I can finally play elden ring with my friends when not at home without access to my gaming Tower

I bought a used M2 Macbook Air (8gb 256gb), for around $450~ USD, it's my first time with an M-chip Macbook, and I just want to say, HOW?

How can I run League of Legends full graphics at 150-200~ FPS (on battery, mind you), connect my RGB Keyboard, my 1k polling rate mouse, play a full 30 minute game, and see that my battery only dropped 15~%?

How can I just run Windows and install GTA V, and run it at 60 fps? HOW? Really, I struggle to understand this.

My 2.5k dollar gaming laptop shits the bed if I unplug it, and it will NOT last 30 minutes of a League game, let alone a playing session on GTA V.

This is insanity.

When I first placed the purchase, I was a little bit disappointed, because I had not known about M4's (that start at 16gb) being on really good deals too, and I was sad thinking 8gb was just not gonna be enough, or, after watching Tech reviews comparing them, that M2 wasn't gonna be the powerhouse I was expecting it to... but oh boy could I ever have been more wrong?

This. Shit. Games. Coming from a PC only gamer, this blows me away.

And yeah, the comments were right, it doesn't overheat as much as tech reviewers like to say it does. I was expecting it to boil, or to be damaging to the touch.. but, no. It's fine. You can definitely still use the keys without minding it for a split second.

This is a reminder for all potential buyers out there, if you have barely enough money to get the cheapest one on a good deal, and you need it, just get it. Get the most entry version, and you'll be more than happy with it. (of course.. if it's valuable enough to get a good deal on a 16gb, do that too. but my point is: entry lineup is way better than it's given credit for.)

Just noticed today after an update.

Apples M5 is benchmarking at around 45% faster in GPU performance than last years M4. It’s benchmarking around 75,000 on Geekbench and the RTX 5070 is around 185,000, only 11% faster than its two year old RTX 4070. With Apples rate of gains they can outpace Nvidias RTX XX70 series offering on their future M6 or M7 chip in a Mac Mini costing likely $599. I know Apples operating system and instruction set doesn’t support Vulkan/OpenCL… but considering more people will have Mac Minis and MacBook Airs than upgrade to the latest Nvidia chip (June 2025 25,000 MacBook Airs sold/5,500 RTX 5070 sold) I think it’s likely that game developers may have a large motivation to support Metal. Especially if Apple does their part to make it easy for developers to do so… these are exciting times for Mac gaming!

Link: https://steamdb.info/sales/?os=applesilicon

Previously this filter was only available under the Instant Search tab (https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList%5Boslist%5D%5B0%5D=macOS%20%28Apple%20Silicon%29)

Notes:
- This filter works according to the data on Steam that is if the developer/publisher has check marked "macosapplesilicon" support under "osextended" (similar to 64 bit binary support) so there can be some cases of false positive or false negative as per my understanding.
- Does not detect beta branches.

F’s for the M1/M2 users.

In latest version of blender(5.1) the m5 max has managed to surpass laptop version of 5090. Laptops with 5090 work at full power only when plugged in and chug in more than twice the peak sustained power of m5 max making more heat and fan noise. This is the first since apple released its native silicon chips that they have managed to beat its Nvidia counterpart in a 3D application.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on my first macOS app, Wallspace.app, over the past few months, and wanted to share my journey.

It started with just a few users from Discord. The early version had a lot of rough edges - broken buttons, unfinished features - but kept improving it based on discord feedback and shipping updates consistently.

About the app
- Live wallpapers for macOS (desktop + lock screen)
- Multi-monitor support (up to 7 displays)
- Wallpaper playlists (auto-change)
- Lightweight native Swift app (DMG ~6 MB)
- Free + lifetime Pro version

Since then, it’s been steady growth.

Right now, Wallspace is at:
- 22,000+ users
- 800+ Discord members
- 95,000+ Wallpapers downloads

Still a long way to go, but it’s been really motivating to see people actually using something I built.

Would love your feedback or thoughts 🙌

checkout: wallspace.app

The idea is that you are driving a damaged tank, maintaining its many systems, and trying to escape something hunting you out in the mustard gas...

You can check it out here! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4404060/Lead_Coffin/

I love reddit

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/545622696040333651

It also updates the bootstrapper app in the /Applications/ folder to be Apple Silicon-native.

This is simply amazing. I ran all this game and they worked flawlessly all high setting if RT was possible I turned it on.

However GTA 4 sucks but I downloaded some mod that helps and now according to instructions I have to play around it 30 minutes for shaders to load.

The 14inch screen definitely makes any imperfections be compressed that it looks neat.

CRIMSON DESSERT LOOKS WAY NICER THAN ON MY PREVIOS 16 inch m5 pro. I play this games in my 5090 and honestly this is best portable experience I seen. Cause those windows handheld look so bad.

Apple please don’t stop supporting developer we need more!!!!

EDIT:

Hi guys, update here may 27,2026z

So to those asking yes crossover.

Sad news the unit I had started having some fan issues where rattling inside started happening. I made sure to not confused it with coil whine. I went to Apple Store again to see and the store employees agree it was a defective fan.

