by roxolotl on 4/27/25, 12:57 AM
I recently finished the latest iteration of a gaming PC and haven’t even bothered installing windows on it. Not Mac but it seems that Linux gaming is also basically Windows gaming at this point. It could probably play games on Ultra vs High if I used Windows but ads in the menu bar is a bridge too far for me.
by culi on 4/27/25, 1:11 AM
If you don't wanna pay $74 for CrossOver, there's also Whisky which impressed me and I've had great success with. It's an open source Wine wrapper for macOS
https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
EDIT: it seems that at some point in the past month the author stated whisky is no longer maintained!
by LoganDark on 4/27/25, 12:50 AM
Through CrossOver I haven't been able to run Space Engineers (playably), Forever Skies, TerraTech Worlds, or even Plants vs Zombies (playably). It's certainly impressive but it's not by any means perfect.
They don't even support excluding the notch from fullscreen apps yet, so if you run a game in fullscreen or fullscreen borderless, the screen notch can obscure UI elements (as it does for me in Volcanoids - the timer until the volcano erupts is just a bit important, given that it dictates the entire gameplay loop).
However, I have been able to run R.E.P.O., Trailmakers, BeamNG.drive, and Cosmoteer, so it's not like nothing at all works, it's just hit or miss.
by LorenDB on 4/27/25, 1:31 AM
I may be biased with my nice high end setup (Ryzen 9900X, 32 GB RAM, RX 6700 XT about to upgrade to 9070 XT) but 40 FPS at 1080p is NOT "great".
by svennidal on 4/27/25, 1:31 AM
I do my work on a mac because I don't like the nuisance of trying to do it on windows. There is always some wonkiness that I don't even bother to remember the details of, because the solution is just to do it on mac.
I rather play games on windows because I don't like the nuisance of trying to do it on mac. There is always some wonkiness that I don't even bother to remember the details of, because the solution is just to do it on windows.
by pelagicAustral on 4/27/25, 1:37 AM
I love gaming, that's what got me into programming in the first place... my career right now. And I just learned after many painful attempts that unfortunately Windows, macOS and Linux all got their territory... I don't want to preach about any particular system, it's pointless, I gave up on trying to force my OS to do something is just not meant to be, that's how I ended up with one gaming laptop with Windows, one with pop OS and a macbook pro. I just switch them over and to be honest Im Happier now.
I must recognise that there is some overlap on the dev functionality now that WSL is a thing... years back it was crazy talk to try to do Rails on windows.
by haberman on 4/27/25, 1:25 AM
These days I game on a PC in the closet streamed to my Mac via Sunshine/Moonlight. Keeps the wires and fan noise out of the office, which is nice.
There’s a tiny bit of latency, but I’m not playing twitch reflex games on it.
by santoshalper on 4/27/25, 1:28 AM
If gaming is important to you, build a good desktop gaming PC. If you enjoy games casually and don't want the money/hassle of a gaming desktop, get a Playstation, Switch, Steam Deck, or buy a lower-end gaming laptop.
If you enjoy tinkering, setting up Linux or a Mac for gaming can be a fun project, but it's not a good use of your time if your goal is to play games well. You'll jump through a lot of hoops and maybe get something 70% as good.
by platevoltage on 4/27/25, 10:11 PM
After reading this thread I gave it a try. I'm blown away at how well Hitman 3 runs, Granted I'm used to running this on a Vega 56 card thats just limping along at this point. I'm using a mid spec M2 MacBook Pro.
by AstroBen on 4/27/25, 1:16 AM
has the meaning of 'amazing' changed recently?
by throwaway0665 on 4/27/25, 12:57 AM
> 95% of the Wine code base we develop for CrossOver gets released back
into the Wine project for the open source community
nice
by apatheticonion on 4/27/25, 1:56 AM
Yeah, nah. My M1 is basically dead to me for gaming. There are a _few_ games that run _okay_ but I now just carry a second computer for gaming. Salty because it's such a great computer nerfed by walled garden business practices.
by iandanforth on 4/27/25, 1:04 AM
This should be titled, "I Tried Windows Gaming on a Mac and With a Lot of Effort It's Passable!"
by MillironX on 4/27/25, 1:22 AM
Alternatives that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
- Just download the Game Porting Toolkit from Apple
- Use Porting Kit
- Dual-boot Asahi Linux and game from that partition
I've used all of these, and they all seem to perform about the same for me.
by ddtaylor on 4/27/25, 1:21 AM
Does Mac not do Steam gaming the same way? In Linux I just press install and it works with my AMD card. I haven't pressed any other buttons. Fedora 42
by davidhariri on 4/27/25, 1:22 AM
I tried to follow many different tutorials on getting Diablo IV set up using CrossOver but never could get past Blizzards automatic patches that break it.
by Noumenon72 on 4/27/25, 1:30 AM
Can the Mac run non-FPS's? eg Heroes of Might and Magic, Slay the Spire, games that don't seem to stress the system much.
by egypturnash on 4/27/25, 2:02 AM
Perhaps one of these days Valve will sink some energy into getting Proton working on a Mac. I’ve got a Steam Deck and it’s great.
Though really I’d probably just keep gaming on the Deck, that lives in the living room; the Mac is at the studio desk or a table in a cafe doing work, and it’s nice to not have a pile of games right there offering to distract me…
by relativeadv on 4/27/25, 1:04 AM
i love my studio displays but they would be absolute dogwater for gaming
by dham on 4/27/25, 1:38 AM
Not releasing Mac or Linux builds this day in age, should be an arrestable offense. At least if someone is using Unity, Unreal or Godot. I actually do it in reverse and do most development on mac or linux and just release a build on Windows at the very end.
by jz10 on 4/27/25, 12:58 AM
with good latency, services like airgpu and Nvidia GeForce NOW makes it trivial to game even on the iphone nowadays
by 65 on 4/27/25, 12:57 AM
Realistically it's way easier to just build a mini PC or get a $600 gaming laptop if you want to play games and also use MacOS. This is good for tinkering but at the end of the day you want to have a good experience... rather than endless debugging, input lag, frame drops, and tearing.
by gitroom on 4/27/25, 1:50 AM
honestly i've tried this before and man, getting games running on mac always feels like a little side quest. not bad when it works but i'd rather just game on my pc and not mess around so much
by mvdtnz on 4/27/25, 1:24 AM
Wait till you try windows gaming on windows.
by muro on 4/27/25, 12:57 AM
tl;dr: you can run windows games with crossover, requires extra manual configuration to make performance better, has input lag and you can get 1080p at medium.
None of that sounds amazing. If you want to play these games without a windows machine, a steam deck seems a much better option.
by ourmandave on 4/27/25, 1:11 AM
But can it run Doom? /s