M2 Macbook Air and gaming.

I got a 15" M2 a couple of months back and have been consistently impressed with just how capable this thing is. So with games like No Man’s Sky finally making their way to Mac, I figured I’d dip a toe in and see what it can do.

In short, I’m blown away.

Sure, it’s not going to be challenging the PC Master Race any time soon, and no Serious Gamer™️ will be using one for any pro Call of Duty tournaments, but damn if this thing isn’t a capable device for the casual and patient gamer.

Over the past few days I’ve finally been able to play Red Dead Redemption, after absolutely falling in love with RDR2 last year. I bought the original for my PS3, which promptly yellow light died on me about fifteen minutes in, so I’ve never actually played it.

But now it’s available for Switch, and there’s a perfectly capable Switch emulator for macOS (called Ryujinx, if you’re interested), I’m able to play it. And it runs damn near perfectly. With vsync off, I’m getting around 50fps, with the GPU peaking at about 95°.

Now, many would say “so what? You’re talking about a 13 year old game”, and that’s true, but this is a fanless machine. That kind of performance on any game would be impressive a few years ago.

I’ve also put some time in to No Man’s Sky (the new Mac-native version on Steam), which my Mac handles like a champ. An hour of NMS used about 15% of my battery. An hour on my old 2015 MBP would have used three times that. And going back to emulators; it runs Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD from the PS3 without any major glitches and a decent frame rate.

In theory, the same kind of performance should be available from the 13” M2 Air. So for £1k you can get a MacBook that does all the good Mac stuff as well as be a solid little portable gaming device. You can’t argue with that.