Despite emulation, Apple M5 Max brute forces its way to smooth AAA Windows gaming

[Redaktion]

Although the Apple M5 Max is not meant for gaming, the presence of a 40-core GPU on the SoC makes it a prime candidate for gaming. To that end, a YouTuber has tested the Apple MacBook Pro with the M5 Max in a slew of Windows games. The results are impressive considering that the M5 Max had to play the games through an emulation layer.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Despite-emulation-Apple-M5-Max-brute-forces-its-way-to-smooth-AAA-Windows-gaming.1260498.0.html

[Yuriy]

Are you insane?! It shows performance of a cheap gaming laptop.

[hmm yee, only a 5070M]

On the one hand we have this, which looks good:

Apple M5 Max 40-Core GPU
Apple MacBook Pro 16 2026 M5 Max   
4392 Points

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 RTX 5080   
4022 Points

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop
Schenker XMG APEX 16 MAX   
3953 Points

3dmark.com/search Steel Nomad:
4060 (notebook): Average score: 2262
4070 (notebook): Average score: 2702
5070 (notebook): Average score: 2985
5070 Ti (notebook): Average score: 3843
5080 (notebook): Average score: 5189
4070 SUPER: Average score: 4635 <- build a desktop PC for much cheaper.

But on the other hand we have this, which looks bad (5070 Laptop performance in actual games):

Cyberpunk 2077 2560x1440 Ultra Preset (FSR off)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop
Schenker XMG APEX 16 MAX   
82.9 (69.5min - 107max) fps

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 RTX 5080   
74.4 (62min - 94.6max) fps

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop
Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16IAX10, RTX 5070   
68.3 (58.1min - 85.8max) fps

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop
Razer Blade 14 2025   
65.9 (55.3min - 84.1max) fps

Apple M5 Max 40-Core GPU
Apple MacBook Pro 16 2026 M5 Max   
64.3 fps

Still, a new 5070 Laptop is like twice the price of a used 4060 Laptop (this one one may call cheap).

[nsklaus]

the real problems aren't solved. brute force helps in many cases yes but,
even the game that seem to work will still have issues:
weird gfx glitches here and there, like water surfaces not showing up in games or other distortions of polygons, or even again weird cases like no-gore in fallout, or no facial animations in that other game etc .. it's not just a thing of the moment. it's something that's always here. it's been like that for a decade. and it's improving but barely, in such a slow pace that in another decade it probably won't have solved much of the issues yet.

apple whole software stack generaly speaking, is in a terrible, horrible, i mean unbearable state, at least in my opinion.
- macos latest UI/UX "liquid a**" is a mess and look very bad.
- base macos weight 150gb (fatberg laced with lard marinating in bloat sauce)
- no bios (macos masquarade as a 150gb bios)
- can't fully boot on external drive (internal drive with macos is necessary, remove that and the machine won't boot anything not even proper bootable external drive.)
- macos has very bad interoperability, it doesn't support other filesystems like etx4, btrfs, ntfs, etc..)
- no proper way to uninstall apps and packages , junk accumulate by nature in ~/Library/ and routine manual maintenance cleaning necessary and is a real chore. (just throwing an app bundle to the trash is not enough).
- OS has many shortcomings, doesn't support many standards (bad old opengl, no vulkan)
- many half-cooked features that were left in half finished state.
- macos "evolved" into a very restrictive OS. you can't even choose your own font to display the system. apple devs are very lazy, sloppy, there tons of bugs, and for all the features they couldn't be bothered to implement or finish they did put restrictions instead so you are forbidden to this or that everywhere for everything. no changelogs, no acknoledgements, no fixes, for years and years.. yes even for glaring bugs in your face everyday. "it's the apple way" ..

apple hardware is kind of good and appealing, but beware, software stack is in terrible state.