Gaming on a Mac? Hell yeah
It's surprisingly workable
When it comes to gaming, Mac users usually had it tough. Depending on the developer, there may or may not be ports available. Sure, the situation has improved somewhat with the M1 and M2-powered devices, as Apple allowed them to access and run iOS games.
But that’s not a true authentic experience, as some of these games were designed with touchscreens in mind. However, Apple has been pushing for gaming on Macs recently, with games such as Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky running natively and using Apple’s Metal API. Metal is basically an application programming interface that handles how your Mac talk to your GPU.
These games take advantage of the capable M1 and M2 chips, which have been underutilised for the gaming segment. Now to be clear, there probably aren’t a lot of Mac gamers, but it’s a market that could be better served. And honestly, gaming on MacBooks makes sense, since they have excellent battery life, performance, and design. Bring them along for a work trip, and you can still have some fun after work.
One of the biggest issues of porting or even emulating games on Mac is the lack of a translation layer for DirectX 12. DirectX 12 is Microsoft’s Metal equivalent for Windows and Xbox. A translation layer allows DirectX 12 calls to be understood by Apple’s Metal API. For a long time, this didn’t exist, though efforts were made to get this done.
At the recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2023, Apple released a Game Porting Toolkit (GPT) with a translation layer for developers to make it easier for them to bring their games over to macOS and test them. But unexpectedly, Reddit users figured out that the GPT allowed them to play games such as Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077, and more that work on current hardware. More features become available if they are using a beta version of the upcoming macOS Sonoma. Users have also built apps to let you easily install Windows games.
In short, there’s still hope for gaming on a Mac. And the performance has been decent, despite the game running on an emulator, and through a translation layer. Native performance will likely be even better, though it remains to be seen if developers will want to put in the work to produce a proper port. After all, the global market share for macOS is just 11.49%.
Anyway, our latest reviews include a speedy and cheap NVMe SSD, a Xiaomi tyre pump, and a Garmin running watch with an AMOLED display. Check them out below.
If you have a PC that supports PCIe 4.0, then you may want to grab your hands on the WD Black SN770. This NVMe SSD is just S$80 for 1TB, and features blazing fast read speeds of up to 5,150MB/s. This makes it perfect for gaming with faster load times.
The Garmin Forerunner 265 is one of the first running smartwatches from the company with an AMOLED screen. Unlike the flagship Forerunner 965, which also gets the OLED makeover, the Forerunner 265 falls into the mid-range category (S$689). But it still has the essential training metrics and smarts that Garmin users know all too well.
There are plenty of things in life that make it easier, and the Xiaomi Mijia Air Pump 1S is one of those. I'll be honest, pumping air into my bicycle's tyres is easy to do, but there's quite a bit of work to get it to the right air pressure. It's powerful enough for filling up a car tyre as well despite its small size.