our testing,
237. 10:50quite a few online games still ran normally on macOS.
238. 10:55Besides the NetEase games we mentioned,
239. 10:57games like Helldivers 2,
240. 10:58Diablo IV, CS2, Warframe, and World of Tanks
241. 11:01all work perfectly through CrossOver.
242. 11:04War Thunder, Dota 2, World of Warcraft,
243. 11:07and the international League of Legends client even have native macOS versions.
244. 11:12So if you use a Mac and happen to play these games,
245. 11:15then you're fairly lucky.
246. 11:17Competitive gaming on Mac has another problem:
247. 11:20macOS enables mouse acceleration by default.
248. 11:23Modern macOS is almost built entirely
249. 11:26around trackpad interaction.
250. 11:29Fortunately, in the past couple of years, Apple has also allowed mouse acceleration to be disabled in the system.
251. 11:34Search for pointer precision to find this option.
252. 11:37If you game on Mac, I recommend turning it off.
253. 11:39Compared with the less optimistic online-game situation,
254. 11:42single-player games perform much better on Mac.
255. 11:46In our tests, the perfect rate reached 68%.
256. 11:49The vast majority of games ran normally.
257. 11:52And for most major single-player releases in recent years,
258. 11:55our M4 Mac mini could basically run them
259. 11:59at medium-low settings at 2K 30 FPS or 1080p 60 FPS.
260. 12:03That's honestly pretty competitive.
261. 12:05This new version of CrossOver
262. 12:07even supports something you'd never expect:
263. 12:09DLSS.
264. 12:12When you see this option in CrossOver, it's absolutely a record-scratch moment.
265. 12:16Wait, Apple can support NVIDIA-exclusive upscaling and frame generation?
266. 12:21Well,
267. 12:22using this DLSS option
268. 12:24doesn't mean it's actually running NVIDIA's DLSS.
269. 12:27Instead, it uses the DLSS hooks already present in games
270. 12:30to pull a neat switcheroo,
271. 12:32grafting in Apple's own MetalFX upscaling and frame generation.
272. 12:36After all, DLSS is already used by tons of Windows games.
273. 12:40This lets translated Mac games
274. 12:42also benefit from upscaling and frame generation,
275. 12:45which can significantly improve the experience.
276. 12:48With "DLSS" lending a borrowed shell,
277. 12:50we found many AAA titles could run smoothly on the M4 in this Mac mini.
278. 12:56For example, Resident Evil Requiem,
279. 12:58Ghost of Tsushima, Stellar Blade, The Witcher 3, and Hogwarts Legacy.
280. 13:03The frame rates we measured were all quite solid.
281. 13:05Very smooth.
282. 13:06The experience is already no worse than some Windows PCs with integrated graphics.
283. 13:09For single-player games,
284. 13:10more and more developers are releasing native macOS versions.
285. 13:14They support Apple Silicon natively,
286. 13:15so we don't need to mess with translation.
287. 13:17These native games really perform very well.
288. 13:20They run well, frame rates are stable,
289. 13:22and most of them support MetalFX upscaling.
290. 13:25Even a heavy AAA game like Crimson Desert
291. 13:28can run on the M4's integrated GPU at 2K
292. 13:32with MetalFX Performance mode at 30 FPS.
293. 13:33That's pretty good.
294. 13:34And Cyberpunk 2077, the tireless workhorse of gaming, needs no introduction.
295. 13:37It's very well optimized on Mac.
296. 13:39It will soon support the latest Metal 4 as well,
297. 13:42bringing new features like frame generation and path-tracing denoising.
298. 13:46On our M4 Mac mini,
299. 13:47with MetalFX Balanced upscaling enabled,
300. 13:50it can hit 63 FPS at 1080p Low.
301. 13:53And if you're using a MacBook Pro with the top-end M5 Max chip,
302. 13:57you can even get 79 FPS at 2K Ultra with MetalFX Quality.
303. 14:03That's very strong performance.
304. 14:05Unfortunately, native Mac AAA releases are still relatively few.
305. 14:09We tested a dozen or so this time.
