Despite emulation, Apple M5 Max brute forces its way to smooth AAA Windows gaming

While nobody is buying the Apple MacBook Pro 14 and 16 laptops with the M5 Max SoC for gaming, the fact remains that the M5 Max is plenty fast for gaming. A new test conducted by Andrew Tsai on YouTube proves that the MacBook Pro with the Apple M5 Max can even emulate Windows games quite well.

Andrew Tsai tested 20 Windows games on Apple M5 Max using Crossover. Apart from a few exceptions where the gaming performance was choppy, a vast majority of the tested games ran superbly on the M5 Max MacBook Pro. The emulated games included heavy hitters like Death Stranding 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Black Myth Wukong.

In Andrew Tsai’s testing, the Apple MacBook Pro laptop with the M5 Max ran:

• Death Stranding 2 at 50+ FPS at 1440p/medium with MetalFX “Quality”
• Wolfenstein Young Blood at 60 FPS at 4K
• Black Myth Wukong at 50+ FPS at 1440p/medium with MetalFX at 66%
• Horizon Forbidden West around 50 FPS at 1440p/medium with MetalFX “Quality”
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart at 60+ FPS at 1440p/high with MetalFX “Quality”
• Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at 80+ FPS at 1440p/high with MetalFX “Quality”

As you can see from these few examples, the Apple M5 Max is a beast. The SoC can brute force its way to smooth gameplay in heavy AAA titles even when running the games through a translation layer.

Naturally, the M5 Max performs much better when playing native macOS games. We showed in our Apple M5 Max performance analysis that the SoC can play Cyberpunk 2077 above 60 FPS at 1440p/ultra without any FSR or MetalFX upscaling.

So, even though the library of native AAA macOS games is small, the M5 Max is more than powerful enough for emulating Windows games.

Finally, this also means that M5 Max will also be able to handle console emulation. Fortunately, there are many really good console emulators for macOS, including RPCS 3 for PS3 emulation and Ryujinx/Hydra for emulating the Nintendo Switch.

Buy the Apple MacBook Pro 16 with M5 Max on Amazon