God of War on the MacBook Air proves Apple accidently made a gaming laptop

God of State of war on the MacBook Air proves Apple accidently made a gaming laptop

(Prototype credit: Future)

Fancy playing God of War on the MacBook Air? Well, that's possible, and indeed has been demonstrated past one Air owner, who posted a video of the game running online.

The video prune is from DueTry8342 on Reddit, and it shows the God of War PC version running via CrossOver on a MacBook Air M1 (2020), one of the first Apple tree laptops to use its own silicon (and this is the base of operations model with 8GB of RAM).

For those not familiar, CrossOver is basically the Mac take on Wine for Linux, pregnant information technology uses a compatibility layer to run Windows software or games on an Apple car.

Every bit yous might guess, the graphics settings are on low, just it's impressive to see that God of War runs by and large okay fifty-fifty on this relatively humble M1 MacBook, save for some nasty bouts of stuttering hither and there.

Note that some of those commenting on the Reddit thread advise that updating DXVK (Vulkan-based translation layer) may help shine things over more than, equally newer than version ane.9.3 has some optimizations for God of State of war.

Analysis: Running well already – and await further optimization

As we've pointed out in the past, CrossOver (from CodeWeavers) is one of the ameliorate ways of running Windows games (or apps) on a Mac. However, folks have been trying to run the God of State of war PC version (Steam) via CrossOver before, and have encountered an mistake bulletin preventing launch.

The Reddit post advises that the method used for running God of War was provided by Andrew Tsai, who published a YouTube tutorial which shows how to get circular the aforementioned error. Substantially, the method involves manually editing the God of War EXE file, patching out its checks for the Windows operating system.

On Tsai'southward M1 Max (backed with 32GB of RAM), the game runs "pretty well", and you tin encounter it mostly hits between 35 and fifty fps (at 1080p, low settings again), with just the occasional stutter when new areas are loading. There are visual artifacts present sometimes and some sound glitches besides, but far from anything game-breaking.

Considering this is a freshly released PC game, it's pretty impressive to see it running like this on the Mac platform, and with further optimization piece of work, Apple tree users may come across it ticking along a skillful deal more smoothly (don't forget what was said about updating DXVK in a higher place, of course). Playing via Parallels doesn't work yet, by the way, and the above patching to avert the mistake on launch fails to practice the trick there.

Here are the best gaming PCs

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare fourth dimension (his debut novel - 'I Know What You lot Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).