Vratislav Holub In November 2020, Apple boasted the first ever Macs to be equipped with a chip from the Apple Silicon family. We are, of course, talking about the MacBook Air, 13″ MacBook Pro and Mac mini. The Cupertino company literally took people's breath away with the performance of these latest pieces, and not just apple growers. In performance tests, even a little thing like the Air was able to beat the 16″ MacBook Pro (2019), which costs more than twice as much in the basic configuration.
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Pavel Jelic At first, there were concerns in the community that these new pieces with a chip on a different architecture would not be able to cope with any application, due to which the platform would subsequently die. Fortunately, Apple has solved this problem by working with developers who gradually release their apps tailored for Apple Silicon, and with the Rosetta 2 solution, which can translate an app written for an Intel Mac and run it normally. Games were a big unknown in this direction. Introducing the full transition to Apple Silicon, we were able to see a makeshift Mac mini with the A12Z chip from the iPad Pro running 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider without any problems. Does this mean that Macs will now have no problem playing games?
Playing on Mac
Of course, we all know that Apple computers are in no way adapted for gaming, in which the classic Windows PC clearly wins. Current Macs, especially the entry-level models, do not even have sufficient performance, and thus playing itself brings more pain than joy. Of course, more expensive models can handle some of the game. But it is necessary to mention that if you wanted, for example, a computer for playing games, building your own machine with Windows would greatly save your wallet and nerves. In addition, there are not enough game titles available for the macOS operating system, because it is simply not worth it for developers to adapt the game for such a small part of players.
Gaming on MacBook Air with M1
Almost immediately after the introduction of the M1 chip, speculation began as to whether the performance would really shift to such an extent that it would finally be possible to use the Mac for occasional gaming. As you all know, in benchmark tests, these pieces pretty much crushed even the significantly more expensive competition, which again raised a number of questions. We therefore took the new MacBook Air with M1 in the editorial office, which offers an octa-core processor, an octa-core graphics card and 8 GB of operating memory, and we decided to test the laptop directly in practice. Specifically, we devoted ourselves to gaming for several days, testing World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, League of Legends, Tomb Raider (2013), and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Of course, you can say that these are relatively undemanding game titles that have been with us for some Friday. And you are right. Anyway, I focused on these games for the simple reason of comparison with my 13 2019″ MacBook Pro, which “boasts” a quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with a frequency of 1,4 GHz. He sweats a lot in the case of these games - the fan runs constantly at maximum speed, the resolution must be noticeably reduced and the image quality setting set to minimum. It was even more of a surprise to see how the M1 MacBook Air handled these titles with ease. All the games mentioned above ran without the slightest problem at a minimum of 60 FPS (frames per second). But I didn't have any game running at maximum details at the highest resolution. It is necessary to realize that this is still an entry-level model, which is not even equipped with active cooling in the form of a fan.
Settings used in games:
Gallery
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
In the case of World of Warcraft, the quality was set to a value of 6 out of the maximum 10, while I played at a resolution of 2048x1280 pixels. The truth is that during special tasks, when 40 players gather in one place and constantly cast various spells, I felt the FPS drop to around 30. In such situations, the mentioned 13″ MacBook Pro (2019) is completely unusable and you may it is surprising that the situation is similar for the 16″ MacBook Pro in the basic configuration with a dedicated graphics card, where the FPS drops to ±15. In addition, this title is also playable without problems even on the maximum settings and resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, when the FPS is around 30 to 50. Behind this problem-free operation is probably the optimization of the game by Blizzard, since World of Warcraft runs completely natively on the Apple Silicon platform. while the titles described below must be translated through the Rosetta 2 solution.
League of Legends
The very popular title League of Legends has long been ranked among the most played games ever. For this game, I again used the same resolution, i.e. 2048×1280 pixels, and played on medium image quality. I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the overall speed of the game. Not even once did I encounter even the slightest glitch, not even in the case of so-called team fights. In the settings gallery attached above, you can notice that the game was running at 83 FPS at the time the screenshot was taken, and I never once noticed a significant drop.
Tomb Raider (2013)
About a year ago, I wanted to recall the rather popular game Tomb Raider, and since I didn't have access to a classic desktop, I took advantage of the availability of this title on macOS and played it directly on a 13″ MacBook Pro (2019). If I didn't remember the story from before, I probably wouldn't have gotten anything out of playing it. In general, things don't run well at all on this laptop, and again it was necessary to noticeably reduce the quality and resolution in order to get any playable form at all. But that's not the case with the MacBook Air with the M1. The game runs at less than 100 FPS without any difficulties in the default settings, i.e. with high image quality and vertical synchronization turned off.
How the MacBook Air fared in the Tomb Raider benchmark:
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An interesting test was turning on the TressFX technology in the case of rendering hair. If you remember the release of this game, then you know that once the first players enabled this option, they encountered a huge drop in frames per second, and in the case of weaker desktops, the game was suddenly completely unplayable. I was even more surprised by the results of our Air, which reached an average of 41 FPS with TressFX active.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
I encountered a number of difficulties with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that can probably be attributed to poor optimization. The game first started in a window that was larger than the MacBook screen and could not be resized. As a result, I had to move the application to an external monitor, click through to the settings there and adjust everything so that I could actually play. In the game, I subsequently encountered strange stutters that made the game quite annoying, as they occurred about once every 10 seconds. So I tried lowering the resolution to 1680×1050 pixels and suddenly the gameplay was noticeably better, but the stuttering didn't disappear completely. Anyway, the frames per second ranged from 60 to 100.
Is the M1 MacBook Air a gaming machine?
If you have read this far in our article, it must be clear to you that the MacBook Air with the M1 chip is definitely not far behind and can handle playing games as well. However, we should not confuse this product with a machine that is built directly for computer games. It is still primarily a work tool. However, its performance is so amazing that it is a great solution, for example, for those users who would like to play a game once in a while. I personally belong to this group, and I was incredibly sad that I was working on a laptop for x thousand crowns, which then couldn't even cope with the old game.
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At the same time, this shift makes me think about where Apple plans to move performance itself this year. All kinds of information about the upcoming 16″ MacBook Pro and the redesigned iMac, which should be equipped with the successor of the M1 chip with even more power, are constantly circulating on the Internet. So is it possible that developers will start seeing Apple users as casual gamers and will release games for macOS as well? We will probably have to wait until Friday for the answer to this question.
Doesn't the M1 graphics with 8GB only have 7 cores?
It has 7 cores only in the configuration with a 256GB SSD disk.
As franzi writes, the MacBook Air has a 7-core GPU in its basic configuration, and we tried playing the games on the version with an 8-core GPU. Anyway, I believe it won't make much of a difference for these older titles.
I have a MacBook Air M1 256gb and minecraft runs 30-60fps on a 120chunk which is very good on the lowest configuration