Apple has all the tech needed for great Mac games. So where are they?

I’ve been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember, and that means I’ve sat on both sides of the Mac/PC aisle in my time. And in fact, right now I have both a MacBook Pro and a custom gaming PC sitting on my desk.

There’s a good reason for that. I love playing games, and right now Apple simply can’t match the breadth of games available on Windows. If I want to have the most choice available for my gaming downtime—and I do—then there’s very little choice but to have a Windows machine close at hand.

It really feels like the situation shouldn’t be this way. macOS has come on leaps and bounds in recent years with its support for cutting-edge gaming technology, including features like upscaling, ray tracing, and frame generation that can make a huge difference to the user experience.

The hardware, too, is more capable than it’s ever been. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be able to play a game as notoriously demanding as Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac, I’d have laughed you out of the building. Yet here we are.

But for all that progress, there’s still a major dearth of AAA games on the Mac. It’s the number one reason I haven’t ditched my Windows PC yet, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I can’t help but wonder: if things still aren’t improving on this front, are we ever going to see parity between macOS and Windows in terms of available games? And what is Apple doing to put things right?

A barren gaming landscape

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Crimson Desert. It’s a massive open world fantasy adventure in the vein of popular titles like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, and unlike most highly ambitious games of its ilk, it was available on macOS on day one, at the same time as its PC and PlayStation 5 launch.

Yet situations like this are few and far between. For Mac gamers, the gaming landscape really is barren compared to what you get on Windows.

Sure, there are plenty of big-name draws like Baldur’s Gate 3, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Cyberpunk 2077 on the Mac. But the list of prominent absentees is long and noteworthy, with titles like Call of Duty, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, Arc Raiders and more nowhere to be found. Past entries in popular series like Assassin’s Creed are unavailable and many of the best Mac games—names like Control Ultimate Edition and Disco Elysium—are either years old or debuted on Windows long before they came to the Mac.

There’s no sign that that’s about to change. The fact that Crimson Desert arrived on macOS at the same time as on Windows was surprising. If anything, it was the exception that proved the rule: most games come to Mac late, if they arrive at all. The fact that something as high-profile as Crimson Desert bucked the trend demonstrates how strong that trend really is.

It’s only in recent years that Apple has made a concerted effort to woo both gamers and game developers, and it’ll take time for any changes to be felt. But if things are going to improve, Apple can’t afford to let up.

Limited progress

Historically, Mac gaming always faced a chicken-and-egg problem. Developers didn’t want to make games for macOS because there weren’t many Mac players. And gamers didn’t want to switch to macOS because there’s weren’t many games available. This vicious cycle saw each side exacerbate the other.

Apple, to its credit, has tried to rectify the situation. On the software side, for example, it’s worked directly with developers to optimize their games for macOS and learn how the company can make the macOS development landscape more appealing.

As for hardware, Apple silicon has brought about a step change in the gaming capabilities of the Mac. While it’s not as good as having a discrete graphics card like an Nvidia RTX 5090, of course, it’s made gaming a realistic prospect for most of Apple’s computers.

And then there are techs like MetalFX Upscaling and MetalFX Frame Interpolation, which make gaming possible on Macs that never would have stood a chance before.

MetalFX Upscaling takes a low-resolution frame and scales it up to a higher resolution, bringing more detail and clarity to your gaming sessions. So, your Mac might render a frame at roughly 1080p, then MetalFX steps in to scale that up to 4K or thereabouts. The key here is that your Mac doesn’t have to actually draw a 4K frame each time, saving resources and increasing frame rates as a result. The Windows equivalents are DLSS for Nvidia graphics cards and FSR for AMD cards.

MetalFX Frame Interpolation, meanwhile, is Apple’s equivalent of the frame-generation tech used in PC graphics cards made by the likes of Nvidia and AMD. In short, it uses AI to generate one additional frame for every two existing frames. The effect of this is smoother gameplay than you would normally expect from your hardware.

Combined, these technologies mean you can get an enjoyable gaming experience on a relatively low-spec Mac – provided game developers actually implement these features, of course.

But even when that’s the case, you’ll still get the nagging feeling—borne out by benchmarks and developer guidance, unfortunately—that performance is still better on other, non-Apple systems. According to Crimson Desert’s creator Pearl Abyss, you’ll need an M2 Pro chip from 2023 at a minimum if you want to hit 60fps at a paltry 720p resolution. Windows users only need an Nvidia RTX 2080 for the same frame rate, at a higher 1080p resolution. That card was released all the way back in 2018.

In other words, you’ll need a newer chip and the higher associated costs to get a lower resolution output on a Mac compared to a Windows PC. That makes for painful reading.

Benchmarking from content creator Andrew Tsai, meanwhile, showed similarly disappointing results. Running Crimson Desert on a MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip saw average frame rates around 60fps on medium settings at 1440p, although that was using MetalFX Upscaling to increase the resolution up from 960p. Bear in mind that such a laptop will cost you a shocking $4,099 or more thanks to Apple’s recent price increases.

After setting my personal gaming PC to a native 1440p resolution (not upscaled) and maximum settings in Crimson Desert, I got around 50fps, meaning it looked far better than the Mac with similar frame rates. To mirror the benchmarked MacBook Pro, I dropped my PC to medium settings and 900p upscaled resolution with the DLSS Balanced preset, at which point it got to around 110fps. That’s almost double the performance of the M5 Max MacBook Pro, despite my PC costing over $1,000 less.

Larian Studios

As long as you get incredibly worse performance on a Mac that costs a lot more, gamers are likely to stay away. And that will only discourage developers from releasing their products on Apple’s platforms. Better performance at every price point, relative to competing Windows computers, is therefore an important sticking point that Apple needs to address.

What more can Apple do?

We’re starting to see the fruits of Apple’s labor as more big-name developers bring their games to macOS. But clearly, more needs to be done. Until players no longer feel like they’re having to constrain their game library or stymie their performance by going with an Apple device, Mac gaming will always be at a disadvantage. Apple needs to continue working with developers to convince them to bring their games to macOS and to do it on day one, with no delay.

At the same time, Apple must keep improving its hardware and software capabilities to ramp up gaming performance year over year. It’s not reasonable to expect people to pay over $4,000 to get middling gaming performance that’s half of a Windows PC that costs considerably less.

Apple is working on these two approaches, and they’re starting to make a difference. But it’s far too soon to stop now.

Foundry

Aside from that, Apple could do with making itself more visible to gamers. I’m not expecting it to be the marquee sponsor of The Game Awards, but teaming up with a big-name gaming brand for a range of exclusive products would raise its profile. Apple has already done this with Corsair (with the K65 Plus gaming keyboard) so we know it’s possible.

Taking the same approach that Apple has done with Apple TV might also yield results. There, Apple has poured money into its own streaming service and secured prominent exclusives to tempt customers. The company made a half-hearted attempt to do something similar with Apple Arcade, but that never really felt like much of a priority, and these days it’s a sad shadow of its promised potential. Working with prominent development studios and publishers to launch Mac-exclusive games that people actually want to play is something I’d love to see.

Mac gaming used to be a joke, especially in the bad old days of Intel chips’ integrated graphics. Things are looking brighter these days, but there’s clearly a long way to go before Mac gamers can stand shoulder to shoulder with their Windows counterparts.

I’m hopeful that one day, this continued progress will mean I can finally ditch my Windows PC and go all-in on macOS. Right now, though, gaming is the one thing holding me back.