Have you tried any Windows games on Apple Silicon? What kinds of Windows apps do you tend to run? I've used the macOS version of World of Warcraft on my '20 Mac Mini (16GB RAM) and even with utilities that adjust the mouse acceleration curve, I still find game play clunky. I was hoping I could run WoW under a VM and have it be somewhat performant.
For gaming, you want to use Crossover or the FOSS Whisky app. Parallels only runs Arm Windows which then emulates x86. This is much much slower than using Wine to translate system calls and Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to handle the Vulkan or DirectX graphics. Crossover and Whisky take care of the internals of those for you. Give those a shot, I think you'll find it much better than a full VM. In my experience some games do run better this way than the MacOS versions, though that's usually because the Mac client wasn't compiled for Apple Silicon and so Rosetta is emulating. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure WOW is already Apple Silicon native, so you probably won't get better performance this way.
Whisky is free, and will work just as well for games it supports, but has compatibility with fewer games (no official list, so you just have to download it and try yourself): https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
That works really well for me to get a Windows-like mouse curve.
TLDR skip the emulation and go for translation layers via Crossover, Whisky, and GPT. It'll be much faster. The mouse thing is separate and has nothing to do with the graphics layer.
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Personally though, I'd just pay $20 a month for Geforce Now. It is much much faster than even the highest end Mac. I don't think WOW is on there, but for supported games, it's a phenomenal experience... sold my 3080 desktop and replaced it with GFN on my Macbook. It's fantastic.
Input latency is there, yes, but it's not too bad especially if you turn on Nvidia Reflex and use the hardware cursor. Totally unnoticeable in many games. For first-person shooters it's definitely noticeable, but IMO still playable as long as you're not doing it competitively. I play shooters on it from time to time... and put it this way, I would much rather do that (on max graphics) and deal with the minor input lag, than to try to get them running on my Mac, all to get super low graphics with low draw distance, etc.
It's never going to beat a 4090 on your desk, but for $20/mo...? It's an incredible value.
I don't know that there really is a "catch" beyond basic network principles/limitations. Game streaming has been developed for more than a decade now... when OnLive first came out, the technology (home internet and hardware encoding) wasn't quite there. Now 35Mbps is commonplace, Nvidia has hardware encoding in all their cards, AND they control the entire stack of their data center like no one else can. Stadia's failure was IMO a Google management problem more than any technical limitation. GeForce Now is a much much better service, both using your existing Steam library and supporting way more games.
The pricing does seem really good, especially compared to Shadow.tech (where you rent a whole gaming VM with a 3070 Ti for $50/mo, but can run anything you want) or AirGPU (similar service). But the games-as-a-service platforms like Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Streaming, and PS Plus are all comparably priced ($10-$20/mo). There are other third party services like Boosteroid too. Cloud gaming is a maturing technology that's largely already "there", in my experience (have tried nearly all of them over the last 10+ years).
I think Nvidia is uniquely positioned as the only company in this space who can provide the graphics cards first-party instead of needing to buy them from, well, Nvidia. It's possible that the current pricing is a loss leader, but they've already raised the prices from the Founders pricing they had a few years ago, and it's still not too bad. It's not like Nvidia is hurting for cash anyway. My main fear is not that there's a "catch", but that they'll gradually move out of the gaming segment and focus on AI.
In the meantime, while it lasts, GeForce Now really is wonderfully, uh, game-changing :)
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Edit: PS they have a free tier, and you can even use it in a browser tab, no client download needed. That's enough to give you a taste for free, no commitment. If you decide you like it, the Ultimate plan is very much worth it, and the desktop (or mobile) clients offer slightly better UX than the browser tab and higher resolutions.
When I first got it I tested a few games on my 2022 M1 Max 64GB 16" MBP both natively and in Windows ARM.
The only one that I remember is Crusader Kings II. It has a native MacOS version which I tried and it ran pretty rough. Very, very choppy on the map. I didn't tweak any graphics settings from the defaults and put no effort into making it run better, FWIW.
Next, I ran it via Windows ARM in Parallels. Now that I'm writing this I have no idea what I did to test it. I feel like it just ran but I don't think I did anything specific to make an x86 process run on ARM. Maybe Windows ARM does that for you, I forget.
Anyway, it ran really well. Absolutely much, much better than the native app. It felt completely smooth navigating the map, etc. I did NOT play it in a big game that lasted hundreds of years. I probably did 5 turns, mostly checking to see how smooth scrolling the map and the UI/UX stuff was.
I have a 4090'd gaming desktop so it wasn't a big deal to me to be able to game on the mac which is why I put as much effort into this as you can see. lmao.
> I feel like it just ran but I don't think I did anything specific to make an x86 process run on ARM. Maybe Windows ARM does that for you, I forget.
Yeah, Microsoft doesn't get nearly enough credit for this, but Windows for Arm just automagically emulates x86 for you! Kinda like Rosetta, but for Windows.
Not OP, but I use Parallels on M2 and gaming is a bit hit-or-miss. I'd say maybe 80% of games work flawlessly, and 20% have some sort of issue ranging from the annoying to the unplayable.
For non-gaming, Parallels is extremely solid. I use Visual Studio and various productivity apps and they all work perfectly -- although Parallels is enshittified scumware that pops up ads at every available opportunity, so if that kind of thing bothers you, it's worth considering it before buying.
