MacBook Pro 16 (2021) - Gaming Review
And take a look at this I dropped everything to medium and
this is insane I'm getting pretty much a constant 120 fps and this is running in native resolution 3.5 k so it's pretty insane okay so in front of me I have two 16 inch MacBook pros this is the baseline with a 10 core CPU and a
16 core GPU and 16 gigabytes of ram and the silver one is the higher-end model with a 32 core GPU and 32 gigabytes of ram and I have two questions that I want to ask and answer the first one being
how can you run popular games on both of these machines and the second one is
how much better is the 32 core GPU model and
32 gigabytes of ram in terms of gaming over the base model
I have 10 games to test and I should mention that if you're planning on buying a MacBook pro
for gaming just don't like these are not gaming machines, not even a higher-end model
however, if you buy any of these for productivity work and you want a game on the side then this is what this article is all about you see how much they can actually game under different scenarios we'll be installing windows 11 and lots of different things to actually test proper gaming on both of these machines okay
so there's actually four ways you can play games on a mac the first one is playing native apple silicon games in mac os and the advantage of this is that you get the best possible performance ever but the downside is that there's barely any games available actually the only game that i managed to find that was popular enough that was a native apple silicon game running on macos is world of warcraft and this is running extremely well so at the moment i'm running the game in 3460 by 2234 resolution so that's 3.5 k and i'm getting about 50 frames per second 47.48 but everything is literally maxed out so this is pretty awesome keep in mind that this is unplugged as you can probably tell and i'm getting 42 yeah just between 40 and 50 frames per second on a macbook pretty impressive now with the exact same settings on the higher end model we're getting about 74 75 to even 80 frames per second this is incredible and what's really cool about this is that i can actually notice the extra fluidity because of that pro motion display we're not actually getting 120 of course but if we drop down the graphics we actually can so if you care about gaming
This model is pretty much twice the performance of the baseline in terms of word of warcraft at least and take a look at this I dropped everything to medium and this is insane I'm getting pretty much a constant 120fps and this is running in native resolution 3.5 k so it's pretty insane this is totally playable and there it goes some battery power now the second way of playing games on your mac is playing x8664 so intel games in mac os using apple's rosetta 2 translation layer so the upside to this is that you can play any macOS game the downside is that the performance will be noticeably impacted overrunning the games natively okay and
The first game that we're going to test in this case is starcraft 2 and the reason why we're testing this game is because i've never actually been able to play starcraft 2 which is an 11-year-old game at max settings on any of my previous macs so let's see if this is any different on these macs so this is running at maxed-out settings so native resolution everything on ultra it's a 3.5 k on the base 16 inch and I don't know if you can see the frame rate but it's 11 frames per second so it's not great let's drop the resolution to something more normal okay
so now I drop the resolution to 2560 by 1600 so just over 1440p and with maxed out settings I'm getting about 19 to 20 frames per second so this is unfortunately not playable I can drop the settings of course to medium and it will be but on max note settings and at this resolution on this MacBook it is not now on the max that model at the native resolution we're getting about 20 frames per second so that's actually double of what we were getting on the baseline with the exact same settings and now with a resolution of 2560 by 1600 we're getting about 29 to 30 frames per second so still not fully playable it's not a 60 but considering that everything is maxed out it's still pretty good but, to be honest, I was hoping for a bit more
Next up we have planet coaster which is also a very demanding game everything is cranked up to the max so we have 3.5 k resolution all the settings are on ultra and on the base model we're getting 20 frames per second which is actually really impressive keep in mind that you don't need this to be at a 60 frames per second uh frame rate so 20 fps is actually it's not playable yet but it's very close and on the max dot model with the exact same settings we're getting 40 frames per second this is honestly playable this is incredible and keep in mind it's running at 3.5 k on ultra setting this would be demanding even for a gaming pc
it's not an easy game like i said and it's running it at 40 frames per second and like i said if we turn down some settings we can get it even higher okay next up we have shadow of the tomb raider which is like the default mac os benchmark game and i'm running this at native resolution or close to native at 3.4k uh 2160 and at the highest possible settings so i'm actually going to run a benchmark in this game to see what frame rates we get uh this is actually not great so we're getting 17 but keep in mind this is 3.5 k resolution everything to its max and this is a 2018 game so it's fairly recent and i gotta say the graphics look incredible and the fact that this is well i don't know it's not playable but again if we lower the settings it will be the fact that it will be playable to some extent on a macbook pro is pretty incredible and i think i'm gonna play it on the 14 inch by the way let us know in the comments if you want to read review article a gaming article on the 14 travel pro and subscribe if you want to see our upcoming benchmarks article which is still in the works
so let's see what the final score is so we got an average frame rate of 18 frames per second on the base model okay and now let's run it on the m1 max model and right off the bat we're getting almost double the frame rates at the beginning of the benchmark at least so 33 compared to about 17 which is what we were getting before so this is pretty incredible and i think the fact that we're getting essentially double the frame rate width double the ram and double the gpu core is is pretty awesome as it essentially shows you how well apple's gpu performance scales up the more gpu cores you have oh and i'm actually starting to hear the fans on this one which i didn't hear on the previous one keep in mind that this macbook pro also has the high performance mode which the baseline one does not it is set to auto because i think that's the fairest way to do this benchmarks and there you go the benchmark has finished and we literally got double 36 compared to 18 on the base model which again is so interesting because we have double brand double gpu cores this is so cool
