Don't buy a Mac with the intent of gaming on it. It's just not there. Apple is not really effective as improving gaming, despite what their marketing department wants you to believe.
I bought an M3 Max with the intent of blowing cash, having good LLM performance, and maybe gaming.
I certainly blew cash and it has good LLM performance, but the gaming is very meh. I even tried the Steam Link thing from my gaming PC and that was of dubious quality (graphics artifacting and latency). IIRC, Steam Link was running over Rosetta, because an Apple Silicon build wasn't available.
There's a couple games, like Baldur's Gate 3 or whatever, but the Mac support forums for those games are full of bug complaints.
I ended up building a ~$672 gaming PC (i3-13100 + RX 6600 on sales) last month and it's been great and I don't think about gaming on my Mac anymore. I supposed I should try Steam Link play as the i3 is surprisingly performant -- hopefully it's not the Mac's fault entirely.
If you don't mind streaming games, Geforce Now works WAY better than SteamLink in my experience, even when the two computers are in the same apartment. (Also, with either, using a landline ethernet cable works much much better than WiFi, FWIW).
Thanks, I do plan on trying Geforce Now at some point. Although with rural (albeit cable not DSL) Internet, I'm not holding my breath. But I still want to see it for myself, as well as XBox Cloud or whatever it's called.
I live in a semi-rural area too. All you need is 25 Mbps for 4k streaming, less for 1080p. (What would probably matter more is how far you are from a GFN data center: https://status.geforcenow.com/
Microsoft's XBox cloud is terrible because they stream from actual Xbox consoles (which are much weaker than a 4080). BUT you can also play a subset of PC Game Pass games on GFN with your Microsoft subscription, which will then stream from Nvidia's much better GPUs instead.
I bought an M3 Max with the intent of blowing cash, having good LLM performance, and maybe gaming.
I certainly blew cash and it has good LLM performance, but the gaming is very meh. I even tried the Steam Link thing from my gaming PC and that was of dubious quality (graphics artifacting and latency). IIRC, Steam Link was running over Rosetta, because an Apple Silicon build wasn't available.
There's a couple games, like Baldur's Gate 3 or whatever, but the Mac support forums for those games are full of bug complaints.
I ended up building a ~$672 gaming PC (i3-13100 + RX 6600 on sales) last month and it's been great and I don't think about gaming on my Mac anymore. I supposed I should try Steam Link play as the i3 is surprisingly performant -- hopefully it's not the Mac's fault entirely.