Boot Camp has already found my Windows 10 Build 1511 ISO image along with the intended USB flash drive for creating a bootable install “disc”. Depending on your Mac, Windows may support your ethernet drivers out of the box as it did on my 2014 Mac Mini, but wireless was not supported.
Can You Play Games on a Mac? Macs are made of the same components as any other PC.
They’re just an Intel x86 computer in a fancier case with a different operating system. This means there’s no real hardware barrier to gaming on a Mac. It’s not like a PC has some magic video game component that your Mac lacks. However, Macs aren’t exactly designed for gaming.
The discrete graphics cards used in the high-end Macs aren’t all that great, and you don’t have the choice of the more powerful graphics cards you would in some Windows PCs. The Mac Pro is an exception, which carries a decent graphics card inside, but it’ll cost you a lot more than a comparable Windows PC would. These graphics cards are also soldered in, so there’s no way to upgrade them a year or two down the line—even on desktops like the iMac or Mac Pro. Windows desktops are more upgradeable in this respect.
Entry level Macs don’t have dedicated graphics cards at all—they have integrated graphics chips that are even more asthmatic. They might reach the absolute minimum requirements of some popular modern games, but just barely. There’s no way you’ll be able to play new games at full resolution with all the detail settings cranked up, even with a specced-out iMac—but they are technically capable of playing many games. Even a MacBook Air can play Minecraft.
But, although it’s possible, is it worth doing? A Mac is never going to be as good for gaming as a dedicated Windows PC, especially for the price. Even a Mac Pro can’t compete with a gaming-focused rig that costs a quarter of the Mac Pro’s $2999 price tag.
If you’re serious about having the best gaming experience, your Mac isn’t going to cut it. Build your own gaming PC or buy a console and be done with it! If you’re looking to casually play the occasional game, though, a Mac may suffice. I travel a lot, and only have my MacBook with me when I do. I’m away from my beloved PlayStation 4 for months at a time. My MacBook is able to give me a small gaming fix.
It might be more methadone than heroin, but it’s something. What Games Are Available? The biggest issue with gaming on a Mac, though, is game availability. Windows’ DirectX APIs are incredibly popular with game developers. They don’t have any equivalents on macOS, which makes it harder for developers to port their games. Because of this, the catalog of games available on macOS is much much smaller than that for Windows.
There are plenty of big games that will never come to Mac. Things, however, are a lot better than they used to be. While you can buy games through the Mac App Store, major games retailers like, and all have Mac clients with better selections than the App Store.
If the game you want is there and your Mac has the hardware to run it, it will run. The quality of macOS’ game selection depend on what games you like to play. AAA first person shooters are especially underrepresented.
None of the recent Call of Duty or Battlefield games are available on macOS, but other genres, like MMORPGs and strategy games, are actually pretty well covered. Popular games like World of Warcraft, Civilization VI, and Football Manager 2017 are available and work without you having to jump through any weird hoops.
Here are the top 15 most popular titles on Steam: It’s a broad mix of AAA titles from major publishers, like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, and indie hits, like Rocket League. Of the fourteen games (the Season Pass for Wildlands also makes the top fifteen), only five are playable on macOS. However, those five games— Rocket League, Pillars of Eternity, Counter-Strike, Blackwake, and ARK—are all older or independent titles. Wildlands, Dawn of War III, For Honor, and the other big AAA titles are Windows exclusives, at least at the moment. This, then, gets to the heart of it.
If the kind of games you’re looking to play are available, work on your specific Mac, and you don’t mind playing them with the quality settings turned down low, you’ll be fine. If you want to shoot your friends in Battlefield One in high resolution, macOS is about as useful as a toaster. Better Ways to Game on a Mac If you don’t want to plop down another $800 for a decent Windows-based gaming PC, you have a few options for better gaming on your Mac.
The first of which iswell, Windows. RELATED: Gaming in macOS is stunted in more ways than one. It might be easy, but if you’re serious about gaming, it’s probably worth your while to set up. Boot Camp lets you install Windows on a separate partition, so you can boot into Windows or macOS whenever you want. You have your macOS partition for day to day use, and when you want to game, you restart your Mac and run Windows. You still won’t necessarily be able to play games at high settings—after all, you still have whatever low-power graphics card came with your Mac—but at least you’ve got a much wider selection of games to choose from. Also, because they’re designed for the operating system, the same games tend to run better on Windows than on macOS.
Even if you can play the game natively in macOS, you might have a better experience running it through Boot Camp. RELATED: If that doesn’t appeal to you, you might be interested in NVIDIA’s new game streaming service called. Instead of running the game on your PC, NVIDIA runs the game on a high powered server somewhere and streams it to your PC. That way, its servers are doing all the heavy lifting, and you reap all the benefits—it’ll even let you play Windows games from macOS, no Boot Camp required.
