Before the official start of sales, foreign publications published the first reviews of the new Apple MacBook Air with the M3 processor. For example, Digital Trends decided to test its gaming performance, which is especially interesting given the lack of active cooling.
Apple says some games run 60% better on the new MacBook Air than on models with the M1 chip. Luke Larsen decided to test the new product in one of the most successful games of last year – Baldur’s Gate 3. According to him, the game performs great on a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max processor. It’s just that the Max version uses a 30-core graphics accelerator, while the regular M3 uses a 10-core one.
The author set the game settings to “Low”, after which he increased the quality of models and textures to “Medium”, and set the resolution to 1710×1068 pixels. In this mode, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs at approximately 40 frames per second, which is quite acceptable for a game like this with a turn-based combat system. When activating FSR technology (only version 1.0 is available on macOS) and setting it to “Ultra Quality,” the frame rate increases to approximately 50 fps, with almost no degradation in image quality.
Next, Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4 Remake, recently released on macOS, were launched on MacBook Air. Both started with high settings. The first showed 45-50 fps, and the second with a resolution of 1600p and slightly lower graphics settings – about 45 fps.