Windows on Mac Q&A - Revised March 22, 2010
Aug 01, 2016 How to Play WINDOWS Games on a MAC (STEAM HELP) - 100% Satisfaction GUARANTEED - (OMG!!!). Once this is done, you can play any Windows-only Steam game on your Mac. It's EASY, it's SIMPLE,. Browse the newest, top selling and discounted macOS supported games New and Trending Top Selling What's Being Played Upcoming Results exclude some products based on your preferences-40%. Wanderlust: Transsiberian. Adventure, Indie, Casual, Philosophical-10%. Radio General. Sep 09, 2013 Of course you can play your MAC games in your windows PC, though there are less number of games which can be played in the MAC OS. Platform for playing games doesn't entirely depend on OS, but it also depends on graphics quality & on the RAM of the machine.
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Can you play Windows games on an Intel-based Mac?
Yes. By installing Boot Camp and Windows on an Intel-based Mac, you can boot into Windows and play any Windows game provided that the minimum system requirements are met.
Although Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0 (and higher) supports DirectX and OpenGL and a number of games have been tested and found to work, VMWare Fusion 1.1 (and higher) supports 'select games' and CodeWeavers Crossover Mac supports some games as well, booting directly into Windows with an Intel-based Mac remains the way to obtain the best performance for Windows games. Nevertheless, virtualized solutions also are worthwhile for those with modest performance expectations.
Also see: How does the performance of Parallels Desktop for Mac 5 compare to VMWare Fusion 3? How does the performance compare for productivity applications? How does it compare for games?
How do Windows games running on an Intel Mac compare to a PC?
If you install Windows and play Windows games while booting Windows on an Intel-based Mac, you can expect performance roughly equivalent to a similarly-equipped Windows PC.
Perhaps one of the more in-depth opinions (unfortunately, no longer online) is from April 7, 2006 and is provided by gaming website 1UP.com. The author covers installation of Windows XP using Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro and chronicles his experience playing Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
The piece should be read in its entirety for the complete perspective provided by the author, but regarding the performance of Half-Life 2, the reviewer notes that:
Half-Life 2 still looks pretty damn nice in 2006, but cranking up the visual feature set to 'max' is not recommended for any existing laptop just yet. However, at a more modest 1280x768 pixels with medium polygonal detail, high resolution textures and medium sound quality, the game plays at a decent 20-30 fps. It's hardly perfect, but definitely, satisfyingly playable.
Regaring F.E.A.R:
With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen.
Regarding Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion:
With a decent reduction in settings -- which is to say, a realistic vision of the game -- Oblivion still looks great and is wholly playable.
If you want a Mac, but would like to play Windows games, Apple's Boot Camp makes it easy to install Windows, boot Windows, and play Windows games on Intel-based Macs.
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The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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