Video: Turns out you can run God of War on an M1 MacBook Air

God of War
God of War (Image credit: PlayStation)

What you need to know

  • A new video shows you can run God of War on the base-spec M1 MacBook Air.
  • Software called CrossOver finally seems to be working.
  • It means playable performance, but does involve some stutter and requires the lowest settings.

A new video posted to Reddit reveals that you can in fact run God of War on Apple's base spec MacBook Air with M1 processor.

The footage found via our good friends at TechRadar was posted by DueTry8342 on the site, and reveals the PC version of God of War running on the base spec MacBook Air with M1, which features the very first iteration of Apple silicon and a poxy 8GB of RAM.

Despite that, as you can see from the video God of War is mostly playable on low settings, with a few stutters along the way.

Running the Windows version of the game is enabled by using CrossOver from Codeweavers, as explained in a tutorial from YouTuber Andrew Tsai. Tsai also shows the game running using the same technique on the all-new MacBook Pro (2021) featuring the M1 Max running "pretty well", but again there are some odd visual quirks and audio issues. Tsai goes on to explain that this can be done with pretty much any game using the CrossOver method and that God of War, being relatively new and not optimized might have some performance left in the tank.

iMore sister site Windows Central recently reviewed God of War on PC and found it to be a "masterpiece" with almost no drawbacks.

Of course, the M1 series chip, certainly the MacBook Air version at the heart of the story, is not designed for gaming and is meant for mobile performance and battery life optimization, it doesn't even have a fan! Despite this, Apple silicon is fast emerging as a real heavyweight in terms of mobile and desktop computing.

In 2022 Apple is tipped to release a new MacBook Air featuring the M2 chip, the next generation of Apple silicon, as well as a new Mac Pro with an M1 chip that is even more powerful than M1 Max and could have as many as 128 graphics cores.

Stephen Warwick
News Editor

Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design.

Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9