is the game smooth and playable?

Resident Evil Village is now available for Mac on the App Store. But how well does the game run and does that mean the Mac has become a true gaming machine?

Resident Evil Village on Mac: That’s how smooth the game runs

To get straight to the point: Resident Evil Village runs well on a Mac with an M1 chip. However, it is not the best version of the popular game and that is a shame.

Things like ray tracing (for very realistic reflections) are not yet supported in the Mac version of the game. In addition, the game suffers from small glitches when you first play the game.

Nevertheless, the game is very playable on a Macbook Air 2022, a MacBook Pro 2021 and a Mac Studio. You don’t actually even have to have the latest MacBook. As long as you have a device with an M1 chip or better, you can play Resident Evil Village on your Mac.

Check out Digital Foundry’s video about Resident Evil Village on Apple sillicon below.

We should add a caveat: on the first generation M1 chips, such as those in the MacBook Air 2020, the frame rate is rather unstable. You will then have to tweak the settings to make Resident Evil Village pleasantly playable.

Got a new MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio? Then you can rub your hands. It will then even be possible to game in 4K with a smooth 60 frames per second.

Resident Evil Village on the Mac also supports MetalFX. This feature uses various techniques to enhance the game’s display quality. For example, you can set a game to a screen resolution of 720 x 576 pixels. MetalFX can then ‘upscale’ it to 1920 x 1080 pixels. Windows PCs have had this kind of functionality for some time with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX.

You hardly need this option on the lightning-fast MacBook Pro 2022 or Mac Studio, because you can also play the game smoothly in 4K. But on an older MacBook Air 2020 it is a welcome addition, because it still gives you a higher frame rate at high resolutions.

Resident Evil Village on Mac is available exclusively on the Mac App Store. There is no Mac version of the game on Steam, one of the most popular digital gaming platforms.

Mac as a gaming machine?

It’s still too early to label the Mac as a true gaming machine. But this special version of Resident Evil Village made specifically for Apple sillicon is certainly a big step in the right direction.

It is a pity that Resident Evil Village is not the heaviest game and advanced graphics options such as ray tracing are not (yet) supported. That’s why it’s hard to say what the gaming performance will be like on high-end Macs when you really sweat the sillicon chips…

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