In 2026, when Apple Silicon is about to be released for five years, the well-known technology channel Geekerwan recently released a 25-minute test video with a direct title: “Can Mac play games in 2026? We have tested nearly 300 games!”. They used a lowest-end M4 Mac mini (16GB unified memory) as the test platform, spanning stand-alone masterpieces, online games, independent games, two-dimensional mobile games and visual novels, and gave a fairly comprehensive Mac game report card.
Geek Bay actually tested nearly 300 games, and GPTK 4 + CrossOver performed extremely well
The timing of this test is also very clever. At the just-concluded WWDC 2026, Apple launched GPTK 4 (the fourth generation of Game Porting Toolkit), which officially supports direct translation of Metal 4 and DX12, and CrossOver also achieved a technical breakthrough in grafting the DLSS interface to MetalFX for the first time. These technological advances will make the Mac gaming experience in 2026 completely different from what it was when M1 was first launched five years ago.
Apple’s three major strategies: Comprehensive reinforcement from hardware to ecosystem
In the video, Geek Bay first reviews the historical context of the Mac gaming ecosystem. When Apple Silicon was launched five years ago, Mac lost two options for gaming at the same time: First, the possibility of using Bootcamp dual-system to install Windows to play games was completely eliminated, and second, support for 32-bit veteran Mac games was also cut off. This put Macs at the time in an unprecedented dilemma in terms of gaming.
But Apple has done three things over the past five years to turn things around. First, actively contact game developers and launch GPTK (Game Porting Toolkit), which allows developers to run Windows games directly on Mac without modifying the program code and quickly evaluates the feasibility of porting. Second, in-depth cooperation with CodeWeavers has made CrossOver the most important Windows game compatibility layer on Mac. Apple even personally created the D3DMetal translation layer to achieve direct conversion of DX12 to Metal, greatly improving compatibility and performance.
Third, continue to enhance the GPU performance of Apple Silicon. From M1 to M4 to the latest M5, Apple’s strategy is clear: since translation involves loss, make the chip powerful enough to ignore the loss. At least in the CPU part, the film emphasizes that Apple Silicon has indeed achieved this. Even with a translation layer, the performance of many games is still very strong. This is due to the powerful CPU core.
Major breakthroughs in GPTK 4 and CrossOver
Geek Bay tested GPTK 4 immediately after WWDC 2026 and found that the performance of many games has been improved by about 10%. And CrossOver has implemented an unexpected feature: DLSS support. When you see the DLSS option in CrossOver, it does not actually run on NVIDIA’s DLSS, but grafts Apple’s own MetalFX super-resolution and frame generation technology through the interface left to DLSS in the game. Since DLSS has been adopted by a large number of Windows games, this “backdoor” method allows Mac to reap the benefits of super scores and frame generation when translating games.
In actual testing, through DLSS backdoor technology, many 3A masterpieces can run smoothly on the M4 Mac mini. Including “Resident Evil”, “Ghost of Tsushima”, “Sword Star”, “The Witcher 3”, “Hogwarts Legacy”, etc., the frame rate performance is quite good, and the experience has surpassed some internal display Windows PCs. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 is also very well optimized on Mac, and will even soon support new features such as frame generation and path tracking noise reduction brought by Metal 4.
Actual measurement data: various game transcripts
The test results of nearly 300 games in Geek Bay are divided by category. The data is quite valuable for reference:
online games
Online games are the biggest pain point for Mac games, and the main obstacle comes from each company’s anti-cheat system (Anti-Cheat). Many anti-cheats cannot function properly in a translation environment due to dependencies on core layer drivers. According to actual tests, about 46% of online games can be run on Mac. Playable include Deadpool 2, Diablo 4, CS2, Warframe, World of Tanks, and more, while DOTA 2, World of Warcraft, War Thunder, and Apex Legends even have native Mac versions.
Single player game
The performance of stand-alone games is much better. The measured playability rate reaches 68%. Most stand-alone masterpieces in recent years can run at 2K30 frames or 1080p60 frames at medium and low image quality on the M4 Mac mini. Games that natively support Apple Silicon perform particularly well. Not only do they run with stable frame rates and smooth frame rates, most of them also support Metal FX super-resolution technology. For hardware-based AAA games like “Red Desert”, the M4 internal display can also run 30 frames at 2K with the Metal FX performance profile.
indie games
59 out of 60 indie games are playable, giving a playability rate of 98%. Moreover, the native rate of independent games is very high. 34 out of 60 games are native Mac games (17 of them are native ARM), far exceeding 3A masterpieces. If you mainly play indie games, a Mac will do the job.
Two-dimensional mobile games
13 out of 15 secondaries worked perfectly. “Ming Tide”, “Infinite Warmth”, “Honkai Impact 3”, “Phantom Tower” and “Alien” have performed stably. Another unique advantage of playing mobile games on Mac is that PlayCover can directly run iOS/iPadOS games with native performance, and the compatibility is quite good. As for MiHoYo’s “Beng Tie” and “Genshin Impact”, the PC version can be run through the open source project YAAGL translation.
visual novel
Only 1 of the 19 visual novels failed to run (the FSN reset due to WebView2 translation issues), while the rest were playable smoothly. Coupled with the long battery life of MacBook, it is very suitable for playing such lightweight games when going out.
Advantages of unified memory vs traditional architecture
Geek Bay specifically mentioned one unique advantage of Mac over Windows PC: unified memory architecture. Take “Black Myth: Wukong” as an example. This game has high demands on memory and video memory. On a 16GB Windows laptop with internal display, the performance will be significantly affected by the separate memory configuration. On the other hand, the Mac mini, which is also 16GB, has unified memory that can be flexibly allocated, and the memory is basically sufficient. Many AAA games are running close to the memory limit on a 16GB Mac, and the performance is still OK. After updating GPTK 4, the memory usage has been further reduced.
The content of the video explains quite clearly the technologies such as Apple Silicon chip, CrossOver and GPTK4, and also lists them in detail.Game compatibility list, recommended for everyone to watch:
Conclusion
Geek Bay gave a quite pertinent conclusion at the end of the film. Macs improve the gaming experience, not to compete with gaming PCs. Apple’s goal is to make consumers who already value Mac’s low power consumption, quietness, long battery life, and suitability for content creation and program development no longer hesitate because of the shortcomings of gaming. You buy a Mac for its advantages, and now a Mac can also meet your gaming needs. You don’t need to buy a gaming PC after buying a Mac like before.
Judging from the actual measurement results of nearly 300 games, the Mac gaming ecosystem in 2026 has indeed evolved from a “joke” to a “usable” stage. It is still not suitable for players whose main purpose is gaming. Such users should still buy a discrete graphics gaming PC. But if you are a Mac user and have gaming needs, you no longer need to endure the dilemma of “buying a Mac and just staring at the game”. At least it will no longer require you to see a doctor. Now you can loudly say that playing games on the Mac is actually pretty good (although you still have to toss CrossOver).
Source: KOCPC Chinese