I’m not a hardcore gamer. But like a lot of people, I like to dabble here and there. Looking at my limited Steam account, I find a handful of remotely current titles I’ve enjoyed lately, including Baldur’s Gate 3 and Civilization VI.
Related One of the biggest changes to gaming on the Mac was the introduction of Apple’s Metal framework, which provides developers with closer access to the GPU and, thus, potentially dramatic gaming performance improvements. Metal’s been around since iOS 8, way back in 2014, and made its first appearance on Macs in 2015, in OS X El Capitan. Metal hit its second generation in 2017, in MacOS High Sierra, and then Metal 3 was announced in 2022.
But hardware is key, too. Until recently, Macs just didn’t have the GPU horsepower to run many of the most demanding AAA games. The M3 Max, in particular, changes that. With up to 40 GPU cores on board, it’s incredibly impressive what it can do. It’s so fast that in certain GPU-intensive benchmarks, it performs better than the M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores — up to twice as many.
Where are all the games? It takes time for hardware and platform advancements like this to filter through to developers and into shipping games. Therefore, the number of AAA titles reaching macOS remains relatively small compared to Windows. But that doesn’t mean gaming on a MacBook Pro can’t be satisfying.
In our own list of the 10 best PC games you can currently play, a reasonable selection can be played on a Mac. They include the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate 3, Dave the Diver, Undertale, Dota 2, Fortnite, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a handful of puzzle/platformer games, and Rocket League.