Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvT5VL8QqhQ
Modern AAA Gaming On A 17 Year Old Mac
Introduction
The early 2008 Intel Mac Pro was a seriously impressive piece of kit when it was released… 17 years ago. But now I have Windows 11 up and running on it, how does it cope with gaming in 2025?
Script
This is a 2008 Intel Mac Pro. It has two quad core Intel Xeon CPUs clocked at 2.8 GHz - so yep, this is an 8 core machine from 2008 - it has 20GB of RAM, and in a previous video on the channel I tore it down and cleaned it out and showed what was inside it. Then, in a follow up video, I installed Windows 11 and eXoDOS on this machine, which involved upgrading the GPU to a GTX 680 and also installing a couple of SSDs as well - and we discovered that, actually, this 17 year old Apple machine does actually make a pretty decent DOS gaming rig.
But of course, that begs the question of… Well, modern Windows games! I mean, we have a relatively recent GPU in here, we’ve got some beefy CPUs and also a pretty decent amount of RAM as well, and so with specs like that, the next logical step to me seems to be to check out some - well, some modern Windows games like Untitled Goose Game here, and perhaps we can push it even further than that. I mean, that GPU has 4GB on board and it also supports some level of DirectX 12 so you’d think this would be quite a capable machine despite being 17 years old - and that’s what I wanted to check out in this video.
[PCBWay]
So here it is, Untitled Goose Game from 2019. I admit this isn’t one of the most technically demanding games in the world, but one of my lockdown games, I must admit, I spent quite a good chunk of time playing this - yeah, July 2021, that sounds about right - I think I revisited it a bit later on trying to get the speedrun achievements and things, but I would expect this to run pretty well on this machine. I think it’s like a Unity game - so where are we? We’re in the back gardens and we’re getting a solid 60 FPS here according to the Steam FPS counter in the corner.
And the other issue is I haven’t actually played this with the keyboard and mouse before - I’ve only ever played it with a game controller - so that should be interesting. Solid 60 FPS by the looks of it.
Can we run? Is that shift? No, shift is walk.
Okay, well, I’d say that was pretty conclusive for our very first test: Untitled Goose Game from 2019. Absolutely rock solid at 60FPS there, not that I would have expected any less, but good to know that, you know, the most powerful and expensive home computer from 2008 can run Untitled Goose Game at a solid 60FPS. Useful knowledge, that.
Alright, so, just a bit of fun there, but still interesting nonetheless, I think, but yeah, I think it’s time we tried out a thoroughly modern AAA game in the form of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, one of my favourite games at the minute. I’ve played what, 43.3 hours of this so far. It was released towards the end of November or maybe even December last year.
Really, really enjoying this - it did have its fair share of bugs and things on launch, but I think all of the important ones have been fixed now, and I can highly, highly recommend this game if you like first person shooters and survival horror, exploration, all of that kind of stuff. Been a big fan of the series since the very beginning.
Now, I thought this would be a great way of kind of pushing the limits of what this machine can do, and unfortunately, I have spent quite some time fiddling with this today trying to get it to work but It’s a no go - so we have a DirectX 12 error here: “DirectX 12 RHI use is required by the project, but it is not supported, or failed to choose a valid graphics adapter.”
…and this is an Unreal Engine 5 game, which is a really kind of advanced high end AAA game engine, and I did find some fixes and some workarounds and things on the internet, command line switches and all of that kind of stuff, but unfortunately just couldn’t force it to work on this GPU. Now one thing that I think is quite interesting to bear in mind is that this is a DirectX 12 GPU, but it only supports feature level 11_0. Now I must admit that I’m not really an expert on these things, but it essentially means that it’s the the absolute basic bare minimum that you can support to claim that a GPU is DirectX 12 - so there’s loads of advanced features and things that it doesn’t support, and evidently Unreal Engine 5 requires those, or at least this particular implementation of it.
So, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, unfortunately a no go on the 17 year old Mac Pro.
Okay, so next up, let’s try out a racing game, and we’ll also try to manage our expectations a bit. This is a game from 2018, but it is one that I play a lot, so yeah, whenever I fancy kind of dipping in and having a quick blast around a track, WreckFest is the game that I tend to pick up.
