Apple has a long history of nerfing its chips' sustained performance. I think number 3 is a real killer and would stop me on its own from trusting it to run on anything but a Mini without my own experience. Not a great experience, but if you really wanted to play Cities Skylines on an M1 Mini, I think you can.

I assume that has something to do with the Rosetta layer, but fairly minor.Īll in all, I'm impressed. I don't have a save game to test with, but since it ran as normal with my k, I assume it would scale up to 50% worse with large cities due to Rosetta. Acclaimed city builder Cities Skylines getting the virtual reality treatment. While they are both the same silicon, the Mac Mini's fan and performance curves are tuned more aggressively for better sustained performance, which is very important for a video game.Ĥ. Celebrate Apple Day with over 1 000 off this refurbished 13 3 MacBook Air. I was running on a Mac Mini, the best case scenario for an M1 chip. Again, I don't think it would matter too much.ģ. Also about graphics, the Mini has 8 GPU cores and the MBA has 7 GPU cores.

I tried lowest settings and it seemed fine.Ģ. About 20% more pixels than an MBA, but shouldn't matter too much to Cities is CPU bound. I was quite surprised how well it ran it, to be honest. Of course that'll come at a price.So, I ran it on my m1 mac mini. Still, since the next pro Macs are expected to have 2x/4x M1 Max chips (or possibly M2) in iMac Pro and/or Mac Pro configurations with 20/40 CPU cores and 64/128 GPU cores respectively, hopefully that'd get the game over the hump even if it's stuck on Rosetta. I wonder if a native port will come in the future or if the game/engine is just too old. Considering the game is running under Rosetta on the M1 this is level of performance is quite impressive. FPS are acceptable on the larger cities, but still not very good, like in the 20 range.

Once I get above about 50K the simulation speed kind of hits a ceiling, but it's never felt excessively slow. I have a couple with populations of 700-800K. From what I understand that's probably below average for a serious player, but my average city size is in the 300-400K range. I have about two dozen mods and roughly a thousand custom assets. Looks similar to what I see on my base model iMac Pro (8-core 3.2 GHz Xeon, Radeon Vega 56, 32GB) with a city of a similar size.

City skylines on macbook air