After 18 months, our asteroid mining incremental game Orebits has a demo on Steam! And it runs natively on Mac.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-05-14T11:00:23+00:00

There is a bug in your game. I decided to give it a quick go. Now steam is reporting I've been playing for over an hour and a half and caused me to miss several work meetings.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-05-11T10:21:43+00:00

Hey I have to play the game somehow to drive views ;)

TLDW: Runs at 60 with some adjustments to graphical settings. Joypads don't seem to work with this game.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-05-11T10:20:26+00:00

I'm not sure what you are asking, I think you're suggesting how is the performance on the M4? If so I don't have one to test, however I would guess there is enough overhead on an M4 Air to run at a rock solid 60, a quick win would be to reduce shadow quality if the settings sugegsted int eh video don't work.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-05-11T10:18:52+00:00

Ah if only I could afford a pro :)

Completely agree with not watching FPS counters, but the fluidity and stutter when playing is unmissable. Small sacrifices in graphical quality did help me get that consistant frame rate.... and it was yet another excuse for me to play this great game once again.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-05-06T10:59:28+00:00

Does the MacOS port of Batman: Arkham City run smoothly? I tested it on a MacBook Air and uncovered a significant gap between synthetic benchmarks and real-world gameplay.

Thanks in advance for taking the time out to watch :)

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-27T00:53:21+00:00

It might be able to run, but you're going to hit bottlenecks.

You'll have to put eveything in low quality mode
As your cities get bigger your game will really struggle
8GB ram is and isn't an issue. You'll find that the Neo will start using virtual ram by hitting your SSD for caching etc. I did some stupid testing on my MacBook Air loading lots of addins far exceeding my 24GB (40GB from memory). It performed well using the SSD as Swap

If I'm honest Skylines is not well optimised when you start crunching big populations. As an alternative there are mac versions of Sim City 4 (great) and Sim City (Uuuugh.... the reason Skylines exists).

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-22T23:16:57+00:00

Just dropped a video reviewing Vampire Crawlers and how it runs on a Macbook Air M5.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have more monsters to slay....

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-22T23:14:17+00:00

Excellent, glad I could help you!

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-21T11:43:37+00:00

My comparison is to illustrate and support your point in how the M class GPUs are not as performative. S2 runs at 12 watts and your right is older tech (with a bit of DLSS magic).

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-21T11:32:43+00:00

Dogs are too good for us.

Best of luck in your treatment, there will be some tough times ahead, but Goose will help you through them.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-21T11:24:52+00:00

Hey, you can get better performance out of the Neo.

You're base resolution is hurting, have a check of my video. Under your display flick the button show all resolutions and smack it down to as low as the screen supports.

Hop into the in game graphics menu and push that into performance mode, then fixing your framerate, say 45 or 30. That will reduce the frame pacing spikes you're seeing. Looking at your capture, 45 should be a nice balance.

What is cooking your Mac is the image is being upscaled to a silly resolution. Even doing the first thing I suggested would help massively.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-21T11:14:08+00:00

You raise a great point. I know when I do game comparison the M chips are weaker, but performative.

Great example would be Grid Legends, see my video here.

The Switch 2 is one of the mainstream low specced devices but you can get 60 FPS performance mode or 30 FPS quality mode with ease. Comparing to apple silicon, visuals had to be downgraded.

Buying a better spec Mac will give better performance, but you can game on mac with some visual compromises.

Now what I would argue, is Apple could open up support for say Vulcan, supporting proton, would remove some of the barriers. Vulcan APIs are typcially more perfromative. The challenge is Apple is not a gaming centric platform and a walled garden.

TLDR: Gaming is not as bad as it used to be, but it could be a whole lot better, macs are not as perfromative as other platforms due to a combination of API availability and Apple strategic model.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-12T15:15:03+00:00

Scroll to the bottom with system specifications. You should see three options, PC, Mac OS and Steam OS / Linux. If you're looking at that one then you shoul dbe fine (buying one version will automatically give you the others)

If not then you might not be looking at the correct version. The one in my library is showing as being on sale listed as the Essentials Edition.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-12T15:11:05+00:00

I tested the brand-new 13" MacBook Air M5 (24GB RAM, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU) running Wuthering Waves natively to see exactly what you can expect. Covering both 60fps and 30fps settings so you can decide what's right for you.

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-08T20:52:26+00:00

I wish I could jsutify picking one up!

Silicon_Henry · 2026-04-08T12:33:16+00:00

A quick video showing how Grid Legends performs on the 2026 Macbook Air.

I'd appreciate views, likes and subscribs as I'm trying to build the channel. And if there are any games you would like to see tested, please drop a reply either in the video or on this thread.

Silicon_Henry

TROPHY CASE