I've just bought a MacBook Pro with 2.7 (3.1 turbo) duo processor and the pretty lame iris 6100 integrated graphics card. I know it doesn't sound like the best investment for anyone who wants to play games, but my fiancée wanted a Mac and we couldn't justify the £1650 for the top of the line number. What I was wondering is, how do I find out what sorts of games this thing will manage to run? I got steam for Mac set up and got papers please running, but I heard there was a button somewhere that checked whether your computer would run a game before you buy it and can't find this anywhere... I'm also looking to get into emulation, haven't played any of my snes or amiga games since the 90s and I wondered if there was a safe and secure Mac emulator and a reputable portal for download out there? Sorry for the long multiple part question, I've never had a Mac before and I'm not sure what the software is like, whether it's as closed off as the tablet/phone side of Apple.

I think the "button" you're referring to that checks whether or not your computer should be able to run a game or not is for PC - that's Can You Run It? at SystemRequirementsLab.com. It's a good general resource, but not necessarily that accurate.

I have a very similar MacBook Pro - I'm typing this on it at the moment - and the only real gaming I do on it is streamed via Steam In-Home Streaming from a PC. Otherwise, some Mac versions of games work quite well. The Blizzard games all do fairly well, and there are free Starter Editions of all of them you can download directly from Blizzard to see if they work and how you like them. I can play Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm on this MacBook with the resolution and effects turned down to low. It's not an optimal experience by any means, but it does at least work.

There are also many free to play games on Steam that have Mac clients available. You should start looking into those and getting them installed to see how you can get them to run. Beyond that, I'm not sure which "big" games will run on your PC. I'm sure there are other Giant Bomb users with more experience in this area, though. (Moving this to the Mac forum for you.)

I also dual boot Windows 8.1 on this machine in order to give Windows direct access to the hardware rather than running it in a Virtual Machine. I've found that to be a better experience than trying to run VMWare or Parallels or some other similar solution. So, I recommend looking into that, and then playing around with both the Mac and PC Free to Play games on Steam to see what kind of capabilities your machine has. I'm sorry I can't give you any more specific recommendations that that, but I quickly found when I got this thing that gaming on a Macbook with integrated graphics is not a great experience, so I almost never do it. I do play quite a bit of Diablo 3 at a friend's house with it though, and for that it's fine...but again, that's with everything on the lowest settings possible just to maintain a respectable (45 FPS) frame rate.

As a general tip, if you find a game that you might be interested in, you can always do a Google search for something like, "Game name Macbook Pro" and then looking for forum results from other people who have discussed it in the past. Gaming on a Macbook Pro is definitely going to be a challenge, but if you're willing to deal with low frame rates or poor image quality, I think you'll find it at least capable of running quite a variety of both modern and classic games. On the emulation side, this is better on Windows than OS X, so again, in this case you'll be better off dual booting directly into Windows.

I also recommend looking through some of the older topics here in the Mac forum for similar questions that have been asked and answered in the past. Good luck.

@Mike said:

In general this is all really good advice, but emulation on OS X is actually pretty good so you shouldn't need to dual boot Windows if that's all you're interested in. In fact, there's a really great native OS X app called OpenEmu that packages a bunch of popular emulators in one application bundle and can support a bunch more though a relatively painless plugin architecture. Beyond that, it has a ton of great features like automatic detection for most major USB HID gamepads, button remapping and robust, iTunes-esque library management. It's free, open source and looks real pretty thanks to some great artwork that I'm almost certain Alexis is behind.

Thanks guys, wasn't expecting a reply so quickly! I've got one year of my degree left before I get a real job, so I'll leave all the big stuff until I get a PC then, was just interested to see if I could run smaller stuff reasonably well. Thanks for all the tips guys, I'll get loads of fresh little experiences and nostalgia hits out of this thing for a year or so based on what you guys have told me. Cheers!

Yeah I came in here to say that Blizzard games run fantastic on Mac. They're the only ones I really play on my Pro. I was even able to run them on my old 2012 Air, to give you an idea of how well optimized they are. I'm not really aware of any other games that run really good on Mac, but the Blizzard games are pretty much enough for me when I'm on the go.

I go the dual booting route myself, while I can run games I find myself getting considerably more hitches and pauses than on Windows. Things like emulators I know that I've seen a fair number of ports of popular ones (SNES9X, MAME) that seem to do the job pretty well, just be aware that you'll probably need to modify security settings to run things that come outside the App Store. For what it's worth I'm using a 2009 MacBook Pro with a Nvidia 9600M card, it still gets respectable performance (especially for indie games) but I do find myself having the dual boot if I feel like playing many games on it.

Cheers guys, this is all useful stuff. I'm glad to hear that some of blizzards stuff will run, be good to have a go at running Starcraft 2 at low settings and see if that'll work, not played any PC stuff since about 2002 and I'd be happy just to see some of the stuff I've missed over the years regardless of graphics. So much that is just interesting and different that never got near a console, will have to look closely at the dual booting situation to expand the available stuff beyond Mac enabled things. Thanks all!