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The games table seems to be very misleading. For example, for Alien Isolation you apparently get 7-12 FPS at 1440x900 resolution but somehow that's marked as playable.

In fact, there are tons of entries for first/third person 3D games where <30 FPS is apparently playable.

Looking at the games which has been marked as "playable: no" it seems that their definition of "playable" means that it runs without crashing/glitching. I think that's perfectly sensible definition. A game can have 60FPS, but be unplayable because it crashes when you switch scenes. And a game can have 5FPS, but be "playable".

They should have another column called "recommended" though, since filtering by "playable" isn't very useful…

There are three entries for Alien Isolation, one gives a 30FPS (on a Mac mini), one gives 7-12FPS(on a MacBook Air) and a note of "Very slow and blurry, only 7-12 FPS, Effectively unplayable". The third says nothing useful.

The game is rated as "playable". So you need to look at the notes and hardware carefully if this is important to you.

thanks a lot for the feedback!

I've already switched some games that were reported as "playable" to "not playable" because they are only technically playable

I am currently thinking about how to best approach this and provide a definition of "playable" that makes sense as context for the reports

I'm also thinking about adding some kind of confidence indicator (e.g. 5 reports by different known reporters stating a game is playable vs 1 report from an anonymous user w/ incompletely filled out report)

I'm currently looking at best practices from other software compatibility databases out there.

Any pointers or thoughts very welcome. I want this to be as high quality as possible so you know that if you have a question about game compatibility or performance on Apple Silicon Macs that this is the website to check.

I think what it needs is a filter you create yourself that defines "playable" and only those games get the green light.
In some cases there quality and resolution are higher than they need to be. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an exceptionally heavy (or poorly optimised) game.

24fps at 1080p/highest is indeed unplayable, but it's expect it to be much better at 720p/medium.

kids these days get mad if their fps drops below 100!
> In fact, there are tons of entries for first/third person 3D games where <30 FPS is apparently playable.

first/third person 3D games are playable with 20 FPS (with drops to 15), I played a lot of them with that FPS on my old laptop (e.g. GTA IV, V, Sleeping Dogs).

I don't game on Macos, but if you get above 10fps, depending on the specific game, it can be playable.

For example, I played several hours of Hitman on a device which cannot push more than 15 fps at 1080p. In that game you have to plan, walk around, wait for opportunities... And you might not even have to fire your gun

I really wish Apple would just sort out their graphics APIs. Proton & wine makes gaming on linux genuinely surprisingly performant: I have enjoyed several AAA games (and am continuing to do so). I really don't know why they do not like Vulkan or don't want to provide a compatibility layer for it. One of the games mentioned is Fallout New Vegas, which apparently gets 15 FPS outdoors, at the lowest graphics quality settings, in a game >10 years old. I've literally just finished that on my linux box, under proton, with the gog copy installing brilliantly under lutris and with a 3rd party higher-resolution texture pack. Apple are really shooting themselves in the foot.

Also, from the article on a call of duty online game:

> Everything felt smooth, works flawlessly in highest settings available, but only few minutes until your account get banned :( SoC power consumption is around 3.5W

I'm not surprised that perhaps many devs naïvely assumed that if you're not running x64, you're a "cheater" [or in a VM, which apparently is often also "cheating"...sigh]. I'd be interested to know how many of the god-awful DRM schemes that BigGames like to run (like Denuvo) take to being emulated in crossover-or-wine-running-under-rosetta. I bet they don't like it!

Well, Apple did sort out their graphics APIs ;)

If anybody (e.g. Valve or Apple) would see the Mac as a viable gaming platform, they would offer an API wrapper solution like Proton (which would emulate DirectX and Win32 APIs on top of macOS APIs). But it's already starting at the hardware, embedded Intel GPUs don't cut it for gaming.

