Apple Mac Studio With M4 Max Review: Big Gains, Petite Package

UL 3DMark Graphics Performance

Just as we took this M4 Max Mac Studio into our possession, UL alerted us to a beta version of 3DMark for macOS and hooked us up with access. So these are going to be some of the first publicly available results for Apple Silicon in these tests. Right now, the beta only features the ever-familiar Wild Life Extreme, the new-ish Steel Nomad, and the lightweight ray tracing benchmark Solar Bay. Steel Nomad is by far the most taxing test of these three. 



3DMark shows that there might actually be some real gaming potential hidden away inside Apple Silicon. The trimmed-down M4 Max in our Mac Studio actually beats out the Strix Halo part in the ASUS notebook. Even the M3 Max from October of 2023 takes a shot across the bow of the Radeon 8060. Remember, however, that ASUS limited that part to just an 80-Watt TDP in the ROG Flow z13, where it can be configured to go as high as 120 Watts. And also don't forget that, honestly, desktop PC hardware can be a far sight faster than this. But still, Apple has some hardware that can play some games, should they exist. 

One thing to note about Solar Bay is that it uses a software ray tracing implementation on the M2 Pro in our older MacBook Pro 14". So even though the Mac mini is nearly 50% faster, the fact the M2 Pro runs it at all is pretty impressive. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark

Yes, some games do exist on macOS, including the entire Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. It was a year late coming to the Mac in 2019, and it never got updated for Arm64, but the game is here on the Mac. Let's see how it runs. 


This game shipped on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so it doesn't require a ton of CPU horsepower to run well. As a result, the load is mostly on the M4 Max's big GPU, and the Mac Studio beats out the ROG Flow z13 at both 1080p and 1440p. It has much more memory bandwidth, and the same is true for the M3 Max in the 16" MacBook Pro. So it's probably not a huge surprise to see it leapfrog the ASUS at a higher resolution. 

We're not done with gaming just yet, but before we do any more tests, we need to talk about software. So let's do that now. 

D3DMetal Covers Gaming

Before we go any farther, we should talk about Windows games on macOS. If you've played any Windows games on a Steam Deck or other Linux desktop, you're no doubt familiar with Proton, which is Valve's take on Wine with a Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer. Back in 2022 when the Steam Deck launched, commercial software vendor Codeweavers had a curious press release, touting its own Proton software as the power behind the Steam Deck. It seems Valve did collaborate with Codeweavers. Codeweavers also partnered with Apple to push out the Game Porting Toolkit, which we used to run Diablo 4 back in 2023. 


Of course, the GPTK is a development tool, not a library for running games. But it's been wrapped into Codeweavers' Crossover for a while, ever since macOS Ventura launched in the fall of 2023. The company calls it D3DMetal, which is a Direct3D to Metal translation layer targeted at DirectX 12 games. That combined with Apple's Rosetta x86-to-Arm translation layer build the foundation of running Windows games on Linux. Crossover is a commercial software, but there are free options -- namely Whisky and Heroic. Heroic is a launcher and storefront that integrates tightly with GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming. Whisky is a more generalized Wine bottle runner. They're both heavily reliant on Apple's GPTK distribution that includes D3DMetal.

But the point is, you don't really need Mac games to run games on macOS these days. And in fact, much like Linux, some of those native ports get forgotten and the Windows versions are actually superior. For instance, Baldur's Gate 3 never advanced beyond AMD FSR 1.0 for upscaling on macOS, but 2.1 is in the Windows version. The Windows port of the game runs about as well, but actually looks better, on macOS than the native game. 


Yes, there are some high-profile games coming to the Mac on their initial release date. Baldur's Gate 3, for sure, but Civilization VII and Assassin's Creed: Shadows both launched part and parcel with their Windows and console counterparts. Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 is coming in all its punishing ray-traced glory, Control just launched at the end of March, Death Stranding made its way to Mac, and Capcom has been pumping out its Resident Evil remakes for the platform. But you don't necessarily need native versions to play the games well. 

Gears Tactics Benchmark

2020's Gears Tactics still makes an excellent benchmark for normal integrated graphics. It's a tightly-optimized Unreal Engine title with a highly-configurable built-in benchmark that provides a wealth of performance data after each run. We tested it on High, Medium, and Low presets at 1920×1080 resolution, just as we have done for the other systems. But it's a PC game. We're going to run it in Crossover on the Macs. 


Well...the Mac Studio isn't the perfect gaming machine. Not that the game isn't playable; even on high at 1080p, 60 fps is pretty solid. The thing is, when you compare the ROG Flow z13's absolute dominance in this title, it's tough to take. Gears Tactics is not a graphically intense title and it seems to lean heavily on the CPU. And in this case, the CPU is an emulated x86 processor in any Apple Silicon Mac, rather than the actual x86 CPU found in the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. What happens if you turn up the detail?

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmark

Cyberpunk is coming to the Mac. That was announced way back in October, but it hasn't actually materialized just yet. No worry, however, since it runs pretty nicely in Crossover. Everything that isn't proprietary is available here -- including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, FSR 3, and FSR Frame Generation. In a future article, we hope to really dive in deep when it comes to gaming on the Mac, but today isn't that day. For now, let's see how this benchmark runs. 


The Ray Tracing Medium preset comes with FSR 2.1 enabled at the "Auto" setting. Instead, we chose to bump that to FSR 3 with Quality upscaling. At 1080p, it's obvious the Mac isn't quite the ray tracing powerhouse that the Ryzen's Radeon RX 8060 is, but it's not the worst showing. We're hopeful that the Mac-native version of the game will increase performance. The good news is that if you turn off ray tracing, performance improves, and you can get further improvements by turning on frame generation in the game. With some tweaking, it's possible to hit 90+ fps if you go with the baked lighting rather than real-time ray tracing. 

Other Windows Games on the Mac

We ran a bunch of other Windows games on the Mac via Crossover, albeit briefly. We stuck to 1080p gaming for now just to have some baseline data, but we've got a hunch that this system might have a bit of headroom, particularly thanks to over 400 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. That's a bit less than the Radeon RX 7600 XT but quite a bit more than the Radeon RX 6650 XT, as a point of comparison. It's not perfect, especially considering the quiet efficiency of the Mac Studio's GPU, but it's something. 

Here's a list of games that we tested, and according to the Metal performance HUD that appears in-game, roughly how they run with our chosen settings. 


A couple of notes: at 1080p, if a game runs at all, it runs really well. These are all using Rosetta and D3DMetal, with Mach semaphores for synchronization operations in Crossover. According to Codeweavers, this is the most compatible and the most performant setting for D3D11 and D3D12 titles, so the fact that Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced won't run at all is disappointing. 

We really want to dig into this much more than time allowed for in this review, and it's also getting kind of long, so let's save that for another day. Instead, next up, we'll get into the real reason someone buys a Mac: Apple-exclusive apps.