Made by BugBear, of course, the makers of the fantastic FlatOut series, which I am also a huge fan of - or at least was back in the day on the Xbox until they killed it off, although I think they’re making a new one? I can’t quite remember. Anyway, let’s try this out and see how it runs on this machine - so we will run the 64 bit version, of course the Xeon CPUs are fully 64 bit compliant, a 64 bit OS.
I don’t know why I had to point that out, because they didn’t even do a 32 bit version of Windows 11 - and the game does indeed fire up in this case, so let’s see how it runs.
Ah, right… I seem to remember If you try to go in and do an event again, it actually resets your progress on that event, which I really don’t want to do because I’m not expecting this to run very well, and I’m expecting it to kind of mess up all of my events and things - so let’s try out the custom event option.
That looks like a good track - we’ll go for that. Main circuit, and why not? That’ll do. Looks like a decent enough car, doesn’t it? So banger race, 23 opponents. That seems like quite a lot - let’s at least give it a chance. We’ll go for… We’ll go for 7 opponents, so there’s 8 of us in total. That’s still a reasonable number, isn’t it?
So 4 laps, and we’ll go for 3 laps. Easy difficulty, automatic, whatever, default options. Let’s see how this runs.
We are loading surprisingly quickly, actually, considering this is such an old machine.
Okay, so I don’t remember seeing any graphics options or anything. It looks pretty decent!
…and of course, be sure to-
Oh, I’ve gone completely the wrong way already. Ah!
Nobody saw that. This isn’t a gaming channel - you should know that by now. Right, so, I was about to say, keep an eye on that FPS counter in the top right hand corner, so we are showing about what, 50 FPS at the moment? That’s surprising. This is a good looking game!
…39 FPS…
I must admit, I am genuinely impressed with this - I mean, we’ve got the cars deforming, we’ve got stuff all over the track, and we’re actually running at yeah, well over, sort of, 45 FPS most of the time, peaking at about 60.
It’s very playable, it’s very playable indeed - I mean, alright, I appreciate people have higher standards nowadays and expect at least 60 FPS if not 120 or whatever, but, for what it is this is very, very good indeed.
Another personal favourite of mine: this is Stray, and I did actually play this all the way through to the end, again sat on the sofa with a game controller, I’m sure you can see a bit of a pattern emerging here, I’m certainly not a hardcore PC gamer, but yeah, I did complete it and apparently it took me 6.8 hours, so not a huge game this, but I enjoyed it a lot, I am also very much a cat person as well, but a really nice kind of exploration type game. But yeah, I haven’t actually run this on this machine yet. I know it says that it was last played today, but I’m not quite sure why it is saying that - so we will try to launch Stray.
Oh, look at this: it’s now available for MacOS! All right, that was December 2023, but yeah, perhaps I should be running the Mac OS version? Perhaps it would be a bit more appropriate.
Start game, control room. Spoilers, by the way, we’ll we’ll start at the beginning, shall we? At least near the beginning.
I’m not quite sure what the graphics options are, I didn’t even look at those, but we do have the FPS counter at the top, and we have our little kitties here, wonderful, so we can look around with the mouse. Is this an Unreal Engine 5 game? I should have mentioned by the way, this was released in 2022, so it’s a couple of years old now but I think it does count as modern, I mean look at all this foliage, all these leaves and things.
“Press left alt to meow”, where’s that?
Oh! Mah heart!
…and actually, this is probably one of the most visually complex areas in the game with all of this overgrowth and stuff. We’ve got stuff flapping in the breeze and we’re getting sort of 25 FPS, approaching 30 at times and again, I mean, this part of the game isn’t particularly fast paced and I think the - if I remember - the later bits that are a bit faster paced are still more kind of quick time event type things.
But yeah, it’s, it’s actually very playable at just under 30 FPS - I know this is doing my PC Gamer credentials absolutely no good whatsoever - but yeah, it’s…
I mean, the proof is in the pudding, I guess!
Oh, let’s see if we can chain these jumps…
…yes, good kitty.
Great game, this, actually. I really enjoyed this one.
So here we are in Dead City, the first area, or I guess the second area in the game, the first kind of named area, part of the campaign, and we’re getting a pretty solid 40 FPS, maybe just ever so slightly under that.
Again, I mean, all of this lighting and stuff going on, the complexity of this environment, this is really impressive stuff considering the age of this machine - and the age of the GPU as well, remember. I mean…
This is very playable, very, very playable indeed.
