Is A Mac Good For Games

There are not many games that work with mac, and modding them as well as downloading content for them is nigh impossible with mac. Use PC for gaming. Macintosh computers a re only good if you are not very adept at using computers. Mar 29, 2015 - For years, Mac gaming has been almost an oxymoron - not really worth. More than that, the hardware is looking better and better for gaming.

Mac hardware and buying advice There are three separate desktop Mac product lines: the iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro, and two main portable variants, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, with the newly announced Intel Core-M based MacBook joining the family. Each serves a quite distinct set of users, with different hardware, design, pricing and performance depending on the configuration you go for. As we all know, the key to great gaming performance is having a good graphics card and processor. All Macs come with an Intel Haswell or Broadwell processor, with integrated graphics in the entry-level models. With some Mac models, there’s the option of a discrete mobile GPU, from either Nvidia or AMD, but this depends on the type of Mac you’re buying.

As with mini-ITX PCs and Ultrabooks, the Mac Mini and MacBook Air are designed to be as small as possible, and therefore the maximum performance they can offer is quite restricted, given there’s only so much heat output they can handle from powerful components. Should you buy them for gaming? Of all Apple’s products, the Mac Mini, Air, and new MacBook are the least suited to gaming since their CPUs are clocked fairly low, in favour of long battery life. The processor only runs at 1.1 GHz in the case of the entry-level MacBook, and there are no options for discrete graphics cards. Don’t count on it playing anything but old and lightweight games.

The Mac Pro At the other end of the spectrum is the Mac Pro.The Mac Pro is a workstation and isn’t aimed at gamers, but it’s without a doubt the best Mac for gaming you could buy. It starts at $2,999—not exactly an impulse purchase.

It comes with dual AMD FirePro professional GPUs, rebranded as D300, D500 and D700 cards. It’s the only Mac to offer desktop graphics cards, custom designed by AMD to fit into the Mac Pro’s cylindrical shell.

The oddly shaped design gives the Mac Pro some really superb thermal efficiency, but also means you can’t fit hard disks inside it. Instead, you have to make do with up to 1TB of flash storage, which uses 4 PCI Express lanes for roughly 1GB/sec read and write speeds and external storage for additional capacity. And since the Mac Pro is a workstation, it’s priced as such. The Xeon processor options range from a 3.7 GHz quad-core chip to a 2.7 GHz 12-core processor.

For gaming, the quad-core processor will deliver better performance in most cases, as the extra clock speed will affect gaming performance more than extra cores. The quad-core Mac Pro costs far more than a PC of comparable performance, but you can add a nice upgrade that works out as reasonable value for money. Bump the graphics cards to the D700 option for an extra $1000 and you’re basically getting two top-end AMD FirePro cards for far less than the cost of the desktop variants. Should you buy it for gaming? This configuration will deliver the very best gaming performance of any Mac, but it’s still only a system you should be buying if you’re doing video editing or design work (or have a ton of money and an unrequited crush on Johnny Ive). The MacBook Pro Although integrated graphics are certainly no match for a proper graphics card, Intel’s offerings are far better than they used to be. Of course, you won’t get anywhere near the performance of a desktop gaming PC out of an entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it’s now enough to at least run modern games, probably with the resolution and detail settings turned down and the fancy effects kept to a minimum.

Install my passport for mac. (Note: that cool-looking aluminium chassis has a tendency to get pretty hot when asked to push 3D graphics around.) The 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a dual-core processor, while the 15-inch model comes with a quad-core chip. The integrated graphics is better on the 15-inch model, too.

On a 13-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with a dual-core Intel Core i5-4288, running at 2.6 GHz, Intel Iris HD 5100 graphics and 8GB of memory, we not only had Dota 2 running fine in OS X but got Battlefield 4 running at a playable frame rate on a Boot Camp Windows partition, with the resolution set to 1280x720 and the detail settings on low. It might not sound impressive at all compared with what a GeForce GTX 980 can do, but once again, it’s enough for gaming if that’s the only computer you own or have at hand. You’ll get better results from the 15-inch MacBook Pros, which come with Intel’s more powerful Iris Pro integrated graphics, while the $2499 top-end model has an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M.