306. 14:10Some of them, like the Resident Evil series and Assassin's Creed:
307. 14:13Some of them, like the Resident Evil series and Assassin's Creed Shadows,
308. 14:15are exclusive to the App Store.
309. 14:17For players like us who already bought them on PC,
310. 14:20buying another full-price copy just isn't realistic.
311. 14:24I still hope more native Mac games come to platforms like Steam in the future.
312. 14:29One difference when playing AAA games on Mac is unified memory.
313. 14:33On Windows laptops with integrated graphics, whether Intel or AMD,
314. 14:36memory and VRAM are also shared,
315. 14:39but VRAM space needs to be reserved.
316. 14:42That eats into the available system memory.
317. 14:44For Mac,
318. 14:45unified memory is one big pool, and everyone takes what they need.
319. 14:48You don't need to rigidly split 16 GB into system memory and VRAM.
320. 14:54Scheduling is more flexible.
321. 14:56For games like Black Myth that use lots of memory and VRAM,
322. 14:59we found performance takes a big hit on 16 GB Windows integrated-GPU laptops.
323. 15:03But the 16 GB Mac mini's memory was basically enough,
324. 15:07and it ran fairly smoothly.
325. 15:08Many AAA games we tested, like Assassin's Creed Mirage
326. 15:11and Horizon Zero Dawn,
327. 15:13ran right up against the memory limit on a 16 GB Mac,
328. 15:16but still performed okay.
329. 15:18Especially after updating to GPTK 4,
330. 15:21we saw memory usage drop further,
331. 15:24and performance improved noticeably.
332. 15:26However, some translated games do suffer memory leaks.
333. 15:29For example, Marvel Rivals, which we marked yellow earlier.
334. 15:32Under GPTK 3, it had an obvious memory leak.
335. 15:35Fortunately, under GPTK 4, memory usage became much more normal.
336. 15:39Another example is Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection.
337. 15:42On Mac, the longer you play,
338. 15:44the higher its memory usage climbs, and it rises very fast.
339. 15:47In our tests, even under GPTK 4, it used over 30 GB of memory at peak.
340. 15:53Wow.
341. 15:53With that much leakage, the game was somehow still running.
342. 15:56Honestly, that's not something you see every day.
343. 15:59Overall, I think new games performed commendably.
344. 16:02Even the M4 can run so many games smoothly.
345. 16:05That's quite a pleasant surprise.
346. 16:06So what about old games?
347. 16:09The situation is a little more complicated.
348. 16:11First,
349. 16:12although old games don't demand much performance,
350. 16:14they often use old graphics APIs,
351. 16:17such as DX9 and OpenGL.
352. 16:20Translation efficiency for these old APIs on macOS is fairly poor.
353. 16:24DX9 can only be translated through DXVK or WineD3D.
354. 16:27In our tests, several old Source engine games,
355. 16:31plus various DX9 or even older games,
356. 16:34had occasional small stutters during translation.
357. 16:36Frame rates fluctuated, so the experience wasn't great.
358. 16:39Also,
359. 16:40many older single-player games actually have x86 Mac versions.
360. 16:44In theory, they can run on ARM Macs
361. 16:47through Rosetta translation.
362. 16:48But because macOS has completely removed 32-bit app support,
363. 16:54games like Portal and Left 4 Dead
364. 16:58can no longer run through their native Mac versions.
365. 17:01Instead, translating the Windows version through CrossOver works.
366. 17:05Didn't see that coming, did you?
367. 17:07Even then,
368. 17:08some native Mac x86 games that do run normally
369. 17:11may still feel worse than the CrossOver-translated version.
370. 17:15Take Euro Truck Simulator 2. It has a native x86 Mac version,
371. 17:19but it doesn't use the Metal API.
372. 17:21It still uses old OpenGL.
373. 17:23So native performance is terrible.
374. 17:26On the M4, it only reaches 74 FPS at 2K lowest settings.
375. 17:31But if you translate the Windows version through CrossOver,
376. 17:34using D3DMetal to run DX11,
377. 17:37the frame rate at 2K lowest settings
378. 17:39shoots up to 160 or 170 FPS.
379. 17:41That's more than double the performance.
380. 17:43Translation actually crushes native!
381. 17:45I have to say, that's pretty surprising.
