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🎮 The MacBook Neo seems like a surprisingly capable Mac for gaming tasks
💪 The A18 Pro chip inside is decently powerful and can handle some more casual games
🤔 For instance, Minecraft can run from 50fps to 300fps at 1080p depending on the preset, while the more basic Mewgenics ran “flawlessly”
🧪 That’s according to YouTuber Andrew Tsai, who has put the new $599 MacBook through a range of game benchmarking
Gaming has never been a Mac’s strong point, even if Apple has been keen to convince people otherwise. However, the new MacBook Neo might be a surprise package for it.
The Neo has surprised folks that have reviewed it with how powerful the A18 Pro chip is that’s inside, for more than just basic tasks, even if its multi-threaded power is only on a par with the nearly six-year-old M1 chip as things stand.
This extends not only into more creative-oriented tasks such as video and photo editing, but also into gaming. YouTuber Andrew Tsai decided to run the gauntlet by putting the MacBook Neo through ten games, as well as through Switch emulation.
The games he chose for the 512GB model were:
Cyberpunk 2077
Minecraft
World of Warcraft
Control
Resident Evil Requiem
Resident Evil 2 (remake)
Counter-Strike 2
Elden Ring
Dark Souls Remastered
Mewgenics
As per his testing, the MacBook Neo performed better than most would anticipate, although the 8GB of unified memory turned out to be its biggest constraint.
Games designed to run natively on macOS worked best overall, with Windows games running through a translation layer not as optimal. Performance also depended on how memory-intensive the specific title.
Delving into the numbers, Cyberpunk 2077 only ran well on low settings at 720p, so AAA gaming is still off the table for this chip. However, Minecraft ran at between 50 and 300fps at 1080p, depending on the graphical preset.
As for games through translation layers. Counter-Strike 2 was deemed “completely unplayable”, although Mewgenics, a more basic 2D game, ran virtually “flawlessly”, according to Tsai.
It seems like you’ll need to temper your expectations as to what the MacBook Neo can do in some respects, although for a $599 laptop, it seems to be quite a package.
Up next: Xbox Project Helix: everything we know about Microsoft’s next console
Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.
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