Running Games on Apple Silicon Macs
Sep 12 2024
Was reading and realized that Boot Camp doesn't work with Apple CPUs. So with an Apple Silicon Mac you have to use Parallels, which officially supports ARM64 version of Windows 11. It will run Windows x64 apps in their Prism emulator. Windows games, especially high end ones or ones with anti-cheat, may be a problem and Microsoft links to Windows on Arm Ready Software for a crowd-sourced list of games that work. Parallels itself only supports DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 3.3 which also limits game availability.
Parallels has a single-purchase Standard Edition ($100) and subscription-baed Pro ($120/year) and Business ($150/year) Editions. For Pro and Business Edition their comparison chart says "Run professional graphics-intensive Windows applications and multiple virtual machines" and I haven't found what they mean by that. Assuming I need Pro it's rough paying yearly especially since it may or may not run any given game.
Another option is CrossOver which is front-end for Wine. CrossOver would run under Rosetta 2 and this CrossOver review says games probably work ok. AppleGamingWiki has a CrossOver page with notes on getting things to work and it has a Parallels page for using Parallels for Windows gaming. In practice CrossOver doesn't support as many games as I thought, so much so that I resorted to running Boot Camp with Windows 10 Home.
There is also Whisky which is essentially similar to CrossOver. Whisky uses Apple's Game Porting Toolkit (which in turn is a dev kit that uses Wine so that Windows devs can see how their game will run in Apple Silicon Macs). Doesn't support as many games as CrossOver but I feel those games would run faster since CrossOver doesn't yet support Apple Silicon natively.
I guess when I do get an Apple Silicon Mac I'll still have my old Intel MBP with Boot Camp to run games (and even then high-end games struggle). But I do like using just one machine for everything but always-on server stuff.
Addendum:
Microsoft's New AI Computers Struggle With Hundreds of Popular PC Games
Talking about MS's Copilot+ PCs which are Arm-based with Windows 11 and Prism for emulation. Half of the 1300 tested games had problems and I think mostly higher-end ones. Then again Qualcomm Snapdragon are not great performance chips.
Parallels has a single-purchase Standard Edition ($100) and subscription-baed Pro ($120/year) and Business ($150/year) Editions. For Pro and Business Edition their comparison chart says "Run professional graphics-intensive Windows applications and multiple virtual machines" and I haven't found what they mean by that. Assuming I need Pro it's rough paying yearly especially since it may or may not run any given game.
Another option is CrossOver which is front-end for Wine. CrossOver would run under Rosetta 2 and this CrossOver review says games probably work ok. AppleGamingWiki has a CrossOver page with notes on getting things to work and it has a Parallels page for using Parallels for Windows gaming. In practice CrossOver doesn't support as many games as I thought, so much so that I resorted to running Boot Camp with Windows 10 Home.
There is also Whisky which is essentially similar to CrossOver. Whisky uses Apple's Game Porting Toolkit (which in turn is a dev kit that uses Wine so that Windows devs can see how their game will run in Apple Silicon Macs). Doesn't support as many games as CrossOver but I feel those games would run faster since CrossOver doesn't yet support Apple Silicon natively.
I guess when I do get an Apple Silicon Mac I'll still have my old Intel MBP with Boot Camp to run games (and even then high-end games struggle). But I do like using just one machine for everything but always-on server stuff.
Addendum:
Microsoft's New AI Computers Struggle With Hundreds of Popular PC Games
Talking about MS's Copilot+ PCs which are Arm-based with Windows 11 and Prism for emulation. Half of the 1300 tested games had problems and I think mostly higher-end ones. Then again Qualcomm Snapdragon are not great performance chips.