If you grew up with the idea that gaming on a Mac was a joke, join the club. Computer gamers in the 2000s and 2010s used Windows, Windows, Windows. The Mac had been a major gaming platform up through the 1990s, but the shine came off that Apple by the time Y2K rolled around. For two decades next to nothing was available for the platform when it came time to blast alien jerks or plunge into a dungeon crawl on the small screen.
We’re just halfway through the 2020s, yet this decade has been much kinder to Mac gamers. Publishers lately have begun to release some of their biggest titles for Mac on the same day as for Windows. But the tech that allowed this was Apple’s major updates to handle more intense gaming, namely support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and new software to take advantage of it.
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We can trace the Mac’s resurgence as a viable gaming platform back to the Apple M3 chip that debuted on the MacBook Pro and iMac in November 2023. The previous years’ M1 and M2 chips didn’t support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, a technique used to realistically model how light interacts with environment and characters. When the M3 chip introduced hardware-accelerated ray tracing, it was a boon to game developers making titles with highly realistic graphics. Games no longer had to compensate with software-accelerated ray tracing, which slowed down the system and caused reduced, sometimes stuttering frame rates.
When Apple released macOS Tahoe in September 2025, it incorporated another bump to the Mac’s gaming chops that built on the M-series hardware-accelerated ray tracing: the software MetalFX Denoising and MetalFX Frame Interpolation. This was Apple’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation. MetalFX Denoising improves the quality and performance of ray-tracing.
When Nvidia released DLSS Frame Generation in 2022, it gave PC gaming even more of a boost over Mac gaming. In layman’s terms, the technology uses machine learning to generate a frame between two back-to-back frames. Suddenly a GPU that’s rendering 60 frames per second (FPS) can send 120 FPS to your display, allowing for ultra-smooth graphics on fast-moving games.
Apple wisely created MetalFX Frame Interpolation to perform the same function for its Macs’ Apple-designed M-series chips, demonstrating to game developers that it was serious about giving them the tools needed to let their games perform well on Mac.
Any iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, or MacBook Pro with one of Apple’s M3 or later chips should suffice for resource-intensive AAA titles. Sixteen gigabytes of RAM is the bare minimum, but strongly consider at least 24 GB. The more RAM you have, the better it is for gaming.
The MacBook Air’s lack of an internal fan hobbles it when playing games because the system struggles to keep itself cool, and the new, budget MacBook Neo isn’t up to the task. Lightweight games by indie developers, such as Stardew Valley and Tiny Bookshop, can run on these budget Macs, though.
I’d be stretching the truth if I proclaimed that the Mac was now of equal stature to Windows in the world of computer gaming. The biggest advantage of Windows PCs over Macs, aside from the breadth of its game library, is that they’re typically much more configurable when ordering new. And they’re upgradable later on. Even many PC laptops, particularly gaming laptops, will let you change or upgrade the RAM and internal SSD, which are designed to be replaceable. Ultra-thin Windows laptops have largely been chasing the MacBook’s design in recent years and soldered everything together so that you can’t change out components, but a Windows gaming laptop usually lets you swap some components, much more so than the entirely sealed and non-repairable/non-upgradable MacBooks. You can’t change the CPU or GPU, which is more of a desktop PC capability. But you can usually add more RAM down the road once your PC laptop ages and needs a performance boost so that it can keep up with the latest games.
But Apple has shown that it’s serious about turning the Mac from afterthought to worthy gaming platform. Developers and publishers responded by showering the Mac with some of the most highly anticipated, big-budget games to launch in the past year, and on the same day as Windows. The momentum is here, and the next few years look like it’ll be a good time to be a Mac gamer, indeed.
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Matt Jancer has been in the industry for 15 years and lives in his favorite urban death maze, New York City. He’s traded words for money on behalf of more than 15 magazines. Some of his longest-running bylines were spent covering cars, motorcycles, outdoors gear, health and fitness for Car and Driver, Outside, Esquire, Smithsonian, Playboy and Wired. When he’s not writing about motorcycles and our place in the wilderness for a living, he’s writing for enjoyment, riding his motorcycle, and mountain climbing out West. He believes everyone needs at least one hobby they have none of their ego invested into, and so guitar noises and cooking smells have been known to emanate from his apartment. Oh yeah, and he thinks pigeons are way underrated.
Will Egensteiner has been reviewing products for 10 years, testing and writing about everything from climbing gear to video game consoles to cars. He began his career as an intern at Popular Mechanics, then worked as an editor at Outside, spearheading the magazine's gear coverage and biannual Buyer's Guide. Now that he's back, he leads product reviews for PopMech, as well as Runner's World, Best Products, and Biography. His favorite stuff to review is still outdoors equipment, and he can tell you from memory what ePTFE stands for.
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