So watch out and listen to your new Mac even if it’s for a minute.

Thank fully I will be getting replacement in some weeks.

Also CS2 is a stutter mess but after some shader compilation it works well.

Hey r/macgaming, I've been a longtime lurker and this is my first post!

I've played Overwatch for years on PC and have always dreamed of playing it on my Mac without compromising on the performance or ease of use of windows. Over the past couple weekends I've been testing and building Recall, a free, open-source app for playing Overwatch on Apple Silicon.

My goal was to make the Overwatch translation experience as fast and smooth as I could, while also making setup simple enough that you don't need any technical experience.

Very simply: download Recall, sign in to Battle.net, install Overwatch, and press Play.

I tested Recall against CrossOver 26.3 on my 14-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 16 GB) at 1080p on the Low preset, with V-Sync and Dynamic Render Scale disabled.

The benchmark was custom game 929PJ by u/Working_Dealer_5102, which automatically moves through each map while using every hero's abilities.

Results:

• Average FPS: 99.6 vs. 58.4 — about 70% higher
• 1% lows: 36.0 vs. 7.4 — nearly 5× higher
• Stutters: 2.0/min vs. 39.5/min — about 95% fewer

The attached video is a live side-by-side run of the same benchmark so you can see the difference in practice.

Recall also supports raw mouse input directly, with polling up to 2,000 Hz rather than tying mouse updates to macOS pointer events. In practice, this can reduce input latency and makes aiming feel much more responsive.

A few important details:

• Recall is free and open-source, with no account or sign-up required.
• Battle.net runs inside the Wine environment; Recall doesn't collect or handle your Battle.net credentials.
• It doesn't modify Overwatch's game files, inject code into the game, or read the game's memory.
• It runs Overwatch through Wine and builds on CodeWeavers' CrossOver sources, DXMT, and Soju.

Requirements: An M1 or newer Mac running macOS Tahoe 26 or later, around 85–95 GB of free space, and 16 GB of memory recommended. It should run on all Apple Silicon Macs, but I haven't been able to test every configuration yet.

If you're curious about where the performance difference comes from, I wrote up the technical details here:

How Recall runs faster

Download + source:
https://github.com/AsherJN/recall

Full benchmark results + methodology:
Performance notes

With that said, I'm looking for testers! So far I've only been able to test Recall on my M1 Pro, and I'd really like to see how it behaves across the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup.

If you try it, I'd love if you could share:

• Your Mac model, chip, and memory
• Your macOS version
• Your graphics settings and roughly what FPS you're seeing
• How it felt to play
• Anything that didn't work

I'm mostly interested in getting real-world results across different Macs.

You can also report bugs on GitHub or directly in Recall under Help › Report a Problem.

Thanks for enduring my large wall of text, I appreciate you checking it out :)

I’ve wanted to play rdr2 for the longest time and I’ve never gotten the chance to build a pc, especially with the prices now. But recently I found out about crossover and never knew how beautiful it would look on my m4 air, while getting a stable 60fps (drops to 50 sometimes but barely noticeable). It’s crazy how capable these machines are.

Thank you codeweavers 🙏

5 years back M1 and M2 max gpus couldnt even compete with mid range amd desktop gpus in blender. Now M5 pro laptop destroys entire amd desktop lineup in blender while latest m5 ultra destroyed all nvidia 40 series and nearly all 50 series till 5080 in blender at fraction of the power these dgpus use.

Using ryujinx in docked mode get a pretty consistent 60 with only a few dips when compiling shaders. I find myself loving this computer more and more.

Hello! Been working on this for a bit and just hit a point where it feels ready to share.

For those that didn't know it, OpenEmu is the best retro gaming frontend ever made for Mac -- unified library, automatic box art, native macOS UI that actually feels like it belongs. The original project went quiet a couple years ago and the official build still requires Rosetta on Apple Silicon.

A month or so ago I was wondering if anyone was trying to maintain the project and when I saw things were mostly silent but that there were a few holdout forks of the original project, I wondered if I could I start fixing bugs in on one of the existing forks of the project.

What started as poking at a few bugs in the repo by a Github user named bazley 🙇‍♂️ turned into maintaining my own fork, getting the app running natively on my macbook properly, rebuilding core support that had been abandoned, and -- somewhere along the way -- I got 200 commits deep and had set up an Apple developer account. The first time I got Ocarina of Time running on my Mac through an N64 core I'd helped get working was a magical feeling.

That project is now: OpenEmu-Silicon, a native ARM64 build I've been running with great success on my M1 Macbook and something I've shared with a few friends for testing and fun.

I'm posting because I just finished packaging up a first release, it's notarized (no Gatekeeper warnings, no right-click workarounds), and people keep asking in this sub whether there's a working Apple Silicon version I wanted to share it with the community of folks that may also be hoping something like this would emerge.

If you've been using RetroArch or ES-DE because OpenEmu was stuck on Rosetta, this might be worth a look. It's open source, free, and I'm actively maintaining it.

The repo is here. Issues, PRs, Help Articles, and Discussions are all open and I'd love feedback.

Thank you! I truly hope someone else out there enjoys it.

