Attempting To Game On the Trashcan Mac Pro Is a Nightmare

It's been a hell of a past month and things have finally settled down enough with the move for me to catch up on the sizable backlog of posts I've accumulated. So here's one of them. I mentioned in my last post about the 6,1 Mac Pro that I was going to be travelling with it - and I did. I spent two months with the machine trying to get it to do things it was never meant for. It went about as well as you'd expect.

Unfortunately my dumb ass forgot to transfer all of my images from the time I was testing the machine before I wiped it back into server duty. Yeah, sorry guys - no screenshots of pretty games this time (as pretty as I could get them anyways). You'll just have to take my word salad for what it's worth.

The Setup

I was more-or-less restricted to whatever hardware I could fit in my two carry-ons. That ended up being my drawing tablet, a 3D printed stand for said tablet, my boom microphone and audio interface, an Xbox controller, a pair of headphones, my webcam, an external hard drive, my keyboard and trackball, and of course: the computer itself.

All put together, it ended up being a pretty cozy and very functional little setup. For work, media consumption and creating, it's perfectly suitable. Gaming however, is another story entirely.

With gaming in mind, it's worth revisiting this computer's specs. It's equipped with an Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12-core CPU running at 2.7 GHz, 64 GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 RAM, and dual Tahiti XT GL-based AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. Sounds at least decent, right?

These cards are connected via CrossFire which was AMD's equivalent to Nvidia's SLI for multi-GPU rendering. Much like SLI, CrossFire was - and still largely is - a complete waste of time and money outside the handful of applications that actually supported it. In most cases, the computer will only make use of one GPU, assuming the mere presence of the other cards didn't cause your games to shit the bed when you tried running them.

So that means the Mac Pro is only going to be utilizing one of what is roughly in the same performance bracket as a GTX 670 or a Radeon R9 380, according to TechPowerUp. Yikes. While the D700 supports most common APIs like DirectX 12 (yet only up to feature level 11_1), OpenGL, and Vulkan, it can likely only handle 1080p at best in modern titles. On top of that, you're praying that your games can even run on macOS, never mind the positively ancient hardware and drivers.

Of my 271 Steam games, just 42 work in macOS. Hope you like visual novels and games older than 2015!

It's no real surprise at this point that gaming on native macOS is a kind of a dreadful experience. Yeah, the App Store and Apple Arcade have their trough of mobile games with a few genuinely compelling indie and AAA titles sprinkled into the mix, but most Steam games haven't even bothered supporting the OS - and why should they? If you're buying a computer for gaming; you're almost certainly not buying one from Apple.

Yet a good chunk of Mac hardware is plenty capable of respectably running most modern titles and thankfully, there is a solution for running most software not directly compatible with macOS in the form of Wine.

Wine Is Not Emulation

Wine is a Windows compatibility layer for POSIX-compliant Unix operating systems, which includes Linux and macOS. It's also the basis for the Proton compatibility layer that SteamOS uses. Wine is not an emulator for Windows like Parallels, rather it translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls which macOS can interpret, eliminating any sort of performance penalties that traditional emulation might induce - at least on paper.

Unfortunately for most users - including myself - Wine is kind of a pain in the ass to set up and use. It's an entirely terminal run application so you need to have some technical knowhow to feel truly comfortable using it. Me personally, I couldn't be bothered. I didn't want to deal with the process of tweaking every single install and setting up shell scripts so I could run them off the desktop like an alias.

The good news is that people much smarter than I am already took care of this problem for us filthy casuals. Enter, CrossOver.

CrossOver is a piece of software based off Wine, but it's equipped with a GUI and simplifies the bulk of software installation and performance tweaking. It also integrates all your installed software into Launchpad and the Dock, so applications installed into CrossOver bottles behave much more like native macOS programs. It also has an active community of developers and testers, and they keep a very up-to-date database on what software works with CrossOver, among other useful information.

The problem with CrossOver in my case is that it seems mainly optimized for ARM equipped Apple Silicon Macs and a lot of the present information relates directly to running software on those machines. That's not to say it doesn't work on Intel machines like the 6,1, it's just that some games work best with features that machines as old as mine are flat out incapable of. 

