Apple's MacBook Air 15 M5 can play Assassin's Creed Shadows at more than 30 fps

Assassin's Creed Shadows is one of the few AAA titles, which are available as a native version for macOS. It is also a very demanding games and we were very impressed that the new MacBook Air 15 with the faster version of the M5 SoC (10 GPU cores) manages smooth frame rates. We have already talked about the great gaming efficiency of the smaller MacBook Air 13 M5, which means the device offers stable gaming performance without any throttling, despite the passive cooling solution. This is also the case for the larger MacBook Air 15 M5.

You can obviously not expect that you can play the title at maximum details, but in the resolution of 1710 x 1107 pixels, low details and MetalFX upscaling with the preset Quality, we recorded around 35 fps, and the performance was very steady without frame drops. This is pretty impressive when you consider that there are no annoying fans noises.

The overall power consumption is also interesting, because we only measure 23 Watts during gaming. On battery power (where the performance is only severely reduced when the battery level drops to just 3 %), this means you can play for almost three hours. Other titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Resident Evil Village or No Man's Sky, you can even play smoothly at higher details. The smaller MacBook Air 13 M5 with the base M5 SoC (8-core GPU) is not quite as powerful and struggles to reach 30 fps in Assassin's Creed Shadows, but the base model can handle smooth frame rates in the other mentioned titles.

For more information, please see our in-depth review of the new MacBook Air 15 M5.