While Mac may not be the first choice for gaming since most games are built for Windows, you may have a Mac already and also want to use it for gaming.
Instead of purchasing a separate laptop for gaming, there are a few things you can do to improve your gaming experience.
Let’s take a look.
Tip #1. Restart your computer
If you are someone who leaves the computer on all the time, you might want to get into the habit of shutting it down regularly. Having your laptop on all the time generates temporary files that can slow down your computer over time.
This affects your ability to have a good gaming experience due to the slow speeds.
Tip #2: Declutter your laptop
You want to start with the desktop. Clutter on the desktop causes your system to slow down because every icon on the desktop takes time to load.
You can also organize files so that you have them under fewer folders which mean fewer icons on your desktop.
Tip #3: Clear your hard drive
You need 10% of your hard drive to be empty at all times so that your laptop can function.
If you struggle with storage, you should start looking at the files that are hogging up space. You can see your storage and which type of file is responsible for more clutter through the ‘About this Mac’ option.
You can get rid of apps, images, games, temporary files, cache to clean out your hard drive. Before you do that, make sure you back up all your data using Time Machine.
Once you are done with deleting files, make sure you also empty the Trash folder to eliminate the clutter.
Tip #4: Quit apps and processes
To be able to have a smooth gaming experience, you need space in your RAM. When you want to start a game, you should make it a point to shut down all other apps and processes. Sometimes this may not be a possibility if you have an app working in the background, so you should check the Activity Monitor to see which apps and processes are hogging up more processing power and quit those.
Tip #5: Tweak the app’s settings
You can also turn to the game’s settings to play around with the resolution and optimize it to run on your Mac. Other features you can tweak are shadow quality and texture quality. Try to make do with a lower number for both, and you will see an improvement in your gaming experience.
You can also see if there is an overall setting for the game and set it to Low to improve how fast the game loads.
Tip #6: Run a hardware diagnostics test
You can run Apple’s diagnostic test to see if there are any underlying issues with hardware that need to be fixed to improve the overall system’s performance.
This is an inbuilt feature that you can activate by pressing D when your laptop restarts.
Tip #7: Play games online
Instead of native games, you can switch to playing games online for a better experience. If you do play online games, make sure you clear your cache on your browser and remove all the extensions. The cache and the extensions can slow down your computer.
However, online games do have a drawback since you cannot verify the site independently. So, you may accidentally have your system infected by malware or virus because of a malicious website. The solution is to use a native gaming app like Steam that securely connects you to online games.
Tip #8: Upgrade your RAM
If you cannot quit apps and processes to clear enough RAM, you might want to look into upgrading your RAM. If you play games on occasion, 4 GB of RAM will serve you well, but for serious gamers, you need at least 16 GB of RAM.
Upgrading the RAM may not be an option for everyone, so you might want to invest in cleaning software instead that can automate the process of clearing out unnecessary files.
Tip #9: Upgrade to SSD
If you have an older MacBook, you may have an HDD or Hard Disk Drive instead of a solid-state drive or SSD. SSDs are much faster than HDDs and also more expensive. So, if you can afford to, you should upgrade your disk to SSD to have a better gaming experience.
All in all
Gaming on a MacBook can be a good experience if you make the right software optimizations and clean out all the clutter manually or through cleaning software. If you don’t have a Mac already, you may also want to purchase a different model altogether, like an iMac or a MacBook Pro that can handle the taxing requirements from a gaming app.
