Early Apple Silicon Macs that shipped with 8GB of unified memory were fine for everyday basics like web browsing, email, and light productivity. The trouble started the moment users piled on multiple apps, opened large projects, or did anything demanding. Memory pressure would spike, macOS would begin swapping data to the SSD, and the smooth “it just works” feel could quickly turn into stutters and slowdowns.
Apple largely addressed that pain point by moving its current-generation Apple Silicon lineup to 16GB of unified memory as the standard. But a new and increasingly important challenge is exposing the limits of that upgrade: modern gaming, especially big Unreal Engine 5 titles.
A recent gameplay video from YouTube channel MrMacRight showcases Cronos: The New Dawn running across different Mac configurations. The game uses Unreal Engine 5 and supports Apple’s MetalFX upscaling, which strongly suggests a proper macOS version is in play. Even so, the results highlight a hard reality for Mac gaming right now: in heavier scenes, the system can chew through available memory until the framebuffer is fully consumed. When that happens, the Mac has to lean on SSD swapping to keep going—something that can tank responsiveness and frame rate.
The issue isn’t just raw GPU horsepower. Cronos: The New Dawn is extremely demanding, and Unreal Engine 5 games are also known for shader compilation that can cause hitching while assets and effects are prepared in the background. But the biggest recurring bottleneck here is memory capacity. When unified memory gets tight, performance suffers as macOS shifts data back and forth between RAM and storage.
In the video, the experience on an M4 system remains rough even with low graphics settings and MetalFX enabled. The on-screen overlay shows performance around 15 FPS at points, but there are moments where it dips below 7 FPS, which makes gameplay feel choppy and unplayable for many people. Restarting the game can temporarily restore performance, but that’s a short-term workaround, not a real fix.
The M4 Pro handles the situation better, and it’s not hard to guess why. With 24GB of unified memory, there’s more headroom before the system hits the wall. That extra capacity helps reduce the frequency and severity of swapping, and overall performance improves. Still, even on the higher-end chip, the video suggests you’ll likely need to stick to a low graphics preset and rely on upscaling to reach a “respectable” level of playability.
It’s fair to point out that Unreal Engine 5 has performance quirks on many platforms, including PCs, and stuttering is not unusual. But that argument can cut the other way: if you’re primarily buying a system for gaming, Windows-based hardware often offers more flexibility, higher peak performance, and more upgrade paths—letting brute-force hardware muscle through demanding games with higher FPS and fewer compromises.
If Apple wants Apple Silicon Macs to become a more serious gaming destination, unified memory may need another step up in baseline capacity. Apple has raised the minimum before, and it could do it again. The problem is that gaming still doesn’t appear to be Apple’s primary market focus, and offering higher unified memory configurations at significantly lower prices seems unlikely.
A good example is the rumored low-cost MacBook expected later this year, which is said to ship with just 8GB of memory. Estimates suggest it could represent around 25 percent of Apple’s portable computing revenue recorded in 2025 once it arrives. That’s a strong signal that Apple still sees a large, profitable audience for entry-level configurations, even as more demanding use cases—like modern AAA gaming—continue to expose the limits of lower memory ceilings.
For anyone excited about the Mac’s growing gaming library, Cronos: The New Dawn is an important test case. It shows that ports and Metal-friendly features like MetalFX are meaningful progress, but also that unified memory capacity can quickly become the deciding factor between “it runs” and “it feels good to play.”