so this game is still not fully playable at these settings but the fact that again we can play it at 3.5 k highest settings which would be even difficult to do on a high-end gaming pc
is pretty awesome and now I want to try Fortnite which funny enough is still available on mac os even though it got removed from the ios app store
now these are the settings that I'm actually going to run it in so native resolution and everything is set to epic, okay and it looks like we're getting 23 24 frames per second
it's pretty low but again we're playing at almost 4k resolution and everything is set to epic and let's see if we drop to the ground ouch I'm getting about 18 16 17 frames per second not playable adi settings but I have gotta say it looks so good on this display, okay and now on them on max model here in the bus I'm getting about 42 frames per second it's not very constant it keeps dropping to like 20
but the height that I can see is about 41.42 which is again double of what the entry-level was getting okay so now let's try and go to the ground and see what frame rate we'll be getting there okay so previously we were getting 18 but now we're getting on this one 36 so yeah we're basically seeing the consistent double performance on the m1 max model with 32 gigabytes of ram, okay so we went through the first two ways of playing games on mac but there are two more ways
the third one is called crossover is essentially a compatibility layer that translates Windows API calls into macOS API calls essentially what this means is that you can actually run windows games and windows apps on mac os without the need to actually install windows the downside is that a lot of the games would not work so games that have anti-cheating systems games that have steam overlays they won't work Fortnite doesn't work for example the epic games launcher doesn't launch uh battle nets doesn't work so there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work but in terms of the games that do work mostly older games they work pretty well actually in fact out of the 15 plus games that I tested only three of them actually worked in crossover and the first game that I want to try under crossover is the age of empires 2 definitive edition I know this is a pretty old game well technically it got released like three years ago I think
but the good news is that it is fully playable in mac or using crossover the downside is that you cannot sign in using Xbox live so that doesn't work and the highest resolution that I could set it to was 1728 by 1117 so I couldn't set
it to anything higher than that and I'm just running a ranked benchmark test to see what we get so I couldn't really see the frame rate but we got a score of 1145 but in case you're wondering how the game runs it runs pretty well I can't see the frame rate unfortunately
but I would say this is 60 at least it doesn't look great in terms of the resolution it just looks very pixelated I know ran the benchmark on the 32 core and we almost got the exact same score and even when it comes to actually playing the game it honestly feels exactly the same as on the base models and
now I'm testing age of empire streets definitive edition this is actually a very demanding game it got released in late 2020 not even an RTX 3090 with a top of the line CPU you can drive this in 4k at 60fps at least not at launch and here we're getting 24 frames per second in 3.5 k and everything on ultra which isn't too bad let's see what this one can do and now the exact same settings on the 32 core we're getting 47 46 frames per second which almost 50 I would say this is playable honestly especially for a game like age of empires the only downside to h3 and crossover is that there's no music so you can still hear the sound come on you won't yes right it won't but there's no actual music so let's we'll definitely try this in parallels as well and see if that's any different oh and I also tried h4 but unfortunately that one doesn't work okay now we have witcher 3 which is running at maxed out
settings so native resolution everything is on ultra it looks absolutely incredible like it's
so so sharp but uh unfortunately i can't see the frame rates if i could guess i would say it's probably about 15 or 20 at most it is pretty choppy and now running witcher 3 on the 32 core gpu at the exact same settings this is significantly more fluid again i cannot see the frame rate unfortunately but i would say this is this is at least 40 if not even 50 so this is playable guys maxed out settings 3.5 k witcher 3 in mac os is fully playable so as you can see with crossover you can actually play windows games on the mac without installing windows but only older games but we have one more method of running games on the mac and that is through parallels so on the apple silicon max you cannot install windows natively like you could with intel max through bootcamp but you can actually use parallels to essentially virtualize windows the armed version of windows and run it that way so the upside is that you'll be able to play almost any windows game on the mac but the downside is that the performance will be heavily impacted because number one you will run windows the arm version of windows in a virtual machine and then number two that version of windows will have to emulate x8664 apps so you're essentially having two layers of translation or emulation in this case so yeah performance is not going to be great but let's see
