u/AllowCookies404

Gonna skip the usual “Mac isn’t for gaming” thing and just be real about where it’s at from my experience.

Apple Silicon honestly changed a lot here. Stuff that used to absolutely choke Intel Macs just… runs now. Less random mid-session crashes, way less thermal panic, and your battery doesn’t instantly disappear the second you open Steam. I’ve been running some heavier stuff through CrossOver and it’s actually playable…Cyberpunk, AC Shadows, and Civ VII running natively is not something I could've said confidently a few years ago. Not perfect, but good enough that I’ve even seen people ditch GeForce Now for it.

That said, it’s still messy imho. Native releases are growing, but it's slow, and the gap when a big title drops on Windows and just doesn't come to Mac is still frustrating. Anti-cheat is also still a pain. Some games just straight up don’t work unless you go cloud. The Finals for eg. basically force you to cloud gaming or nothing. 

And storage on base models is still quietly killing the experience. War Thunder alone is ~130GB. You install two or three titles on a 256GB Mac, and you're already juggling what to delete. Not even counting random leftovers and caches that build up over time.

Also I feel like this part gets ignored that most of us aren’t gaming on a clean setup. It’s the same machine we use for everything. I usually still have Discord open, a bunch of Chrome tabs, random background stuff. Like ok, the game runs, but the question is, can it run the game plus everything else? That’s where I still see dips, especially after like 40 mins into a session.

I’m kinda curious how this shifts over time. If more people actually start using Macs for gaming, maybe devs will care more. Right now it still feels like we’re in that in-between phase.

Where are you at with it? Sticking to native stuff or just using CrossOver/cloud when needed?

So I finally got fed up and did a proper audit of what games are actually sitting on my SSD. The full picture: caches, saves, and residual junk after uninstalling. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but it's genuinely kind of shocking to me. Here's what I found on my 512GB MBP:

War Thunder claimed ~130GB. But after I uninstalled it, I found leftover shader caches and replay data that Steam just... left behind. Like 4GB of stuff hanging around for no reason.

Cyberpunk 2077: the base game is ~70GB, but after a few hours of play, the cache had grown another 8-10GB, and the macOS storage view doesn't really surface it anywhere obv. Multiple auto-save slots are adding up fast.

MapleStory, this one hurt fr!! Through the Nexon launcher, you apparently need 130-150GB free just to download and install properly. Something about how the launcher unpacks files pisses me off. Ended up in a whole thing trying to clear enough room just to get the game running.

What I keep noticing: the install size is just the starting point. Stuff like shader caches, saves, old patch files, crash logs, and random preview data all pile up quietly. macOS's storage view gets pretty much useless for finding where it all goes. Suppose most of it just gets dumped into System Data. At some point I gave up digging manually and used Space Lens to get an actual visual map of what was taking up space (CleanMyMac) and found ~22GB of leftover game files from titles I'd already uninstalled months ago. No idea why any of that was still hanging around but kinda explains where my storage went...

Anyway, things I’ve learned and hope it might save someone:

• Expect ~30-40% on top of the listed install size for caches + patches over time
• After uninstalling, always check ~/Library/Caches and ~/Library/Application Support manually or with something that actually visualises it, Finder won't help much here
• 256GB is basically unplayable  if you play more than 1-2 games, so 512GB is the new floor if you're gaming regularly

Anyone running bigger games through CrossOver, how bad does it get for you storage-wise? Does it add its own cache on top of the game or am I just imagining that?