Apple has been working with more and more AAA game publishers over the last few years since the release of its Apple Silicon devices, and there’s been some amazing examples including Death Stranding, the Resident Evil games and many other titles, but the most convincing example is Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
This dropped on the Mac App Store on the same day as Assassin’s Creed Shadows on every other platform, and to my surprise, the second I logged into my Ubisoft account on my Mac, my PS5 save came straight over and I was able to continue exactly where I left off.
I decided to play the game on the new M4 MacBook Air just because it’s fan-less, and obviously it’s the base M4 model, so it’d give me a good point of reference, and it was extremely playable whilst still retaining the MacBook Air’s crazy good battery life.
For example, playing on the base M4, you get selective ray-tracing with 1080p base at 30 FPS, playing on the M3 Pro, you get 1080p/30FPS with standard ray-tracing, the M4 Pro and M3/M4 Max at 1440p/30FPS.
This is possible due to MetalFX upscaling, which is Apple’s version of AI upscaling (similar to DLSS or FSR). If you’re happy to adjust settings or go to a lower resolution, you can improve the frame rate even more.
I was pretty impressed with how stable it was on a laptop that is this thin and doesn’t have a fan. Again, it wasn’t as good as playing it on a high-end PC or a PS5 Pro, but it was extremely playable and a really solid next-gen feeling experience.
AAA gaming on the Mac is still very much in its early days in comparison to PC, but this proves (along with the 15-20 other AAA games that have released recently) that gaming on Macs and iPhones is more than viable, and I’m excited to see where it keeps heading over the coming months and years, and kudos to Ubisoft and all of the other publishers that are making it happen.