One prime example of this is Palworld, a Unreal Engine 5 DX12 title. On CrossOver's default settings, the game appears to load just fine, even rendering the character select screen. But as soon as I load into a world, I'm greeted with a black screen. The UI is all there and I can hear things going on amidst the complete darkness, but the game is completely unplayable.

This is actually a very common occurrence with UE4 titles in CrossOver but I haven't seen any cases of it happening with UE5 titles. Either way, the game will apparently run just fine if you have the D3DMetal option enabled in CrossOver - but that's apparently only reserved for computers with Apple Silicon and macOS Sonoma or newer installed on the system. 

I even tried installing macOS Sequoia on the computer via OpenCore in some vain hope this was a strictly software level restriction that could could be circumvented by installing a proper macOS version, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Apart from screwing up Vivaldi and Discord, it didn't make a single difference. If anything, it just made things worse.

Committing Sacrilege

Between the sheer difficulty of running great portions of my library, the lack of anti-cheat support for multiplayer titles, and the ghost town that is native support - I gave up trying to run games on macOS and started exploring some other OS options.

I entertained Bazzite, which is a fork of SteamOS - itself a fork of Linux. Since it's an OS that's geared primarily for gaming but it's better equipped to run on hardware other than the Steam Deck, it seemed like a shoe-in for the "Trashcan" and I would have the benefit of being able to leverage Proton - Valve's own optimized version of Wine.

But if we're being serious, the most obvious choice in this regard is Windows. Since the 6,1 Mac Pro is still an x86-based Intel machine, it can natively run Windows 10 without the use of Boot Camp through macOS - or even Windows 11 if you trick the installer past Microsoft's bullshit hardware requirements with something like Rufus.

I chose the latter option since it was the operating system I currently run on my main desktop so I'd feel right at home dialing it in on the Mac. It was a little bit of pain in the ass getting it running even without Boot Camp, however. It was strongly recommended pre-loading the install USB with the specific Boot Camp installer for the machine so all the hardware specific drivers could be quickly installed following the operating system.

Getting that installer was a chore since Apple doesn't actually host the individual installers on their website, forcing users who weren't installing directly through macOS to dig through obfuscated back channels to source the one for their specific machine. Thankfully, someone has made a Python script to do just that, and I quickly had the correct driver package ready to go as soon as Windows finished installing.

Well, everything except for the AMD graphics drivers.

The two Tahiti-based D700s are positively ancient GPUs from AMD's GCN 1 series. AMD hadn't released new drivers for the cards since 2022 and even then, the one's Apple packaged with their installer appeared to be even older than that - like, 2015 or something.

Naturally, I had to get those drivers updated if I had any hopes of playing games - or really any software made this decade. Since the fruit cult obviously wasn't going to be much help in getting these proprietary GPUs working with that insipid OS from Seattle; I turned to AMD, who seemed a little more keen on providing more recent Windows support for something with their name stamped on it.

There are actually newer modified drivers from BootCampDrivers.com which might work better but for the sake of keeping things as original as possible, I'm only going to test the official AMD provided Boot Camp drivers from AMD's website; version 20.45.40.15 released on March 15th, 2022. 

For all the games I tested, I'm running them at 1980 x 1200 resolution using a mix of low to medium settings and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution where available, though I'll try all games that have it natively first. I'll also specify which games have CrossFire support and if it's even worth taking advantage of. I won't go into too much depth - just general look and feel - but I'll also try to push settings up if the machine has headroom for it.

What Worked

Old games unsurprisingly, are some of the better running titles on the Mac Pro. BioShock Infinite screams on the 6,1 and I was able to push it to "ultra" settings while still cracking 100 FPS in most scenarios. It felt and looked great - but then I found out it's actually compatible with CrossFire, so it no longer was much of surprise.

In fact, a good chunk of the major titles in my library actually support CrossFire. Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Cities Skylines, Crysis 2, Skyrim, and every Battlefield game from Bad Company 2 to Battlefield V is able to leverage the power of the dual GPUs. Whether or not they'll look or perform well is another question entirely.