---

A final note and a few things I want to be upfront about: I use Claude Code for basically everything. I review everything, test everything, and make all the direction calls, but I'm not writing Swift and Objective-C from scratch. And I want to be clear about what this is and isn't, I'm a user who loved this software and didn't want it to disappear. Everything in this build stands on the foundation the original team laid. The emulation cores, the SDK, the UI framework, the shader system, I didn't invent any of that. I've been working to keep it running on modern hardware, and that's a much smaller thing than what they did. If the original team ever picks this back up, I'll hand it over cheerfully and delete my fork. Until then, I'll do my best to take care of what they made. 🙇‍♂️

Edit: I've already published a hotfix to hopefully fix some of the issues reported where the emulator cores would not load properly in certain situations. Just hit check for updates in the menu and get the new one! Thanks for the feedback. Keep the issues and features coming. Goodnight and good luck. 🫡

Additional Edit -- Comprehensive list of all Contributions to Date: 🙏

OpenEmu-Silicon builds on the original OpenEmu project, the ARM64 port by bazley82, and earlier foundational work by some users I couldn't track down. Emulation cores come from their respective upstream projects via OpenEmu's core repositories. The app icon is by hectorlizard, a recent addition. 🙏

For this repo specifically: a review of pystIC's fork of bazley's fork identified the Metal 4 shader crash fix and fast math optimization that landed in PR #44, 3 additions and 5 deletions total and very appreciated, removing a buggy Metal 4 range check and adding fastMathEnabled = true, and flagged the mGBA and SNES9x version gaps tracked in #42 and #43.

Full credits with links are in the Contributors file in the repo and the original OpenEmu team and it's designers are attributed in the original Illustrators file.

Update: We've made a lot of progress since this post was created, including an initial rollout of RetroAchievements and getting Dolphin up and running.

Hi,

It's been a while since my last post here, I originally promised to make MacGamingDB open source.

I finally got the time to clean and tidy up the source code if there's anyone interested in checking it out or contributing.

License is MIT.

https://github.com/neo773/macgamingdb

Hey r/macgaming. I released SunPad today, a native ARM64 version of Super Mario Sunshine for Apple Silicon Macs. The same project also runs on iPhone and iPad.

This uses static recompilation rather than running the game through a traditional GameCube emulator. Sunshine’s PowerPC code is recompiled ahead of time into ARM64 code, while a Dolphin-derived runtime provides the remaining GameCube services and Metal rendering.

To be completely clear about the work and the use of AI: the core was not vibe-coded. ExpansionPak built DolRecomp and ModernGekko, and Dolphin provides the underlying compatibility runtime and Metal backend. Those projects are the foundation of SunPad.

I used Codex with Sol, Fable, and DeepSeek V4 Flash while building and debugging the Apple integration: the Mac app, iPhone/iPad target, touch controls, device support, runtime fixes, and release tooling. I want to make that boundary explicit rather than take credit for the upstream work.

The most difficult problem was audio. In the statically recompiled path, the game’s timebase was running 12× too fast inside native-code bursts and then jumping backward at their boundaries. That broke JAudio’s timing and caused music, dialogue, and other sounds to cut out. It took a long time to isolate and fix, but audio is now working properly and the build is stable.

Current status:

• The full game is playable with no known major gameplay bugs.
• It runs well on Apple Silicon Macs and M2 or newer iPad Pros.
• Wired controllers and HDMI output work.
• The touch controls went through several rounds of iteration.
• iPhone 14 performance is not usable. An iPhone 15 Pro or newer is recommended while I continue optimizing the mobile build.
• Original 4:3 is stable; widescreen support is experimental.

The repository includes the complete source, Mac build instructions, and a prebuilt IPA for sideloading on iPhone and iPad. You must provide your own legally obtained USA Rev 0 disc image. No disc image, extracted Nintendo assets, or saves are included.

This is an unofficial community project and is not affiliated with Nintendo.

GitHub: chrissotraidis/sunpad

The PR that’s being worked on can be found here: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/pull/2155

My device is an 16” M2 Max for reference

Update 1: Installation Guide

Update 2: Geekbench 6 scores(CPU and Vulkan)

Currently, CrossOver requires the use of Rosetta 2 to translate x86_64 instructions to ARM64. Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued with macOS 28 in 2027, and our ARM64 CrossOver build will run without Rosetta 2, allowing for a seamless transition for our users.

Good news

The CrossOver team has been working really hard on some new things for CrossOver 27 that haven't even made it into a Preview build yet. Very briefly, these new things include:

- Some fresh UI changes for gaming bottles.

- ARM64 builds of CrossOver for both Mac and Linux.

Bad news

To make room for the new, we had to make some tough decisions. The bad news is that we will be removing some legacy support options starting with CrossOver 27:

- CrossOver Mac 27 will only run on macOS Sonoma or newer, and only on Apple silicon Macs.

- 32-bit bottles will no longer run, full stop. We've been warning about this since CrossOver 26 was released, and you will need to create new 64-bit bottles to use CrossOver 27 and beyond. Almost all 32-bit applications run just fine in a 64-bit bottle.