Apple M2 Pro MacBook Pro Underwhelms in Gaming Review [VIDEO]

Tech YouTuber Dawid Coleman from Dawid Does Tech Stuff recently reviewed the 2023 MacBook Pro from Apple in the context of gaming, and he found it to be quite underwhelming.

As Apple continues to outfit its Mac line with increasingly powerful and efficient chips of its own design, the company has been trying to push gaming on macOS. Even though Apple’s latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models perform better in games than previous models thanks to their all-new M2 Pro and M2 Mac chips, they still lag behind their PC counterparts.

Dawid tested a 16-inch MacBook Pro powered by Apple’s M2 Pro chip with 12 CPU cores and 19 GPU cores, 16GB of Unified Memory, and 512 GB of SSD storage across a number of titles, including Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Resident Evil Village, the last of which is optimized for Apple Silicon.

The YouTuber found that while the new MacBook Pro can put up some respectable FPS numbers (and quietly so, with near-silent operation in some lighter titles), the gameplay experience leaves much to be desired.

Dawid took issue with the display in particular, which he noted greatly sacrifices input latency and motion rendering — “the two arguably most important characteristics for a good gaming display,” per the YouTuber, for what he admitted is stellar image quality.

The display is plagued by smearing and ghosting issues, and it has some pretty severe input lag. According to the YouTuber, the experience can get marginally better by turning off the “camera acceleration” feature in games.

While the MacBook Pro’s Mini LED display is pretty hard to beat for content creation and consumption, it’s just not that good at dealing with games and motion-heavy graphics.

What’s more, Dawid had issues launching even the Mac-optimized Resident Evil Village that Apple often raves about, and connecting a wireless controller to the MacBook was cumbersome as well.

“This MacBook won’t be good for gaming because its display isn’t good for gaming,” the YouTuber concluded. He was able to have a much better gaming experience by connecting his MacBook to an external gaming monitor.

Check out Dawid’s full gaming review of the M2 Pro MacBook Pro below: