Now you mention running AAA game titles and I’m finding that pretty hard to track down titles getting mentioned unless they are games of some serious age or you are trying to qualify games like baldurs gate 3 and the Sims 4 as AAA titles which is rather disingenuous. As far as I see people talking about with Mac gaming they tend to suggest people use Xbox cloud or other game streaming services… [not going to quote to rest of the paragraph]
Cloud gaming is an option! But I prefer to run games locally, and it’s been a moving target since Apple switched to ARM processors. I’m not going to go into the gritty details, but it involves combining Microsoft’s(x86->Arm) translation layer, Apple’s Rosetta 2 (x86->Arm) translation layer, a Windows->MacOS translation layer (which I brought up above for software compatibility for the rare case software, or and equivalent, doesn’t have a MacOS build), and converting graphical api calls to Apple’s Metal api (this last one flies over my head a bit on the particulars, I’m a backend developer). Mostly the community, and a company called Codeweavers, finding little optimizations per title. Most DirectX11 titles would ‘run’ tho we’d have graphical bugs from time to time, or stuff straight up crashed. However, Apple recently debuted a ‘Game Porting Toolkit’ during this year’s MacOS beta cycle at WWDC — which was an actual first party translation layer for DirectX11/12->Metal calls. It was intended for developers since you do need to crack open a terminal and go to town, but that didn’t stop users from employing it themselves. Simply put, it’s been rather amazing! Here’s a video, if you’re curious:
Though, it is a bit out of date since we’ve had newer versions of the Toolkit. Horizon Zero Dawn no longer slows down and there’s been framerate improvements across the board. I didn’t mention these titles since I haven’t run them locally on my machine, but I play Diablo4 on my MacBook Air using this method. It’s pretty neat, but if someone’s goal was to strictly “game” they’d be better served with a Rog Zephyrus G14 near the same price. However, for those of us who landed on my M-series Mac, for whatever reason, it’s been nice. There’s been projects since then that does the terminal work for you and it’s much more user friendly.
But, back to our dicussion. Which I might add has been rather civil, usually strangers responding to each other in disagreement on the internet quickly turns into throwing insults back and forth. Cheers for that 🙂
As for the touch screen/ 2-in-1 stuff: I understand the benefit using that form factor. Infact, I urge users to purchase the correct hardware for what their use case is, nor have I claimed they shouldn’t be during our discussion. I’m not claiming the stronger statement “Chromebook (or 2-in-1) users should be using a MacBook”. I don’t know everyone’s use case and budget, or what form factor best suits them. I’m responding to the stronger, blanket statement (and I know I’m paraphrasing) “Chromebooks have more functionality than a MacBook for alot less” by contradiction by giving usecases where Chromebooks may have issues with. Similarly, I’m pointing out the hardware matters, in particular when the user needs more robust silicon better suited for the job. Say they want to take advantage of a dedicated engine built onto the board that handles rendering video, or the neural engine that handles neural nets, or improved build times since I’m not using an Intel Celeron or whatever i3/i5 they can install under budget. In my case, I use all three. Plus, it’s been a wonderful ‘generalist’ device. But to say “it lacks a touch screen” and laying out sectors where one would be useful not only doesn’t discount users whose work flows call for stronger silicon but it also could apply to any non-touchscreen clamshell intended for Windows, or otherwise, in the same usecase.
But, this discussion has been rather useful to me. I never actually considered reformatting a Chromebook to run Windows, and will be including them in my recommendations going forward (after I do the easy, but thankless, task of installing Windows for them).