VIDEO A month ago, I reviewed the base M4 Mac Mini and its performance surprised me. So much so, that I spent most of my time after that review…gaming on this tiny little box. Resident Evil 4, Firmament, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider all run great: averaging 40 to 60FPS at 1080P resolution and even 4K with MetalFX upscaling. But as you know, the Mac gaming library as it stands today, is disappointing, to say the least. That’s when I installed a Windows compatibility layer over macOS through CrossOver and man: now the gaming rabbit hole on the M4 Mac Mini gets deep! With CrossOver, I’ve been able to run Black Myth Wukong, Counter-Strike 2, Diablo 4, and Assetto Corsa: and some of these games run shockingly well. So this here is CrossOver: it’s a runtime emulator that translates executable codes into native codes: and what this means is we can open Windows apps and games directly from macOS, without a virtual machine like BootCamp. In case you want to follow on and give this a go for yourself, I’ll quickly run you through how this works. Once you’ve installed the CrossOver app, you’ll want to create a “Bottle” by installing an application: an easy one to install first is just, Steam. Once it’s installed, I highly recommend using an external SSD drive so your Mac gaming library doesn’t chew into your local storage. So you’ll want to go into Wine Configuration, then into Drives, and format the C drive to the external SSD and make sure it’s formatted as either macOS Journaled otherwise it won’t be compatible with CrossOver bottles. So jumping into a Windows-only game like Counter-Strike 2: I quickly realized there are some tweaking that needs to be done to get it running smoothly. For starters, there are a fair few lines of Launch Options I’ve added to help optimize performance and push out as many frames as possible. These alone pushed out an extra 20-30 FPS. -nojoy -noclip +fps_max 0 +violence_hblood 0 +mat_disable_fancy_blending 1 +r_dynamic 0 -softparticlesdefaultoff...
First seen: 2025-04-27 01:12
Last seen: 2025-04-27 01:12