Quick Answer
Inasmuch as we are getting newer titles coming for Mac, getting a Mac for gaming is totally not worth it. There is no arguing the fact that it is powerful for almost any other task that you will put it to, but as a result of its design, it will mostly disappoint when it comes to serious gaming.
Whenever Apple computers are mentioned, capability comes to mind because of their innovative design, enduring functionality and excellent software. Nonetheless, gamers have always seemed to distance themselves whenever you mention making use of Mac for gaming whether you are comparing it to a PC or you are looking at it independently.
Gaming on Apple’s iOS platform is gradually gaining weight, this may mean that we are coming to a closer to using Apple computers for serious gaming. However, this may not necessarily be true even though Apple has come up with the Metal which is its graphical API for gaming developers.
Even as they have both the beauty and the brains for many things that you would call them for, gaming is not something Mac computers make any good showing to because of their hardware design, their easy upgradability, software, and the fact that they are very expensive compared to a normal gaming PC.
Performance
It is no secret that the Mac is better when you have your eyes set on general performance when compared to the PC, but because of its design, hardware, and software, it is unable to stand the PC in terms of gaming performance. This is because the PC is much better to overclock than the Mac and when looking at things like the frames per second for competitive gaming, you will be better off putting your money on the PC.
For the general gaming experience, the Mac computer falls short of the PC not just because of its compact build, but also because the idea of its design did not include gaming.
Hardware and Upgradability
Mac computers have significantly improved their hardware development which is beginning to favour gaming, but the thing is that it is still yet to get there. You can now get Macs that come with good processors as well as GPUs and while they may be cute, you will still find them unable to answer the tough questions of a gamer.
Back to the graphics, you may not bring yourself to fault the cards that Apple uses, but you will also not bet on the drivers because they happen to find their way under the much superior drivers of the Windows OS. What this means is that many games that will perform well on Windows may not perform that well on Mac.
More than the improvement in the Hardware, the main thing that gamers want is the ease with which they can improve on their gaming PC, something they can easily do by just changing the RAM, GPU, Processors or other things. That is one place where Mac has failed gamers because you will not be able to easily upgrade your gaming computer as you may like and sometimes the hardware it comes with may not necessarily be good enough.
Game availability
In the gaming community, it is not only gamers that look down on the Mac but also developers and that is why you will find out that many titles get released on Consoles and PCs before they get to be released on Mac much later. That is gradually changing because as said, there are now titles that are coming at almost the same time as the PC release, but it isn’t significant.
In fact, not too many games are presently available on MacOS even when you look at places like Steam Store where you will discover that there are less than eight thousand games available for the operating system. When you compare this to the over twenty thousand games available for Windows, you will realize that getting a Mac for gaming may not be the way to go. That said, the Mac is still more populated than the Linux, but it still falls a long way behind.
See Also: PC Gaming vs Console Gaming – Which One Should I Choose?
Interestingly enough but not surprising, there are many free games that you can get with your PC when compared to those you will get with Mac.
Price
When it comes to the price difference, one cannot pretend not to notice the massive difference between Mac computers and others. This great difference does not only exist in getting the computers themselves but also in trying to have them upgraded as their hardware also come as expensive as the main product itself.
Another thing is that getting peripherals that can easily work for you on a Mac is different from getting those that would work for you on any other computer. This also makes it hard for many to bring themselves to even contemplate getting a Mac.
Mac For Gaming in 2018?
At the end of it all, there is no serious reason why you as a serious gamer should get a Mac for gaming even if you can afford it. One can easily argue as seen above, that some of its hardware is good for gaming but when you look at the operating system itself, the availability of games, upgradability, and even price among other things, a Mac OS is not the one you should get for gaming.
If, on the other hand, you have an Apple computer for something else and you are wondering whether you can use it for gaming, there is no reason why you should not. Nonetheless, you will have a much more limited title availability and your general gaming experience may fall behind what you may get with a Windows OS. If you want to avoid this, you can simply have a partition on the disk drive using the Apple’s Boot Camp software and install Windows OS and then replace the graphics drivers that your system comes with. This should allow you to have a better gaming.
Not much has changed in 2018 to make gaming on Mac any special than what we had before now, but with games becoming more popular than ever, maybe the future will afford us something better, but that will only be if Mac is able to become cheaper also.
