There’s also the perpetual difficulty of getting programs to run as intended in a virtual machine like Parallels.Īfter spending nearly an entire workday testing games, we’ve concluded that AAA PC gaming may be possible on the 16-inch M1 Max-powered via Parallels - though it’s a dicey proposition. Based on our research and what our colleagues believe, this comes down to matters of compatibility between Microsoft and Apple products. Though some titles are indeed playable via Parallels, it’s not an ideal solution (to say the least).Ĭolleagues we spoke with at other Future publications and elsewhere in the industry say that this is, for the lack of a better term, a “known issue” that even the M1 Max can’t solve (at least for the moment). It isn’t a native app made specifically for running games. After all, Parallels is a virtual machine. We can’t say we’re surprised by these results. However, the 3DMark tests did not report results accurately. They loaded, ran, and played well enough. We had better luck with Far Cry New Dawn, Metro Exodus and Grand Theft Auto V. Borderlands 3 loaded but failed to run (there is a distinction between the two). Titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, DiRT 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption 2 did not load. Our aim was to put titles through our standard litany of performance tests and gauge the results. This piqued our interest so we endeavored to test some AAA games on the 16-inch M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro via Parallels. Some commenters stated that it’s possible to run Parallels to play Windows games on the new Apple laptops (as is the case with 2020’s M1-powered MacBook Pro). We recently detailed some of the reasons the new MacBook Pros are a waste for gamers.

Plus: Samsung Galaxy S22 could look way different than the S22 Ultra.

MacBook Pro 2021 (16-inch) review: Power beyond belief.

Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) review.

The results are surprising considering how, on paper, the M1 Pro and M1 Max should deliver better-than-average gaming performance. Our own tests of the 14- and 16-inch notebooks revealed lower-than-expected frame rate numbers. While both MacBook Pros are leaps beyond previous Apple notebooks and some competitive laptops, they fall short when it comes to gaming performance.

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