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Mac and gaming dont go in the same sentence but is it possible? If you want a gaming computer
a Mac shouldnt be your first choice but what I want to know is can you game at all
on a MacBook? Take a look at the specs of this 2015 13 inch MacBook Pro and its got
a decent Core i7 CPU but the integrated Iris 6100 graphics arent exactly made for hardcore
gaming. Last year I tried a few games on a Mac Pro with much better specs and it did
reasonably well but how will the MacBook stack up? The first problem is just finding games
that work on OS X. There are a few titles in Origin and in the Mac App Store but your
choices are pretty limited.
Luckily Steam is also available and here theres a pretty
decent selection with quite a few games from my library that will work on Mac. First we
have Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Here its totally playable on low at 720p on the MacBook
and just like on SteamOS The Pre-Sequel is a solid port thats basically identical
to the Windows version. Move over to Tomb Raider and its not quite so nice.
Its
almost playable at 720p but were getting pretty significant frame rate drops. Jump
over to Metro: Last Light Redux and things are a bit smoother but were still dealing
with the occasional choppiness during the more intense scenes. Things arent off to
a great start but how does the MacBook handle less hardcore games? Minecraft is a staple
of basically every gaming platform on the planet and the Mac is no exception. Performance
is just fine even at 1080p as long as you notch the render distance back a bit.
League
of Legends is the same story, this is a rock solid version of the game for Mac that runs
no problem on max at 1080p. So a MacBook can handle mainstream games fairly well but next
I wanted to see what we could do running Windows. Using Boot Camp I loaded a preview copy of
Windows 10 which opens a much bigger library of PC games. Trying Tomb Raider again its
clear that Windows makes a big difference.
Were seeing much more playable frame rates
even with the graphics bumped up to medium which got me curious, how much of a difference
is there? I ran the built-in benchmark on medium at 720p and the Windows performance
was over double what it was on OS X, averaging 43 frames per second compared to just shy
of 20 running Yosemite. For a laptop with integrated graphics this isnt half bad
but lets try a couple newer, more demanding titles. Load up Grand Theft Auto 5 and its
totally playable on low at 720p...Well as long as you have a mouse anyway. The only
problem was a weird texture issue that made some things semi-transparent but this seems
more like a GTA problem than the MacBooks fault.
Shadow of Mordor is another great looking
game and here were able to get decent frame rates on low, nothing to blow you away but
its entirely usable. If you want to play more casual games a MacBook is fine but for
demanding titles it might not be a bad idea to install Windows via Boot Camp, itll
give you way more options and things should run a fair bit better. The addition of Metal
to OS X El Capitan should improve gaming performance similar to DirectX 12 so itll be interesting
to revisit this next year. So is a MacBook a good gaming PC? No, not even close.
But
if you want to play the occasional game on a MacBook its totally possible..