How can I find out what games will run well on my Macbook Air?
June 20, 2015 4:29 PM   Subscribe

Is there an equivalent to Can You Run It for Macs? I'm tired of never knowing ahead of time what games will run well (enough) on my MacBook Air, especially since I'm partial to graphics-heavy stuff like BioShock and Half-Life. If it helps, here are my details: Mid 2011 MacBook Air Processor: 1.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 Memory: 4 GB 1333 Mhz DDR3
posted by gottabefunky to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
The real question here is the performance of your GPU (graphics processing unit, the part of the computer that renders 3d graphics).That vintage Air has a fairly weak Intel integrated GPU. Also, 4gb of RAM is relatively tiny for modern OS X -- I upgraded my similar-vintage MBP to 8gb and I find it barely usable; my father has my old 2007 MBP with 4gb RAM and finds it.. not really satisfying, with Yosemite. You've got an SSD, so you are probably not feeling the RAM pain quite as badly, but the situation is not going to be pretty for gaming.

I ended up building a PC tower for gaming, in 2013, so I'm not tracking Mac game performance anymore, but I suggest you grab the GPU benchmarks for your card, and figure out what "gaming" cards have comparable performance (they're going to be pretty old) and then check system requirements against that.. most ports should be fairly similar to their Windows requirements.
posted by Alterscape at 5:38 PM on June 20, 2015


If you search YouTube for the game title you're interested in and add your graphics chip name into the search you'll get some results. I did this when I wanted to see performance of Intel's hd4000 chip. Obviously the newer the game the less likely someone is playing it on hardware similar to yours.
posted by dstopps at 6:25 PM on June 20, 2015


Response by poster: Aha: graphics is HD graphics 3000 384 MB
posted by gottabefunky at 10:00 PM on June 20, 2015


GameAgent has a tool called MacMatch that will automatically sort games via their compatibility with your machine.
posted by TheCoug at 12:19 PM on June 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


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