But the 3D API is just one tiny piece when porting games to other platforms, and the importance of cross-platform 3D-APIs is overrated. Game consoles always had their own non-standard 3D-APIs, and this didn't hinder games being created or ported. And OpenGL only was a cross-platform API in theory, in practice every OpenGL implementation had its own peformance and compatibility quirks, and Vulkan apparently isn't much different.

But the root cause is not a technological problem, there simply are not enough people interested in gaming on macOS. If there would be a market, games would come to macOS, with or without Apple's involvement.

I really don't know why they do not like Vulkan or don't want to provide a compatibility layer for it.

Metal was released before Vulkan existed, and Khronos already has a compatibility layer available (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK) - I don’t think graphics APIs are the issue here.

Note that Fallout:NV is running via CrossOver, a (commercial) Wine version. This means it runs Intel-Windows binaries via Rosetta on the Mac.
I might be too optimistic but I'm hopeful that Steam can figure out a way to provide Proton-like compatibility to Macs going forward and/or that CrossOver will help here.

It certainly would be a lucrative market for Steam that just opened up. Most games w/ high performance requirements were not playable on entry-level Macs up until now.

They don't like it because allowing users to run in a VM would be amazing for cheaters. A VM provides direct memory access to the game frmo outside the VM and a trivial way to create a new computer if you are banned.
I played through New Vegas on a Mac last year using Porting Kit, so that's an Apple Silicon issue not a Mac or graphics API issue.
This looks like a marketing piece. The M1 doesn't replace dedicated graphics power nor is the apple platform going to jump to 100W+ extra power usage to embed a proper nvidia chip. Unless a game performs at 60fps at the displays standard resolution without having to rip it's quality apart it is not an enjoyable experience.

No doubt basic games like terraria or vanilla minecraft will work, same as intel HD.

> 60fps at the displays standard resolution

This has been kind of problematic for MacBooks since the first retina model. They ship with HiDPI displays that are beautiful for text and video, but people don't seem to realize the resolution is just way too high for gaming on an ultrabook. I used to game in 900p comfortably on my Intel integrated 2013 MBP. In native 1600p the same titles would be a slideshow.

High end display resolution has pretty much always outstripped gaming performance. Plenty of PC gamers play modern games on 4K monitors at reduced resolution even with high end graphics cards, so this is a completely bogus expectation.
Playing Batman Arkham City, which is a pretty 3rd person action RPG, at 1080p and 60fps on my base model Air.

To me, that's astonishing.

As someone with a 2020 intel macbook air (i5) that uses it occasionally for gaming here and there, I can tell you that the reported performance in this database, if accurate, is a substantial improvement.
it might not replace a dedicated GPU but people play games on integrated GPU and the M1 makes games playable that weren't playable on previous Macs w/ integrated GPU

e.g. take a look at Metro Exodus on a MacBook Air M1 (30 FPS+ @ 1080p):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUG8SbrFj-A

That's exactly why I started the spreadsheet. All the early review benchmarks about the M1s were interesting but what is even more interesting to me is whether a specific game runs and how well and on which system under which conditions and settings.

e.g. if you are out and about, don't have access to a power plug (need to run on battery) it is interesting to know what the MacBook Air M1 can do (compared to previous Macs).

hi, I just woke up to this thread!

I am maintaining the website and will ship a few improvements this week to make it more usable & improving context information (like OS version, game version, CrossOver version etc)

Thanks a lot for the feedback and for checking it out.

Two things I'm currently thinking about are

a) how to further improve the site (what do you care about? which questions do you have?)

b) how to reach people who might not be aware of the website yet (e.g. it got featured by @gruber on daringfireball recently and on /r/macgaming) but I guess there must be way more people interested in gaming on the Mac out there. Any ideas appreciated!

I'm also on twitter at @__tosh (two underscores)

>15 FPS, playable

That's funny.

And most of these are at the lowest graphic settings.
It is playable.

Not great, but I managed to finish few 3D games with 15-20 FPS and it was fun.