Oh, now this, I started with the original Halo on the OG Xbox whenever that was - like back in 2001, I think - and I must admit I did kind of fall out of playing the series. I played the first three Halos, one, two, and three - and then I didn’t really get into the newer ones. I’d kind of moved on from the 360 and stuff at that point.
But I did buy the Master Chief Collection when that came out back in 2019 - so again, not a bang up to date game, but still quite modern, I think, and if we just go into the campaign, of course we have a collection of all of the earlier Halo games in here, and I guess if we check out Halo CE, just resume from wherever it is I left off.
Again, I haven’t changed any of the graphics settings or anything here, I’ve just trusted it to kind of come up with whatever the game thinks is best.
[Stick to the higher ground to the right. We should be able to recon the Covenant position without being spotted. I’ve detected Covenant stationary guns near the next pass. I recommend using your sniper rifle to take out the gunners while I call for marine support.]
Okay, so, use the sniper rifle…
[Get ready to move in to support us, Sergeant. The Master Chief is going to covertly take out as many of the Covenant as he can. Don’t open fire until you hear the enemy return fire on us. That should let us keep the element of surprise.]
The Master Chief…
Okay, so we have a sniper rifle and we need to snipe some enemies. Oh, I think- has that guy spotted me? Nope.
Oh!
How ridiculous is that!? So yeah, this is what? This is the Apple- is this the Magic Mouse? Or the Mighty Mouse? I think it’s the Magic Mouse, isn’t it? Because the top is one solid piece of plastic that just pivots you can’t actually right and left click at the same time, which makes it completely useless for the old Halo sniper rifle.
Okay, right, so we’ll need to get this lined up, and then I guess shoot…
Yes! No scope. As the kids say.
Oh, it’s one of these dudes… Let’s try a different gun, because that’s definitely not going to work.
Okay, right.
Where are we!? Oh, we’re back at the start!
Not an easy game when you can’t actually use the sniper rifle properly!
Right… Is it middle click to grenade? Right click? I have no idea… Oh, it was that button! F!
Duh duh duh duh!
Again, so, surprisingly playable this - I mean I wasn’t really keeping a close eye on the FPS counter, but I think it was sort of 35, 40 FPS ish, it’s - I mean it’s a little bit sluggish in places, you obviously saw that, a little bit sticky and stuttery but it’s playable, I’m sure I could probably - I mean what graphics settings do we have in here?
If we go to Video… So we’re in full screen, we’ve got graphics quality: original, what else do we have?
Ah, so we actually have everything on Enhanced, so, yeah, I’m sure… Ah, there we go, so with some tweaking, we should probably be able to get some decent performance out of this. Shall we give that a go? Performance mode?
Save settings… Why not.
[A covenant is making a run for that stationary gun. Take him out!]
Oh well, there you go.
So, alright, a very short lived game there, but around 50FPS, maybe ever so slightly more than that, I think I saw on the counter, again, not really keeping a close eye on it because it was quite an intensive scene, but yeah, it, I mean, it was an intensive scene: lots of enemies, lots of plasma weapons and lighting effects, and grenades and things flying around, and actually it was still very playable, particularly in performance mode as well - so again, another plus point for the Mac Pro. Really, really interesting stuff.
So there we have it: Modern…ish Windows gaming on a 17 year old Apple Mac - and all right, it does have a lightly upgraded GPU, but hopefully you will allow me that one concession for the purposes of this video.
So - alright, I wouldn’t recommend that you go out and buy one of these specifically to use as a gaming machine, but if you have one tucked away, or perhaps you know someone who has one in the back of a cupboard somewhere, or up in their loft, it might be worth digging it out and repurposing it for some light gaming, or even some light Windows 11 web browsing duties and whatnot because still a very capable machine, and also a very handsome looking machine, I must say.
But that’s all I have for you for this video, just a bit of fun for this one. Make sure you are subscribed to the channel if you want to see more of this kind of thing - and all that’s left is to say a big thank you to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube Channel Members as well: they get videos a little bit early and also ad-free - and of course, a big thank you to you for watching, and I’ll hopefully see you next time.
Original Video Links
Support The Channel:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Become a Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe7aGwKsc40TYqDJfjggeKg/join
Episode Links:
Part 1 Teardown: https://youtu.be/-MjnLKEz_dg
Part 2 Windows 11 & eXoDOS: https://youtu.be/Z0QsrqzwXII
If you liked this video please consider subscribing to ctrl.alt.rees on YouTube!
