by in If you’re a Mac gamer, it’s likely that you’ve been at the receiving end of jokes by other PC gamers and tech-savvy people that suggest that it simply isn’t suited for gaming. The advice tends to be that users have to either make a switch to a PC or run Windows on macOS for an ideal gaming experience.
Well—that necessarily isn’t true. While there may be some truth to the fact that Macs are not tailored for gaming purposes, there are tips and hacks that you can follow to get a better gaming experience out of your Mac.
What follows in this article are 4 tips that you can follow in order to enhance gaming on a MacBook.
Tip#1: Invest in a good controller to get better
While there is no replacement for a keyboard-and-mouse gaming setup whilst playing a shooter and strategy games, it might be beneficial to invest in a decent controller for improving your gaming experience on a Mac—when you play platform and racing games.
If you have a gaming device like a Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo, you can use its controller for your Mac setup as well. Again, whether or not you choose to use a controller will depend upon the type of game that you intend to play. This can drastically improve your performance and game stats as well.
If you’re thinking about how you can improve your performance specifically, a way to do this apart from getting a good controller would be to record gameplay.
This enables you to see where your weak areas lie and work at them in order to get better at the game overall. It’s ideal to have different productivity tools to help you analyze your game video footage better—for instance, being able to crop your video to note different details from your gameplay recordings.
As a MacBook user, read a guide on how to crop screen recording on mac for analyzing your gameplay videos better.
Tip#2: Make use of other gaming clients apart from Mac App Store
The official Mac App Store is not an ideal place to buy games. This is because of the simple reason that offerings are limited, and in case the game that you’re looking for can be found on it, it’s going to be relatively expensive compared to other gaming clients like Steam.
Using Steam for downloading Mac-compatible games is a far better option since it has the largest repository of Mac games amongst all gaming clients. The UI is very easy on users, too—an Apple logo is displayed alongside the main game title that indicates if it can be played on macOS or not. In addition, Steam offers different discounts throughout the year that can give you a good deal on the games that you buy.
Other gaming clients to check out would be battle.net, Origin, and Humble Bundle. You can also check out different types of games and gaming genres that are available on Mac by checking various review sites.
Tip#3: Invest in an external Graphics Processing Unit
If you feel like the graphics card on your MacBook or the integrated graphics that come with newer versions of your Mac, simply do not cut it for the games you play; it’s better to get an external Graphics Processing Unit or eGPU.
In order to do this, your Mac has to be Thunderbolt 3 compatible since that is a port requirement apart from having your macOS updated to a version that is macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later. This means that if you’re using a relatively old Mac that does not fulfill these two criteria, you won’t be able to get the benefits of extra graphics processing power.
For some versions of macOS, you can even select which applications you would like to use this extra eGPU power for. Popular eGPUs used for Macs include models by companies like Asus, Sonnet, and Blackmagic.
Tip#4: Tinker with in-game graphics settings
Another way to improve the graphics performance on your Mac while playing a game is to simply mess around with in-game settings till you find something that works for you. Since different Mac models have different processing capabilities and other hardware components, it might be better to adjust your screen resolution and frame rates to provide an ideal gaming experience that is suited for the particular Mac model and macOS that you run.
For instance, adjust the screen resolution to available lower resolutions so that it improves speed. This will affect your graphics and frame rates a little bit—so do this such that you’re not able to find a very drastic or noticeable change in both.
You can also toggle the graphics settings to Low, Medium, or High—this is a feature that comes with games out in the market today. You can also choose to open games from Finder in a lower resolution by pressing Cmd + I and selecting the ‘Open in Low Resolution’ option.
So that’s it—we hope that these 4 tips will help you get a better gaming experience out of your Mac.
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