Not everything needs to be 120 FPS to be fun.

I guess Cyberpunk 2077 will have to wait for the M1X.
0-1 FPS, playable.
It works on the PS4 which is pretty old so M1 may be fine.

Question is whether the M1X will support ray tracing.

Or a version that's optimised and natively compiled for the M1.
as ultimate escape hatch it will be available via Stadia which also works well on the M1 Macs
Yeah I played a bunch of games on my mac mini Check out my convoluted thread from a lil bit ago

https://twitter.com/Jack_Mangano/status/1332852433308028929?...

btw Hades should work by now, I just got a report about it
Wonder if any of these are suffering from the high pooling rate issue for gaming mice on Big Sur[1]? Not sure if it affects M1's.

Just ran into this on my 16" Intel MBP after upgrading to Big Sur and attempting to play a game while using a Razer mouse.

Basically many gaming mice in including my Razer have upwards of 1000hz poll rate by default and apparently macOS does not handle that well causing high cpu in WindowServer, however in Big Sur it really doesn't handle it well hitting 150% cpu in WindowServer and games seem to be almost unplayable do to massive stutter. Supposedly some improvement in 11.1 but still recommended to lower poll rate.

Had to plug my Razer into a PC to run their config software to lower the poll rate to 125hz. Now everything runs great, didn't realize how much it was effecting everything and now games are smooth and playable again.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/juqcrd/calling_all_big...

great question @ input hardware.

I also have a Razer on Big Sur right now and it "works" but I have no idea which polling rate is used and the official app by Razer seems unsupported.

Going forward I want to add more context about peripherals as well. The section about supported controllers is a first start (e.g. I was surprised that some controllers are supported on Macs but aren't on iOS etc)

I was looking at this for StarCraft 2 and Diablo III. Both have conflicting reports. Until they have like 90% success, I couldn't risk spending the money on Apple Silicon and not being able to play.

I also love playing these (rather older, now) games on modern hardware with very high settings and very fluid framerates.

Definitely envy the battery life of the new Macbooks, but until they have proper gaming, I cannot "have my cake and eat it, too."

I'm in the middle of trying to find a Ryzen/Geforce/huge battery combo that I like, knowing full well that I'll be lucky to get much more than 4 hours doing non-gaming things off cord (with brightness where I prefer it.)

From what I can tell both run better on the M1 Macs than on previous Macs with integrated GPU (if that helps). Other Blizzard games run extremely well like World of Warcraft, others like StarCraft Remastered do not yet run at all though.

I am working on getting more game reports as well as getting the accuracy (& confidence) of the reports up.

Perhaps I should add a feature for getting notified once a playability status changes from not playable to playable?

> knowing full well that I'll be lucky to get much more than 4 hours doing non-gaming things off cord (with brightness where I prefer it.)

Finding it in stock is a challenge but the Zephyrus G14 is exactly this. RTX 2060 GPU pairs perfectly with a 120hz 1080p display, and it still gets >8 hours on battery doing normal non-gaming stuff

> I was looking at this for StarCraft 2

SC2 works fine on non-M1 macs, so I assume on M1 it will run even better.

Just a UX suggestion for the site:

The header row of the table should be fixed when the user types in a game title at the top of the page. That way the column titles will be visible even as you scroll. When I typed in a game name and was immediately navigated to the table, I had to guess what the columns represented.

The only real benchmark for me is Football Manager, where M1 seems to do really well: https://community.sigames.com/topic/515765-fm20-performance-...
So the only native games are iOS games? We'll have to wait awhile for Silicon gaming...
Diablo 3, playable yes, runs well.

Diablo 3, playable no, unable to launch.

So basically your mileage may vary, alot, making this whole list a bit....questionable. =/

archived for future reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208065007/https://applesili...
This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks.

It turns out the M1 is not the revelation Apple claimed. Great battery life? Maybe, when not running games or other CPU-intensive tasks. But performance champion? Not even close.