M4 Max Struggles To Run STALKER 2 Fluidly; Can Only Manage Between 30-40FPS Average At The 900p Resolution, And That Too With Massively Toned Down Visual Settings

STALKER 2 might have been a successful launch with one million copies already sold, but it is far from delivering a top-end gaming experience, even with the most powerful of hardware available. After pushing AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the fastest gaming processor available, to its limits, how well do you think Apple’s latest M4 Max would fare against one of the most demanding Unreal Engine 5 titles around? For a chipset powering a MacBook Pro, the results are decent, but from a value perspective, you are definitely not getting your money’s worth on this machine.

Small gameplay footage does not reveal if STALKER 2 was running on the M4 Max with upscaling, which would have netted a higher FPS

On YouTube, Denis Gladkikh shows that it is possible to run STALKER 2 on an Apple Silicon using the CrossOver application and GPT2 files to launch the game on the M4 Max. Remember, the game does not run natively on this platform, so emulation is required, meaning some performance will be left on the table. Even then, it is impressive that a silicon designed for portable computers can boot a game as intensive as this, but there are a slew of visual sacrifices that need to be made. According to the person, it took between 5 and 10 minutes for the shader compilation to finish, which is relatively quick.

The video’s description reveals that STALKER 2 was running on the M4 Max MacBook Pro at the default ‘Medium’ settings, with the resolution being 1,600 x 900. In short, Apple’s fastest SoC cannot even achieve between 30-40FPS at native 1080p, which is disappointing to see, especially when you realize that the most affordable MacBook Pro housing the M4 Max will set you back by a whopping $3,199. The interesting aspect of this video is that nowhere can we see the visual settings, which would also provide information if STALKER 2 was running with upscaling paired with AMD’s Frame Generation implementation.

Thankfully, thanks to the real-time performance graph on the top-right corner, we learn that no upscaling is used because the second line reads ‘1.0x,’ indicating that STALKER 2 was running at native 1,600 x 900. It is possible that if there was a native application to try out on the M4 Max, we could have witnessed higher performance, but for now, if you do not own a gaming laptop or desktop, this is the kind of performance that you should expect.

STALKER 2’s developer, GSC Game World, has announced that it will be working on several patches down the road to alleviate bugs and improve performance, so let us keep our fingers crossed for those updates. While you check out the video above, you can also read Alessio’s review of the game, which is still under progress, but provides a comprehensive overview of how STALKER 2 is not your average first-person shooter and brings a whole new level of depth to the experience.

News Source: Denis Gladkikh