382. 17:46Besides performance,
383. 17:48translation can also run into common compatibility issues.
384. 17:51Some games need to open through launchers,
385. 17:53which can sometimes have bugs.
386. 17:54We ran into issues with DOOM's launcher,
387. 17:56and Rockstar Launcher also required workarounds.
388. 18:01Then there are some Microsoft first-party Windows games
389. 18:04that rely on Microsoft services,
390. 18:05such as the Forza Horizon series
391. 18:07and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
392. 18:10Sadly, CrossOver can't translate them.
393. 18:12Without Microsoft's cooperation, I don't think this will be solved soon.
394. 18:16A few games, such as Total War: Warhammer III
395. 18:19and some indie titles,
396. 18:20can't run from an external drive enclosure.
397. 18:22macOS apps need access permission to use external drives,
398. 18:26and some games fail because they don't request that permission.
399. 18:28The most bizarre game we encountered was Marvel's Spider-Man 2.
400. 18:32It could launch normally,
401. 18:34but every character in the game turned into a T-pose.
402. 18:36The whole scene looked hilarious.
403. 18:38The game probably uses some special streaming-load technique,
404. 18:42causing some assets to fail to load during translation.
405. 18:45But across the hundreds of games we tested, this was only an edge case.
406. 18:49Most games ran quite well.
407. 18:51After AAA titles,
408. 18:53let's talk about simpler indie games.
409. 18:56We tested 60 indie games in total.
410. 18:59Would Mac compatibility be better for indie games than big AAA titles?
411. 19:03Turns out, yes.
412. 19:05In our testing, 59 out of 60 were playable.
413. 19:09That's an extremely high ratio.
414. 19:11Only What Remains of Edith Finch failed to run with an error.
415. 19:15Everything else played smoothly.
416. 19:17And since most indie games don't demand much performance,
417. 19:20smoothness was generally fine.
418. 19:22So if you mainly play indie games,
419. 19:25taking a Mac on the go is completely viable.
420. 19:27You can rest easy.
421. 19:29We also found
422. 19:30that indie games have a very high native rate.
423. 19:33Out of 60 games, 34 had native versions.
424. 19:37Among them, 17 were native ARM Mac games.
425. 19:40That native rate is far higher than AAA.
426. 19:43For one thing,
427. 19:44indie games don't have graphics pipelines as complex as AAA games,
428. 19:46so migration is easier.
429. 19:48For another, indie developers are generally more willing to try new things,
430. 19:53unlike big studios with more concerns.
431. 19:55Right now, the indie ecosystem on Mac
432. 19:57is definitely stable and improving.
433. 19:59Then we also tested quite a few anime-style and mobile games.
434. 20:03Is this the part some players care about most?
435. 20:05In our tests,
436. 20:0613 of the 15 anime-style games ran perfectly.
437. 20:10Several native games performed well,
438. 20:12such as Wuthering Waves, Infinity Nikki, Honkai Impact 3rd, Tower of Fantasy, and Ananta.
439. 20:15They all ran stably.
440. 20:17Image quality and performance were both fine.
441. 20:18Aside from these games officially available on Mac,
442. 20:21the remaining anime/mobile games still need various clever workarounds to run.
443. 20:26But playing mobile games on Mac has one unique advantage:
444. 20:29PlayCover.
445. 20:31Unlike the Android emulators common on Windows,
446. 20:35PlayCover can run iOS and iPadOS games directly at native performance.
447. 20:41Compatibility is pretty good too.
448. 20:43In our tests, most mobile games ran fine
449. 20:47as long as you could find the IPA installer.
450. 20:49But PlayCover isn't a magic bullet.
451. 20:51For example, Arknights: Endfield
452. 20:54can enter the game through PlayCover,
453. 20:56but it triggers anti-cheat and can't be played further.
454. 20:59Identity V cannot run through PlayCover at all.
455. 21:03Its PC version also got stuck at the launcher in CrossOver.
456. 21:06As for miHoYo's Star Rail and Genshin,
457. 21:08you can use an open-source project
458. 21:10called Yaagl to translate and run the PC versions.
