Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin usually the words Mac and gaming don't go in the same sentence but is it possible if you want a gaming computer a Mac shouldn't be your first choice but what I want to know is can you game it all on a macbook take a look at the specs of this 2015 13 inch MacBook Pro and it's got a decent Core i7 CPU but the integrated iris 6100 graphics aren't exactly made for hardcore gaming last year I tried a few games on a Mac Pro with much better specs and it did reasonably well but how will the MacBook stack up the first problem is just finding games that work on OS 10 there are a few titles in origin and in the Mac App Store but your choices are pretty limited luckily steam is also available and here there's a pretty decent selection with quite a few games from my library that will work on Mac first we have Borderlands the pre-sequel here is totally playable on low at 720p on the MacBook and just like on steamos the pre-sequel as a solid port that's basically identical to the Windows version move over to Tomb Raider and it's not quite so nice it's almost playable at 720p but we're getting pretty significant framerate drops jump over to Metro last light Redux and things are a bit smoother but we're still dealing with the occasional choppiness during the more intense scenes things aren't off to a great start but has the macbook handle less hardcore games minecraft is a staple of basically every gaming platform on the planet and the Mac is no exception performance is just fine even at 1080p as long as you notch the render distance back up it League of Legends is the same story this is a rock-solid version of the game for Mac that runs no problem on Macs at 1080p so a MacBook can handle mainstream games fairly well but next I want to see what we could do running Windows using boot camp I loaded a preview copy of Windows 10 which opens a much bigger library of PC games trying to murder again it's clear that Windows makes a big difference we're seeing much more playable frame rates even with the graphics bumped up to medium which got me curious how much of a difference is there I ran the built-in benchmark on medium at 720p and the windows performance was over double what it was on OS 10 averaging 43 frames per second compared to just shy of 20 running Yosemite for a laptop with integrated graphics this isn't half bad but let's try a couple newer more demanding titles load up Grand Theft Auto 5 and is totally playable on low at 720p well as long as you have a mouse anyway the only problem was a weird texture issue that made something this seems more like a GTA problem than the MacBooks fault shadow of Mordor is another great looking game and here we're able to get decent frame rates on low nothing to blow you away but it's entirely usable if you want to play more casual games a MacBook is fine but for demanding titles it might not be a bad idea to install Windows via boot camp it'll give you way more options and things should run a fair bit better the addition of metal to OS 10 El Capitan should improve gaming performance similar to DirectX 12 so will be interesting to revisit this next year so as a Macbook of good gaming PC no not even close but if you want to play the occasional game on a macbook it's totally possible