Meredith Johnson
What happens when an overly curious CrossOver product manager ropes an unsuspecting member of the QA team into testing a game on all of the MacBooks they can get their hands on? In true CodeWeavers style, they partner with videography to share the results in the goofiest manner possible. Read on for the backstory and a summary of results, and be sure to check out the video at the end for a far more entertaining version of this information.
This story has humble beginnings: I was reviewing ratings for games on CrossOver Mac. While it's not uncommon for us to have a mix of good and bad reviews for a single game or application, our ratings for Counter-Strike 2 seemed especially scattered. I asked Robert in QA to do a deep dive into settings on his two MacBooks to see if he could identify any possible configuration issues that might be hurting the performance for some users. The game was running really well for him on both of his machines, at which point we decided to grab other machines from other people and give them a spin.
Robert ended up testing Counter-Strike 2 on 4 different MacBook Pros. For all tests, he played on the map Dust 2 for around 20 minutes. All game settings were kept to their default values, and D3DMetal was enabled in the CrossOver Advanced Settings.
The results were very clear: the game runs great with more RAM and/or a Pro chip, but struggles on machines with the standard 8 GB of RAM. The clear winner was a new MacBook with the M3 Pro chip and 18 GB of RAM, which outperformed the still very capable M1 Pro chip with 32 GB of RAM. A MacBook Pro with an M1 chip and upgraded 16 GB of RAM still held a constant 40 FPS throughout gameplay, making it an enjoyable playing experience. However, trying to play Counter-Strike 2 on a MacBook Pro with an M2 chip and the standard 8 GB of RAM did not go as well: the game started with 40 FPS, but quickly dropped to 10 FPS before eventually crashing.
Machine | Chip | RAM | FPS |
MacBook Pro | M2 | 8 GB | 10-40 FPS |
MacBook Pro | M1 | 16 GB | 40 FPS |
MacBook Pro | M1 Pro | 32 GB | 80 FPS |
MacBook Pro | M3 Pro | 18 GB | 100+ FPS |
These results are of course not surprising: more powerful chips and more RAM are fully expected to improve performance. However, Counter-Strike 2 seems to be a rather extreme example of how much your Mac machines specs can affect the performance of games running through CrossOver.
There are many demanding games that are still very playable on machines like the MacBook Pro M2 with 8 GB of RAM, including Grand Theft Auto V, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Palworld, Satisfactory and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. They will run better on a more powerful machine, but not all games have such disparate performance between Macs as Counter-Strike 2 does.
As always, we highly recommend checking our compatibility database to see ratings from other users for your desired games and applications. Just keep in mind that the people leaving ratings might have a different Mac than yours. You can hover over the information icon next to ratings to see if the user left their machine specs in a comment.
Check out our video below, and let us know what other games you'd like to see featured in future performance comparisons!
About Meredith Johnson
Meredith has been with CodeWeavers since 2019, and currently wears both the QA Manager and CrossOver Product Manager hats. After getting her PhD in linguistics, she somehow stumbled into the Free and Open Source Software world. When she isn't testing CrossOver, she's probably perfecting yet another bean stew, jogging slowly, buying even more linen tunics, doing a face mask or doting on her perfect chunky baby.