This service is not available quite yet, but it will be launching for Mac in March of this year. This looks like it could be a promising way to game on your Mac without having to faff around with dual booting. Sony has a similar service for PlayStation 3 games, but there are currently no publicly announced plans to bring it to macOS. Macs are not gaming computers, but they are computers you can game on—as long as you accept their limitations. If you’re looking for a computer that can play the latest games in high quality, look elsewhere. But if you already own a Mac and just want a way to kill a few hours, it can work.
It has for me.
You can run Windows on a Mac. That's a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its page. Apple pitches it as the way to run 'specialty software.' You know, 'that one Windows application.
That's not available for the Mac.' That's actually a pretty compelling pitch for me. I have a handful of Windows programs that don't have Mac alternatives, and I have. So if a virtual machine can handle both Windows and OS X apps gracefully, I would have a much easier time moving back and forth. On the Mac, I originally installed Windows 7. But after a recent memory and disk upgrade I've been looking at virtualization software for OS X, which allows me to run Windows without having to first shut down OS X. It's not exactly seamless, but it works.
Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs-some of them not so obvious at first glance. There's the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs. In this post I discuss both. The cost of software. You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isn't free. And if your can't-live-without it Windows app is Microsoft Office or an accounting program or a point-of-sale system, well, you have to pay for that too. Let's run the tape:.
Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license. (Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM. OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, costs $300. You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly $250, so let's use that price. Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing. A full license for either one costs $80.
I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range. Is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item. That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps. The hidden performance costs What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware.
To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating. I looked at these numbers on my late-2009 Mac Mini, with a decent Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT hybrid disk. The latter two pieces of the puzzle are recent upgrades, with the disk being a substantial improvement over the original sluggish 5400 RPM drive. I have Windows running in Boot Camp and in multiple virtual machines. In addition, I collected performance information from my colleagues Zach Whittaker and Christopher Dawson, both of whom have new MacBook Airs running Windows on the side.
I was shocked at the differences in performance. Here are the side-by-side WEI scores for all systems.
The top group shows scores for my Mac Mini; the bottom chart shows the two MacBook Airs. All of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9. The color coding is simple, bright green is the best, dark red is the worst, with yellow in the middle. The two MacBook Airs have different CPUs, but both have the same 128 GB SSD and Intel onboard graphics.
The default VM configuration sets aside a mere 1 GB of RAM for the VM. For the optimized setup, I increased RAM to 3 or 4 GB. Click to enlarge chart You can see at a glance that virtualization takes a significant chunk of CPU capability away.
On my system, the Boot Camp installation scored 308 MB/s for the CPUCompression2Metric and 470.9 MB/s for the Encryption2Metric, versus 152.5 and 223.0 for the same metric under Parallels. For those two tasks, you're essentially losing half of the CPU by running in a VM. The difference is even more striking in the two MacBook Airs, where the different CPU models account for part of the gap but the VM adds a further penalty.
Likewise, graphics performance in a VM suffers because Windows is unable to use the native Nvidia or Intel drivers and instead has to pass everything through virtualized graphics adapters. Both VMware and Parallels have decent drivers capable of delivering Aero support with transparency and other effects. All of those effects are smooth when running under Boot Camp, but I can see tearing and jerky movements in a virtual machine. The lower scores reflect the differences accurately Surprisingly, one area of Windows performance actually improves dramatically in a virtual machine. Look at the difference in performance on the Mac Mini, where the WEI score goes from 5.9 to 6.9. The Random Read score is 1.2 MB/s under Boot Camp but increases to 2.7 MB/s when using Parallels. That's a huge improvement.
On the two MacBook Airs, you can really see the hit that the Intel graphics take when they're forced to run using virtual graphics drivers. The penalty is even worse because the VM only has 1 GB of RAM available, whereas the Boot Camp installation has 4 GB to work with.
And once again you can see the effects of storage drivers. Under Boot Camp, the 128 GB SSD delivers Random Read throughput of 49.5 MB/s. In a VM, the same score is 182.9 MB/s, a fourfold increase. In Boot Camp, the SSD in that MacBook Air performs far worse than an SSD should. By way of contrast, a Samsung SSD in a 2009-vintage Dell notebook earned 130.2 MB/s on that score. The SATA III SSD in the Dell desktop I'm using to write this post scores 209.2 MB/s.
No matter which way you run Windows on a Mac, you're going to give something up If you use Boot Camp, Windows will probably get as much as it can from the CPU and graphics adapter, but you'll pay a performance penalty in terms of hard disk speed. By contrast, virtualizing Windows unlocks the full disk speed, especially with SSDs, but you pay a penalty in CPU and graphics muscle. Related Topics.
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