How to Optimize Your Mac for Gaming

When you think of gaming, the first thing in mind is definitely now ‘Mac.’ While their products have a sleek and modern design, along with navigable interfaces, they aren’t popular for gaming abilities. Most modern games would run better on a Windows platform!

However, macOS is bringing more positive changes to the Mac, making gameplay smoother and more enjoyable. Of course, provided that you have the appropriate hardware specifications for supporting such games.

But before you begin playing games on a Mac, it’s best to further optimize it to have most, or even all, games run amazingly. Here are some tips you can follow.

1. Free up disk space

The first thing you should do is to leave room on the drive, which can help speed up games. Any game, may it be offline video games or online casino games, would buffer and cache content for improved performance. If ever your drive is too full or without much space, there won’t be any room for cache, so games load in real-time.

For instance, if you are in Sweden and playing online casino games that require licensing (learn more about spela casino utan svensk licens here), then you may notice that it will load slower if your drive is too full. Even if it is online, your browser uses up cache and data, requiring more space to load better. With a fast Internet connection and more space from clean-ups and deleting unnecessary files, you’ll have smoother gameplay.

Clean the clutter and get rid of unnecessary files from your Mac. Do regular clean-ups; you can find tools that will help remove bloats, identify apps that aren’t required, as well as large and unused files you can either uninstall or delete.

2. Switch to SSD

As you check the status of disk usage, you should also check if you are currently using a hard drive or SSD, which is newer and faster. Even if you use an older Mac product, you can upgrade it by switching to a faster SSD that has a bigger capacity.

If you don’t like SSDs from Mac, here are external SSDs that perform fast enough to play games well.

3. Check out your RAM

The base Macbook pro models have 8GB of RAM, which is good for lighter online games. As long as you’re not running other heavy applications in the background, you can enjoy smooth gameplay the entire time.

That said, do check our RAM usage to improve your gameplay further. You can check the Activity Monitor or Task Manager, which gives you a list of background apps that hog memory. That way, you know what to uninstall or Force Quit; may they be apps or services nonessential at the moment.

4. Use an external GPU

Regardless of what Mac device you use, you might want to think about investing in an external GPU. This is a good recommendation if you are a serious gamer.

There are external GPUs like the Core X, and they would have ports to connect with an external monitor. You can also buy and install a graphics card on your Mac. After installing it correctly, you’ll notice a significant performance boost instantly!

5. Cool and restart

Yes, restart your Mac to improve the speed of your gameplay and overall interface performance. It’s that simple!

The MacOS isn’t designed to be shut down right after use, though it may experience slowdowns after running for days. Give your Mac the chance to restart and refresh. While restarting it, the Mac will clear its cache and perform basic maintenance or other useful tasks to perform better.

Besides restarting your Mac, you should also ensure that it stays cooled properly. One of the major causes of Mac slowdowns is overheating, which would happen as you run games. When your Mac is too hot, the processor operates at an even lower clock speed, which negatively affects performance.

Because of this, you may want to get a stand or cooling pad, maybe even an external monitor, if possible. This would offload some heat while allowing the Mac to run a bit cooler for longer periods.

The author, Amy Martinsson, shares even more experience and helpful tips for Mac users. You may view her profile and work here!

Wrapping It Up

If you are a Mac user interested in playing video games on their Mac, utilize these tips for a more enjoyable gaming experience!