STALKER 2 sells a million copies in the first few days of availability, but the gaming experience is very bad, even on the strongest hardware. Even, at this point, with AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D set to the proverbial max, the game is still unable to deliver a high-end experience.
But what would Apple’s new M4 Max chip have to say against it in this punishing Unreal Engine 5 title? And while the results are respectable for a MacBook Pro chipset, the performance isn’t really worth the very expensive machine.
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M4 Max Struggles with STALKER 2: 30-40FPS at 900p with Low Visual Settings
In a demonstration on YouTube, Denis Gladkikh shows how to run STALKER 2 on the back end of an Apple Silicon chip, using the CrossOver application and GPT2 files to emulate it on the Mac and the M4 Max. Since the game doesn’t natively run on this platform, emulation is involved, which, of course, incurs some performance trade-offs.
All the same, for a chip that’s targeted for portable computers, it’s impressive that it can handle such a resource-intensive game, even with some visual sacrifices. The shader compiling procedure had a 5-10 minute finish, which is considered fast.
The game was tested on the M4 Max MacBook Pro at the native “Medium” settings at a 1,600 x 900 resolution. But even at native 1080p, the M4 Max doesn’t reach 30-40FPS, which is an underwhelming number considering you’re looking at a minimum $3,199 entry-level MacBook Pro with the M4 Max.
One of the notable points from the video is that it doesn’t tell you visually about the settings, leaving us guessing as to whether upscaling or AMD’s Frame Generation tech was employed.
Again, the real-time performance graph confirmed that no upscaling was used, as indicated by the “1.0x” text next to the line, meaning that the game was being run at its native 1,600 x 900 resolution. If M4 Max had a native application it could have performed better. Those without gaming laptops or desktops should dampen expectations for now, at least. STALKER 2, being made by the non-idiots at GSC Game World, has promised future patches to iron out bugs and performance hiccups, so it could very well improve.
