Best Way To Upgrade Mac For Games

Macs are great gaming machines. But even great machines need maintenance to stay in good working order. This guide will help you make software and hardware adjustments to keep your Mac as speedy as possible over the long haul so it can stay in top gaming shape.

Method 3 Using Mac 1. Find the game you want to play on your computer. Right-click the game's icon. This will open your right-click options on a pop-up menu. Click Get Info on the right-click menu. This will open the game's info details in a new window. Check the 'Open in Low Resolution'.

Clean desktop clutter
A busy desktop can slow down your Mac. If you have an abundance of photos/screenshots and documents all over your screen, the OS has to render every single one of them for quick preview purposes. Put these images and documents in folders instead of leaving them on the desktop by themselves.

Make sure your HD can breathe
Just like a tidy desktop, a neat Hard Drive is important as well. It is easy to fill it up to the max with personal files and games. An ideal measure is to leave 10% of your max HDD capacity free at all times. Hard drive space isn’t static, as the system and even games need extra room to shuttle around files and temporary items. To keep your hard drive happy, regularly delete unused files, apps, and games, or move large files you don’t often use to external storage.

Don’t stress your RAM
All system tasks, apps, and games use up processing power and RAM. If you are about to play a game, you may need to close some apps for best performance. You can use the OS X Activity Monitor to see how much RAM each app is using. Web browsers are notorious for using up RAM, especially if you have a lot of tabs or windows open. Having sites with Flash content or a bunch of YouTube windows open can suck up precious RAM needed to run games. If you are having trouble, try closing some apps and windows.

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Restarting
Mac’s can be left on for a long time, but eventually, no amount of cleaning or app-tuning will free up the resources. You should restart your Mac at least once a month, perhaps even once a week. Many users shut down/start up daily and this is also fine. But if you are the type to leave your machine asleep a lot of the time, remember to restart it once in a while to refresh the system.

Run a cleaning application
Cleaning apps are a good way to have scheduled maintenance done on your Mac with minimal fuss. There’s only so much you can do manually, so apps like these reach all the dusty corners. They can also help you manage extensions, startup items, unused apps and more. Prosoft Drive Genius 4 is a great option to speed up, clean up and protect your Mac. Whichever app you settle on, be sure to run it a few times a month for optimal use of OS X.

Check your hardware
The better the machine, generally the better your gaming will be. If you are buying a brand-new Mac, be sure to think about your gaming needs and buy accordingly. Apple and other retailers also offer customized upgrade options or pumped up models. But for existing users, you can look to upgrade some of your hardware for better gaming. Since graphic cards are not upgradeable unless you have a Mac Pro tower (and if you do, MacSales.com offers the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition), we are going to look at your other options.

Upgrade your HDD

Gaming isn’t just all about the processor and graphics card. Hard drives matter too. Aside from being a place to store your games, hard drives play a major role in accessing and loading your games as well. A faster drive, such as an SSD, also improves boot times and system tasks. Almost every brand-new Mac currently comes with an SSD, but not all. And if you are running an older Mac like myself, you may not have an SSD. Upgrading to an SSD is the best option if it’s in your budget. If not, look for a 7200 RPM hard drive over the standard 5400 RPM model. A quicker drive will boot up and load your games much faster.

Keep in mind that certain Mac SSDs can’t be upgraded once ordered (such as the 12” MacBook) but most can. Doing this yourself is often an advanced task, so make sure you are comfortable upgrading beforehand. MacSales.com offers a wide selection of step-b-step install videos for those looking for some assistance.

Upgrade your RAM
RAM plays an important part in your games running smoothly and even what kind of games you can play at all. Over time, the importance increases as games and operating systems become increasingly demanding.

Casual gamers will likely be OK with 4GB of RAM, but if you are looking to do some power gaming or play AAA titles, you will want to look to upgrade to 8GB or 16GB of RAM. If you find your Mac is running slow, upgrading your RAM can also help. The MacSales.com My Upgrades three step-process will help you find out exactly how much RAM your Mac can take. It may be more than you thought.

Related article:Getting the right amount of memory for your Mac

In-Game
Once you are actually in a game, what can be done if you want better performance? Most, but not all games allow you to tweak the graphical and video experience extensively to suit your machine. Your first stop should be heading over to Graphics/Video options in a game and tweak the settings. While a full guide to graphics options is beyond the scope of this article, I can make a few suggestions:

• The screen resolution you choose to play at (in the game, not desktop) can have a significant impact on performance. Raise or lower this as needed to test out where you can land smoothly. Testing between running full-screen, full-screen-windowed, or just windowed mode can also help.
• Texture quality and Shadow quality are some of the most demanding options in games. Try lowering these two options in particular if your game is struggling to run well.
• There is usually also presets such as Low/Medium/High for overall settings you can try toggling between.
• You can always use the Mac FPS Counter app to test game performance, too.

Have suggestions of your own for optimizing your Mac for gaming? Let us know in the comments section.

Further Reading:

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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