459. 21:14This project is essentially based on Wine and DXMT,
460. 21:17but it includes patches to solve anti-cheat issues.
461. 21:22With simple setup, you can launch the games.
462. 21:24In terms of overall playability,
463. 21:26quite a few anime-style games can be used on Mac for daily stamina and dailies.
464. 21:30Some just require you to spend time tinkering.
465. 21:34Finally, out of personal interest,
466. 21:37I also tried some visual novels.
467. 21:40Only one of the 19 games couldn't run:
468. 21:42this FSN remaster.
469. 21:44Because it uses Microsoft Edge WebView2,
470. 21:46translation had problems. The others ran pretty smoothly.
471. 21:50Even some fairly old visual novels
472. 21:53were playable normally.
473. 21:55And because MacBook battery life is excellent,
474. 21:58playing lightweight games like these on the go is actually quite suitable.
475. 22:01The problem with these games
476. 22:03is that patching them can be a hassle.
477. 22:06Many games need extra patches,
478. 22:08including Chinese localization, to feel comfortable.
479. 22:11Especially for translated visual novels,
480. 22:13inside CrossOver's container environment,
481. 22:14this sometimes takes extra effort.
482. 22:17You may run into cases where the base game works,
483. 22:19but the patch doesn't.
484. 22:21But honestly,
485. 22:22I've been playing visual novels through CrossOver since it first launched.
486. 22:27Compatibility has improved dramatically over the past two years.
487. 22:30Before, quite a few games would overflow memory after translation,
488. 22:33making them extremely laggy after a while.
489. 22:36Back then, reading VNs on Mac was painful.
490. 22:40Now those bugs have been completely solved,
491. 22:42and I can play however I want.
492. 22:44The full compatibility spreadsheet for nearly 300 games
493. 22:48has already been uploaded and shared online.
494. 22:50If you're interested, check the link in our description.
495. 22:54You can search whether the games you play run smoothly on Mac.
496. 22:58Wow, we tested so many games in one go.
497. 23:01After watching all this, what do you think?
498. 23:04Personally, I feel that in 2026,
499. 23:06Macs really aren't like they were five years ago,
500. 23:09when everyone dodged the topic whenever gaming came up.
501. 23:11Based on our tests,
502. 23:13today's Macs are respectable
503. 23:15in both game compatibility and performance.
504. 23:17And they keep getting better every year.
505. 23:20As I said earlier,
506. 23:21the newly released macOS 27 beta and GPTK 4
507. 23:25even brought double-digit frame-rate gains in many games we tested.
508. 23:29Of course,
509. 23:29this doesn't mean Mac can easily surpass Windows PCs in gaming.
510. 23:34Many online games are still limited by anti-cheat,
511. 23:37so compatibility still needs improvement.
512. 23:40If you're buying a computer specifically for gaming,
513. 23:42I'd still recommend a gaming PC with a discrete GPU.
514. 23:45I don't think Apple's intention is to compete directly with gaming PCs on their home turf.
515. 23:52Improving gaming on Mac
516. 23:53is more about making potential customers who value Mac's other strengths
517. 23:57stop hesitating because of weak gaming.
518. 24:00I already wanted a Mac.
519. 24:02I already cared about its low power draw, silence, and battery life.
520. 24:05I take a MacBook on business trips, for content creation,
521. 24:08for development, and for running Codex.
522. 24:11Now it can also satisfy my gaming needs,
523. 24:14so I no longer have to
524. 24:15buy a gaming PC after buying a Mac, like before.
525. 24:18That is the point of Apple's push into gaming.
526. 24:22So I don't think we need to expect Macs to beat gaming PCs.
527. 24:25Macs just need to keep doing what they're good at,
528. 24:27while continuously improving the gaming experience on top.
529. 24:30Make the strengths very strong, and the weaknesses not weak.
530. 24:33That's my hope for the future of Mac.
531. 24:36Of course, that's just my personal view.
532. 24:38What do you think about Macs being able to game?
533. 24:42Alright, that's a lot of talking.
534. 24:43If you found this video useful,
535. 24:46please remember to like, share, comment, and save it.
536. 24:49And don't forget to follow our Geekerwan channel.
537. 24:51See you next time.