Battlefield 1 - quite possibly my favorite FPS of all time runs pretty well, I suspect in some part due to it's Crossfire support and it ran above 60 FPS on a mix of low to medium settings. That said, the frame times were terrible, and I'd get regular stuttering in between short stints of smooth gameplay.

Surprisingly, Cyberpunk 2077 is actually playable, though largely with the help of FSR 3. I was able to hit above 30 FPS in most scenarios, but having experienced the game on my main system with RT and FPS values pushing into triple-digits, I can't really get into it. It ran far more consistently than Battlefield 1 did though, which was a bit unexpected.

Among other titles, the Frontier Developments games Planet Coaster and Elite Dangerous ran pretty well on the 6,1. The System Shock remake ran like butter, although that's it's not an overly graphics intensive title either. Even less demanding indie games like Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. worked just fine as well, and I churned through several hours of multiplayer on both - even in CrossOver - without a hitch.

What Sucked

Newer DirectX 12 titles, especially Unreal Engine 5 games are a complete mixed bag. Palworld - while it actually runs this time on Windows - is so laggy under DX12 that I have to force it to run under DX11 with a launch option. Only then it would run at an uninspiring 25 FPS average, with regular framerate drops when things get too busy - which is pretty often considering the nature of the game.

On the other hand, the new Oblivion remaster flat out refuses to run at all since it apparently requires DirectX feature level 12_1, which the D700 doesn't support. Similarly, the newly released life simulator Inzoi will just flat out tell me that my GPU is too shitty and promptly refuse to launch the game. I mean, come on guys. You can't even humor me by just allowing me to watch the computer self immolate while trying to load the character creation screen? But whatever.

What About Time Spy?

Really? Time Spy? Do you really want to know? Okay, fine.

My 6,1 Mac Pro set Time Spy scores of 3901 for graphics, and 7796 for CPU, netting a combined score of 4217. In fact, I ran the benchmark on the machine before I upgraded it and so few people ran this test on that exact hardware configuration that I actually set my first "Legendary" score with it - so thanks, Apple.

Regardless it wasn't anything to write home about. The computer couldn't even crack 30 FPS in any stage of the test and it was getting a little on the toasty side. The GPUs were averaging 78 degrees C while the CPU was hitting 86 degrees C. Bear in mind that all these components share the same heatsink and Apple notoriously uses a pretty weak stock fan curve, so seeing it struggle a little thermally wasn't exactly out of the ordinary for this machine.

Conclusion

So, as mental as it sounds - running Windows is by far the best way to try and game on this stupid wastebasket of hubris. Frankly for my own needs, I'd call it the best OS for this computer period. Yeah it takes an age to get everything dialed in right, but everything I'm familiar with works just like I'm used to. I'd be spending considerably much time tinkering on it in macOS or Linux, and that's for damn near every piece of software that doesn't immediately work with a compatibility layer.

With Windows, more stuff worked on the machine than not, surprisingly. Granted, I was mostly restricted to games that weren't released in the past decade, or could leverage upscaling AND didn't require the latest version of DirectX - but I was gaming! Even then, a lot of newer titles didn't run spectacularly, with bad stutter being the most rampant thing I encountered in games that were otherwise playable. 

You can indeed have some fun on this machine, so long as you lower your expectations for how capable it is. Twelve-cores and dual-GPUs sounds awfully sexy on paper but remember; Apple sold this thing without a single hardware update until 2019 thanks to how limited the thermal design was. SIX YEARS went by, and this was the best they could do. It's a twelve-year-old machine at heart, and it feels every bit as old as it actually is.

There is actually one way to further elevate the graphical performance "Trashcan" though, and apparently it's via the use of an external-GPU over Thunderbolt 2. But unless you just happened to have a spare GPU and enclosure lying around, you'd be out of your mind investing in this thing for gaming. It's already incredibly limited in terms of flexibility, even with parts it officially supports.

Since then I've retired the machine back into it's role as a server, which it does quite well - but even then, more efficient options exist. Outside of the sheer novelty of it being one of Apple's worst design decisions (and admittedly, it does look pretty cool), there's zero reason why you'd seriously want to entertain buying one of these computers. It certainly lived up to it's nickname.