A fanless laptop producing 60 FPS output in Marvel Rivals with frame generation—while rendering at 16–20 FPS underneath. I bought the 32GB M5 Air, installed macOS 27 Beta and Game Porting Toolkit 4.0, and benchmarked actual gameplay rather than a synthetic loop.
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The first MacBook Air I'd consider for serious Mac gaming. GPTK 4 + Metal 4's Neural Engine upscaling and frame generation transform what a fanless machine can do: Marvel Rivals held 30 FPS without frame generation and produced 60 FPS output with it, Spider-Man was playable at 30, and separate Dota 2 and League runs reached 60. Limits: frame-generated output can feel worse than its displayed number suggests, sustained sessions settle lower without fans, and a few ports still freeze or misbehave.
macOS 27 Beta + Game Porting Toolkit 4.0: install walkthrough, Metal 4 Neural Engine upscaling, frame generation in Marvel Rivals, and the Spider-Man 2 freeze bug. Also see the M5 Air MOBA test — Dota 2 & League.
Click any column header to sort. These published runs span both the earlier 24GB M5 Air and the current 32GB M5 Air; the evidence column identifies the source.
| Game / App | MacBook Model | Setting | Method | Avg FPS | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marvel Rivals | Air M5 | Low, DLSS off | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | 30 | Playable | 32GB video HUD |
| Marvel Rivals (Frame Gen) | Air M5 | Low + DLSS Frame Gen | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | 60 output (16–20 render) | Caveated | 32GB video HUD |
| Spider-Man Remastered | Air M5 | 1470×956 | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | 30 | Playable | 32GB video HUD |
| Spider-Man 2 | Air M5 | DLSS Quality | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | — | Freezes on load | 32GB video HUD |
| Kingdom Come: Deliverance | Air M5 | Low | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | 30 | Playable | 32GB video HUD |
| Kingdom Come: Deliverance | Air M5 | High | GPTK 4 / CrossOver | 20 | Rough | 32GB video HUD |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Air M5 | Low–Medium, scaled | GPTK / CrossOver | ~32 spot reading | Not sustained | 32GB, 4-sec clip |
| Dota 2 | Air M5 | Low, 3478×996 | GPTK / CrossOver | 60 | Good | 24GB video HUD |
| Dota 2 | Air M5 | Default | Native macOS | 60 (cap) | Good | 24GB video HUD |
| League of Legends | Air M5 | High | Native macOS | 60 (cap) | Great | 24GB video HUD |
| Fortnite | Air M5 | — | Blocked (anti-cheat) | — | Not on Mac | Compatibility guide |
Reconciled against the published HUD footage on June 11, 2026. The 24GB and 32GB captures are separate machines and the Dota clients were not recorded under identical settings, so do not read those rows as a controlled A/B test. The Cyberpunk upload is only four seconds, so ~32 is a spot reading—not a sustained average. Frame-generated output FPS is not the same as render FPS.
Game Porting Toolkit 4.0 (WWDC 2026) is the inflection point: Metal 4's Neural Engine upscaling adds a new reconstruction path on Apple Silicon, and frame generation can raise displayed output—Marvel Rivals moved from 30 FPS without frame generation to 60 FPS output, with a 16–20 FPS render rate underneath. Install takes about ten minutes with CrossOver: full written guide here, or follow the video above. Coming from an older machine? Compare the M1 Air and M1 Max pages.
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Yes, with caveats. Marvel Rivals produced 60 FPS output with frame generation but rendered at 16–20 FPS underneath; League and Dota reached 60 in separate runs; Spider-Man was playable at 30. Long fanless sessions also lose sustained-performance headroom.
The four-second public clip proves the game launches and shows a roughly 32 FPS spot reading via CrossOver + GPTK at low–medium scaled settings. It does not establish sustained playability. Read the evidence note.
30 FPS at low settings without frame generation; 60 FPS output with DLSS Frame Generation from a 16–20 FPS render rate. Tested via GPTK 4 / CrossOver and reconciled against the published HUD.
Long sessions and high native-resolution targets favor the Pro because it adds fans and a larger GPU. The Air is the lower-cost, fanless option; compare exact same-setting runs before relying on a percentage difference.