Introduction to gaming on Apple silicon M1 Macs

Welcome to AppleGamingWiki and our main introduction to gaming on Apple Silicon Macs.

Introduction

The Apple Silicon SoC (System-on-Chip) architecture family, an ARM-based custom architecture, was introduced by Apple Inc. in November 2020 beginning with the Apple M1 hardware, bringing about a new era of CPU and GPU performance that rivals that of high-end Intel desktops - but using a virtually silent and much more power-efficient form factor. This new chipset is no less than a revolution in integrated chip gaming performance - Apple Silicon chips are now completely capable of running high-end AAA games - but only if they are compatible with the new ARM platform. At the Unleashed event (October 18th 2021), Apple introduced the M1 Pro & M1 Max chips. The 32-Core GPU on M1 MAX has the same raw power (Teraflops) as the Sony PS5. Later, at the Peak Performance Event (March 8th 2022), Apple announced M1 Ultra, which had a 64-Core GPU with up to 21 Teraflops raw power and is as powerful as a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080! (Overall Performance is expected to be close to 3090).

As said at the event, M1 Ultra was the last chip of the M1 family, and Apple confirmed that they were working on an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro.

In WWDC 2022's keynote, Apple announced new models of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, based on the M2 family of Apple Silicon, and with improved CPU and GPU cores. During the macOS Ventura's segment of the event, Apple showed off Metal 3 API with MetalFX Upscaling and Fast Resource loading API to make a huge improvement for Mac gaming, and push game publishers to release their games for Mac.

At the event, native Apple Silicon ports of No Man's Sky, Grid Legends, and Resident Evil Village were revealed. Apple announcing gaming on their WWDC 2022 event and upgrading their Metal API shows off a bright future for Mac gaming and hopefully more game publishers will follow Capcom, Codemaster, and Hello Games to release their games natively on Apple Silicon hardware.

As Apple's push-forward to gaming on Mac is happening right now after years of silence, lots of older games are not build natively for Apple silicon and are running through Rosetta 2, which translates Intel(x86) binaries to ARM64. In addition to Rosetta, there are other methods of getting games to run on the ARM Macs. Games from iOS and Windows can be played through virtualisation layers, such as CrossOver and Parallels. AAA Windows game titles can also be played this way, but currently DirectX12 is not supported by either CrossOver or Parallels.

Finding accurate information on compatability with each platform can be tough, as information (and misinformation) is strewn around various forums and websites on the internet. This wiki is designed to consolidate this information to help Mac users play their games on Apple devices, including Apple Silicon, in the best way possible.

Methods

Different ways of playing games on Apple Silicon M1 Macs:

Native

Apple is Pushing forward native gaming on apple silicon as of WWDC2022 and finally AAA games like Grid legends, No Man's Sky and Resident Evil Village are coming natively on Apple silicon macs later this year(2022). Myst,Disco Elysium and World of Warcraft are other examples of native applesilicon games available. Before This Valve have made their SDK compatible with Apple Silicon so now developers can release their native games on Steam.

Rosetta 2

Rosetta 2 is Apple's native x86 to ARM translator included in recent versions of macOS on M1 Apple Silicon which will be installed after you open an x86 application.