I have a question about… Gaming on Mac. I know, I know. It’s for my wife, though. Lol!
She has a very old Windows laptop that I cannot convince her to let me put Linux on to improve its life. I’m looking to source an upgrade for her. She is an iPhone person, through and through, and I thought it might be nice to get something for her in that ecosystem. So, I’m looking into a MacBook of some sort.
The question: how does a MacBook hold up to light gaming? We’re talking Sims 4 and Minecraft, primarily.
The main issue with new Macs is that they use ARM processors and most games, even for Mac, were made for x86 processors. Minecraft works fine as it is CPU-independent Java code, but you aren’t going to have access to a wide library like you do with Linux. I think there have been efforts to game on Wine with Mac but it will likely require x86 CPU emulation through Rosetta 2, possibly slowing things down. I remember I got Skyrim to run on my Mac Mini M1 somehow but it wasn’t a good experience.
I’ve honestly had a better experience running a Windows VM with parallels, and inside the VM running certain games with windows’ translation layer.
Also very minor, but actually important. Rosetta2 doesn’t do 32 bit emulation, it only does 64 bit emulation. For whatever ungodly reason developers still compiled their programs for x86 despite not being capable of running on the few 2006 model Intel Macs that are 32 bit. And a LOT of games were only ever compiled for x86 on Mac so they will not run.
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The main issue with new Macs is that they use ARM processors and most games, even for Mac, were made for x86 processors. Minecraft works fine as it is CPU-independent Java code, but you aren’t going to have access to a wide library like you do with Linux. I think there have been efforts to game on Wine with Mac but it will likely require x86 CPU emulation through Rosetta 2, possibly slowing things down. I remember I got Skyrim to run on my Mac Mini M1 somehow but it wasn’t a good experience.
I’ve honestly had a better experience running a Windows VM with parallels, and inside the VM running certain games with windows’ translation layer.
Also very minor, but actually important. Rosetta2 doesn’t do 32 bit emulation, it only does 64 bit emulation. For whatever ungodly reason developers still compiled their programs for x86 despite not being capable of running on the few 2006 model Intel Macs that are 32 bit. And a LOT of games were only ever compiled for x86 on Mac so they will not run.