Mac Games Database:
What Runs, and What Rosetta Takes With It

Why This Column Doesn't Exist Anywhere Else

“Native Mac version” and “built for Apple Silicon” are two different claims, and nearly every article, store page and wiki treats them as one. A game can be a perfectly ordinary Mac app — no CrossOver, no virtual machine, downloaded straight from Steam — and still be Intel code running through Rosetta 2 underneath.

That distinction was cosmetic until Apple put a date on it. Rosetta 2 is retired with macOS 28, expected late 2027, with a narrow exception Apple describes as covering “certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.” Every x86-only Mac game is now on a clock, and almost nobody can tell you which ones those are.

One command settles it per game, and the results are below. Nothing in the architecture column is inferred, reported, or taken from a store page — each verified row was run against the installed binary on a real machine, with the date it was checked.

The Table

Click any column header to sort. Verified means the command above was run here, on a real install, on the stated date — not read off a marketing page.

Read the gaps as gaps. “Not yet verified here” means exactly that — we have not run the command on that title yet, and we are not going to guess from a store listing. Rows fill in as machines free up; the date on each verified row is when it was checked, and a game can change architecture with any patch, so an old date is a reason to re-check rather than to trust harder.

What This Means If You're Buying or Playing Today

Nothing breaks this year. Rosetta is fully available through macOS 27, so every row above works right now. The deadline is two macOS releases out, and any machine you buy today will be well past warranty before it lands.

Windows games in a bottle are the safe ones, which is the counterintuitive part. A Windows game running under CrossOver does not care what Apple does with Rosetta, because CodeWeavers now ships its own x86 emulator, FEX, in a natively-ARM64 build. We measured it against the Rosetta path and it matched or beat it in every title tested — including beating Valve's own native Mac build of Dota 2. The full numbers: CrossOver ARM64 and FEX — Mac Gaming After Rosetta.

The exposed category is “native” Mac games that were never recompiled. Those are the ones with no bottle to fall back into and no vendor obligation to fix it. That is why this table exists.

If you need to run a Windows game that has no Mac client at all, CrossOver is the tool the measurements above were taken on, and it has a free trial — use it to confirm your specific game works before paying. If you need a whole Windows desktop rather than one game, Parallels is the heavier option; the trade-offs are broken down in Whisky vs CrossOver vs Parallels.

How These Are Tested

Architecture comes from lipo -archs against the installed binary, never from a store page or a press release. Frame rates come from the games' own outputs where they have one — Cyberpunk and the FFXIV benchmark write their own result files, and Dota 2's timedemo runs a fixed tick range so every stack renders identical work — rather than a number read off a screen recording. Power and temperature are logged once a second on every run, because on fanless machines start temperature moved our results more than any software choice did.

Where we have not measured something, the table says so. There are no estimated frame rates on this site.

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Related

• MacBook Gaming by Model — the frame-rate matrix, 29 measured rows.
• CrossOver ARM64 and FEX: Mac Gaming After Rosetta — where the architecture data came from.
• CrossOver Mac Gaming: The Definitive 2026 Guide — install path, per-machine benchmarks, what breaks.
• Whisky vs CrossOver vs Parallels — which layer to actually use.