what performance downgrade are we actually getting compared to running games natively and also compared to crossover okay so before i run some games in parallels as you can see i'm running windows 11 the arm version on both and i want to show you the actual cpu cores and the memory that i have allocated to both of these machines so on the lower end one i have six cores allocated and 16 gigabytes of ram so literally the max on this one i have six cores and 24 gigabytes of ram this shouldn't have been 16 gigabytes but just because i copied the data for some reason it got set to 60 normally you cannot even set it that high also unfortunately you do need perils pro which is a subscription based and it's quite expensive to be able to set more than i believe more than four cores and more than eight gigabytes of ram something like that okay so the first game that i want to try using parallels is world of warcraft because this was the game that we tried uh in the first section of this video so native apple silicon games and as you can probably tell we are running at the same native resolution ultra settings and we're getting about 12 frames per second compared to 40 to 50 which is what we were getting before i should probably mention that we do have these really strange black bars it's as if the resolution is not actually native but if i look at the settings it actually is this is the native resolution of this display so it is a bit strange and as you can see if we go back to mac os not only is the game running at a significantly higher frame rate 40 frames per second in this case but we're also getting a much better experience like you can see how thin the bezels are and it is taking advantage full advantage of the entire display you can even see the beautiful notch there and
take a look at this guys for whatever reason i'm honestly not sure why this is happening i'm getting a lower frame rate on the higher end model with more virtual cores and even more memory allocated to windows i'm getting 11 frames per second before on the other one i was getting like 15 between 9 and 15 so maybe in some cases it is a bit higher but the settings are literally the same so this means that running games natively in mac os on apple silicon gives us about an eight times performance improvement which is just insane so more developers have to port their game okay now i'm going to try shadow of the tomb raider and see what differences between parallels and then uh running the game on mac os through rosetta and obviously as you can probably tell i'm just in the menu and it's barely even running so let's uh let's run the benchmark we got 17 frames per second before in macos through rosetta let's say if we manage to get three frames now okay take a look at this guys so the benchmark has started took about like 15 minutes to literally start and we're getting like seven frames per second and laura's dress isn't even rendering properly now now we're getting 10. okay
so the benchmark has finally finished I think it's been like almost 30 minutes and it got an average frame rate of three frames per second that's six times less than what the same game got running through rosetta and macOS okay and now let's run the benchmark on the m1 max, okay and the benchmark has finished on the m1 max as well and we got an average frame rate of four frames per second so just one frame higher than what the baseline model got which is really interesting so so far it seems like it doesn't really matter if you have the higher-end model if you plan on running parallels so now how do parallels compare to crossover intros of performance well this is what I'm testing now with the age of empires 3 definitive edition and
I have some good news and some bad news here so the good news is that one I can finally connect to the Xbox live service and take a look at this that amazing music is back the downside is that the performance isn't that great so we're getting about 20 frames per second which, to be honest, it's not too bad we're getting a 25 before so we're only losing about five frames per second compared to crossover and we do get the music back but as you can probably tell if I'm doing something more intensive by more intensive I'm literally talking about moving my villages here the frame rate drops to like 17 or so however on the m1 max I'm actually getting about 30 to 27 32 frames per second which is actually playable-ish keep in mind this is 3.5-kilo max down
so yeah still not as good as the 45 fps that we were getting in crossover but we do have the music back and we can play multiplayer and all that kind of stuff
so yeah I think if we tune down some settings I think it will be perfectly playable but obviously like I said the main advantage of having parallels is that you can play a lot more windows games, in this case, I am playing rocket league and I'm playing this in 3.5 k again maxed out settings and I'm getting 30 frames per second I don't know if you can see the counter it's really small 35 is what I'm basically getting uh so it's not yeah it's not too bad it's it is playable you can drop the settings and get you can get a 60 or even higher than that but on maxed-out settings, this is getting just over 30. however on the m1 max again with everything maxed out I'm getting
58 55 58 it's really small but this is fully playable guys in 3.5 k resolution maxed out settings this is incredible honestly okay and the last game that I want to test is overwatch which is still a fairly popular game as you can see I'm running it in max settings so Nintendo resolution ends epic quality and unfortunately on the baseline model with all of these settings maxed out I'm only getting about 20 frames per second which is still pretty impressive considering that this is running in parallels but
unfortunately on these settings it is not really playable however on the m1 max we're actually getting about 40 frames per second 35 36 still not fully playable but this is so much better again we're seeing double the performance in parallels compared to the baseline model and take a look at this so I dropped the resolution to 2560 by 1600 which is just over 1440p and I dropped the settings to high from epic and I'm getting pretty much constantly over 60 now I'm getting 80 or even close to 90 so this is fully playable on a MacBook pro in parallels which is pretty insane okay
so now that I've done all of my testings it is time for me to answer my questions
when it comes to my second question which was what is the ideal configuration for gaming well if you plan on relying on parallels then definitely go with the m1 max model and parallels pro it won't be cheap but it will be definitely worth it if you just plan on playing macOS only games and maybe tuning some settings down then even the m1 pro chip with 16 gigabytes of ram is good enough for that but do
keep in mind that the m1 max was literally able to offer us double the frame rates in almost all macOS games native and rosetta however my ultimate advice for those of you who want a game on your laptop is to just get a windows gaming laptop instead you get much better performance in games for less money the ace Zephyrus g15 or m16 are my favorite choices as they both perform and look really good.
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