Should you head into more modern (and shakier legal) territory, things are more variable. Our Xbox emulation tests resulted in frame rates all over the shop games.
ARM-specific PS2 emulator AetherSX2 was better, despite the odd visual wobble. If you want anything newer, go and buy an actual console.
The Snags With Native Mac Games
Modern Macs not having Intel inside complicates things for native games. It’s no longer (relatively) little effort to port Windows titles to a far smaller market that traditionally hasn’t cared about games. So plenty of developers (regardless of size) don’t bother—and there weren’t that many in the first place.
At WWDC 2022, Apple crowed about No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village coming to Mac later this year. But it’s hard to get too excited when the former landed on Windows in 2016 and might arrive on Switch before Mac. Resident Evil Village is more recent, but still over a year old.
Space is an issue too. When you do find new AAA games fully optimized for Apple silicon—er, basically Baldur’s Gate 3—or that work in Rosetta, they can be huge. Take three tested for this feature: Combined, Baldur’s Gate 3, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider claim over 190 GB of disk space—or most of an entry-level M2 MacBook Air’s 256-GB SSD.
If you do plump for AAA games (or high-quality indie fare beyond Apple Arcade) ignore the Mac App Store. It offers few benefits, has a tiny selection of titles, and typically demands higher prices than elsewhere. Steam is a better bet, and usually nets you a Windows copy of any Mac game you purchase.
AAA Games, B- Performance
First, the good news: The M2 MacBook Air’s speakers are great, the keys are responsive (if you’re a masochist who eschews external controllers), and the screen is bright with great color reproduction. It’s also a relatively power-efficient machine. But it gets hot, due to the lack of a fan and games requiring sustained performance.
Minecraft, unsurprisingly, runs brilliantly, even when you add complex shaders. But it’s an old game. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a sterner test, despite being released in 2019 on Mac (and 2018 on Windows). It’s commonly used in benchmarking because it’s relatively demanding—and because it has a convenient built-in benchmarking system. At the default settings (1440 x 960 resolution; medium graphics preset) we got an average 42 fps, which is fine. This rose to 51 fps on 1152 x 768/low graphics, but dropped to a jarring 24 fps on 1440 x 960/highest.
