Can you game on a Mac?

Once you’re in Windows, you’ll need to tinker with what settings will work best for your particular build. For me, I’m running a late 2013 15” MacBook Pro with retina which sports an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and a meager 2GB of VRAM. While this certainly isn’t much in this day and age, it’s still enough to be able to reliably play Heroes Of The Storm, the new Assassin’s Creed, and plenty of other titles. Just don’t expect to be playing Skyrim with all the most realistic mods you can find.

The best of both worlds for me is running a boot camp partition I can boot into when I’m looking to get serious with something like Magic Online, Overwatch, or another AAA title that either doesn’t support the Mac or will run better on a PC due to your expansion options. I also keep a Parallels instance handy for when I need to make a change on the Windows side, but I don’t want to have to reboot just to do it.

For example, if I want to start a download on a game I know I’ll play later, I’ll use Parallels to virtualize the Boot Camp partition on my MacBook Pro, and use that to start the download while still just using my Mac normally. I never use Parallels to play games, though. Even though there are optimizations in it for gaming, and some games run fine in Parallels, I just can’t justify the drop in performance for the convenience of not having to reboot.

So, let’s answer the question once and for all. Can you game on a Mac? Yes. You can. And to a pretty large extent, too, especially if you’re a filthy casual like me. If you’re looking to get serious, the PC is still the only option. Nothing else will give you the sheer control over your experience like a PC can.