MacBook Neo Tested With Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring And 8 More Games

The newly released $599 MacBook Neo might be an iPhone chip slapped into a low-cost Mac chassis with passive cooling, but it's shockingly competent as long as you accept its limitations. YouTuber and PCGamingWiki founder Andrew Tsai rejects those limitations and put Apple's new entry-level laptop through its paces to see exactly what this fanless, A18-powered machine can handle. Spoiler alert: it's surprisingly capable, but you definitely need to temper your expectations.


The benchmark results are undeniably impressive for the hardware, though they're also exactly what we'd expect given the architecture. The A18 chip boasts incredibly fast single-threaded speeds, which allow it to handle games with remarkable aplomb. In many titles, though, it's limited by having only two performance cores.

The more significant bottleneck is really the fixed 8GB of unified memory. Because of this, pushing modern AAA titles like Resident Evil 9 Requiem or Elden Ring through CrossOver 26 results in unplayable frame rates. On the flip side, most games from the PS4 generation and older, which technically includes heavy-hitters like Cyberpunk 2077, perform quite well. Seeing Resident Evil 2 Remake hit a solid 60 FPS or Control hovering near 50 FPS on a $599 fanless machine is pretty good; the performance is similar to AMD's handheld parts, but without the extra airflow.


You might look at the hardware class and think the Neo is the perfect budget machine for competitive esports, but that whole category of games is a complete non-starter. Highly restrictive kernel-level anti-cheat systems like Riot Vanguard mean games like League of Legends, Valorant, War Thunder, Apex Legends, and most of the Call of Duty series are complete non-starters. Fortnite remains famously absent on the Mac entirely, and Valve's Counter-Strike 2 struggles to hit a measly 5 FPS via CrossOver for reasons that aren't necessarily clear to us.

One thing Tsai didn't touch on in these particular tests is battery life while gaming or performance throttling off the charger. Realistically, though, PC and laptop gaming on battery power is a category still best left to dedicated gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally.


Ultimately, the MacBook Neo is by no means a "gaming system," but it's remarkably competent in a pinch. If you just need to knock out your World of Warcraft dailies on a work trip, or want to pass the time with Mewgenics or Balatro, it will absolutely get the job done. If you want to see an even wider variety of games in action, Tsai also did a marathon 6.5-hour livestream this morning testing titles like Lies of P, No Man's Sky, and many others.