Justin Lin ⟔

Gaming

When it comes to playing non-Mac games from a Mac, there’s a few options ranging from translation or emulation layers like Whisky and Crossover to streaming services like Parsec (self-hosted) and GeForce Now (cloud-hosted). Here’s a comparison between options:

LatencyQualityGamesCost
Crossover0 (Best)LowFewLow
Parsec~10ms (Medium)Med/HighAll$1250 once
GeForce Now~40ms (Worst)HighMany$10-20/mo

Overall, I think Parsec is the best option for most people. It’s a one-time cost to build a headless PC to host it, but the latency is low enough that you can play most games without issue. The quality is also quite good, and you can play any game you want. The only downside is that you need a powerful computer to run the games on and and you need to set up the networking, but if you already have a gaming rig, this is the best option.

Crossover (or alternatives like Whisky) is a good option if you only play a few games and care about latency the most, but the performance is limited by Mac hardware which can get quite expensive if you go for the Pro or Max chips. Crossover has a free 14 day trial. Whisky is another population option for this space and it’s free unlike Crossover. I use this option for games like Diablo 4.

GeForce Now is an option if you don’t want to own or maintain any extra hardware. The latency is high enough to be noticeable relative to Parsec, but single player games are comfortably playable. Another problem is their rigs often have slow CPU’s and disks, so loading times can be slow/unstable (including when loading the games) and the service itself sometimes has issues too. This is the best option if you follow an “own nothing, stream everything” philosophy. Update: After subscribing to the Ultimate tier for $10/mo, I can say that latency is much less with Reflex on. The service is quite good but with minor annoyances such as inconsistency in games launching correctly and random latency spikes. Some games are much more optimized such as Fortnite where it feels like almost no latency and 4k@120hz works well.

Self-Hosted Game Streaming

Software

The two most popular options for self-hosted game streaming are Parsec and Moonlight (client) + Sunshine (server; used to be Nvidia Gamestream). They’re like remote desktop but with GPU encoding and supporting high frame rates (RDP is usually locked to 30fps).

Things I like about both of them:

Things I like more about Moonlight/Sunshine:

Things I like more about Parsec:

For either of these options, I recommend also setting up Remote Desktop as a backup way to get into the machine remotely, especially in a headless set up where you stick the computer into a close with only a power and network cable connected.

Hardware

There’s a few options for hardware if buying/building something from scratch, but if you already have an old PC laying around, I would suggest trying that first to see. You want to optimize for overall latency, and the two main factors for that are to use a wired network connection and I believe Nvidia GPU’s currently achieve lower encoding latency. Since the PC can likely be stashed in a closet, noise is not an important factor.

For low quality gaming, a small <1L mini PC such as from Minisforum would suffice. The main component to look for is what iGPU the machine has, and currently RDNA3.5 or RDNA3 are the best on the market.

For medium quality gaming, a <5L custom mini PC such as the G7 PT will have a discrete GPU which will provide significantly better performance. The downside of this set up is cost and lack of upgradability.

For the most flexibility and highest quality gaming, but at the cost of $ and hassle, building a small form factor PC with an ITX motherboard for small size would be my preferred choice, but it will typically be at least 10L. You do not have to have a small PC.

Other notes

DirectX Translation Layers

The main technology allowing “emulation” of Windows games is Wine, and Crossover is a commercial version of Wine. There are a few other options like Whisky and GPTK 2, but they’re all based on Wine.

These are easy to setup and install mostly like any other app. All the games are sandboxed, so you don’t need to worry about games installing files all over the place and they’re probably portable between different computers.

The main downside is performance. The translation layer has to convert DirectX calls to Metal calls, and this can be slow. The performance is also limited by the hardware of the Mac, so you might not be able to play the latest games at high settings. GPTK2 is coming with MacOS Sequoia, so there may be performance improvements there.

The /r/macgaming subreddit is a good place to get help with these tools.

Diablo 4 on CrossOver

I’m able to play Diablo 4 via CrossOver with my M2 MAcbookAir 8c CPU / 8c GPU with 16gb of RAM on the lowest settings. I get ~60FPS at 720p and ~30FPS at 1440p.

Memory pressure is a problem and all my RAM basically gets used.

Crossover Settings for Diablo 4

Side-Quest: Emulating Console Games

The Switch uses an ARM architecture, and it turns out there’s a very efficient emulator for Apple Silicon called Ryujinx. It’s a native ARM emulator, so it’s really fast and works very well with controllers. I’ve been playing Nintendo games on it, and it’s been a great experience.


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