The $599 MacBook Neo Plays Cyberpunk 2077… But Should It?

Everybody's complaining about the new MacBook Neo only having 8 gigs of RAM, but I'm over here playing Cyberpunk 2077 on this thing. What's going on everybody? It's ETA Prime back here again. Today we're going to be checking out some gaming on the allnew MacBook Neil. And I'm sure a lot of you already know exactly what this thing is, but throughout the video I will go over a few things for people who aren't familiar. But first things first, this is Apple's cheapest MacBook ever created. And a lot of people said it's going to shake up the laptop industry. And after testing this thing out for a little while, it definitely could at this price point or at least set a fire under other companies to create better products at this set price point. And inside of the box, along with the MacBook Neo, you get a 20 watt charger and a USB type-C cable. When the Neo was initially announced, I got really excited and not because I love Apple, but because of what this could represent for other laptop companies. This unit here is $599 and they do make a higherend unit. It comes with a little more storage and Touch ID, but if you're a student, you can get this model for $4.99. It's fully constructed of aluminum. It's got a clicky trackpad, 13-in display, almost at 1440p, only 60 Hz. But one of the craziest things about the Neo is it's actually powered by the same CPU that was in the iPhone 16 Pro. So, we've got the A18, six CPU cores, five GPU cores, and for most people out there, this is going to be more than enough power. In fact, when it comes to single core performance, this is beating out newer x86 chips that released like 2 months ago. And when it comes down to it, if you're a power user, there's no need to get something like this. If you're trying to get into the Mac OS ecosystem and you don't want to spend a lot of money, this is a good option. I wouldn't recommend this for a lot of people out there, but if you're a student on a budget and you know the software you use in school is going to work on Mac OS, this could be a really good option. But all that aside, what I wanted to do here was test some gaming. And this is not marketed as a gaming machine whatsoever. But I still want to see what this thing can do given that it's powered by an iPhone chip. So again, for the CPU, we've got the Apple A18 Pro, six core CPU, 5 core GPU, 16 core neural engine, 8 gigs of unified RAM, and that's going to be a big drawback when it comes to gaming. This is going to be moving over to swap, but the SSD here is pretty quick, up to 1500 megabytes per second. Definitely not as fast as that unified memory is, but it may work for older games. We'll have to take a look and see. It's got a 13-in LCD display with a resolution of 2408x506 at 60 Hz. And it also has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. The unit I have here doesn't have the Touch ID and it only has 256 GB of internal storage. So, to run my games, I'm using an external drive, just a 1 TB drive that I got connected over USB type-C. And with some of the newer MacBooks like the M4, you can go into performance mode or high power mode and low power mode. With the Neo, we can't do that. We've only got an automatic mode and a low power mode. So, we're just going to be in auto for gaming. And all of the games that I'm going to be testing here are going to be on battery. As far as I can tell right now with the limited testing I've done so far, there's no difference between being plugged into the wall and on battery power when it comes to raw performance out of this chip. Oh, yeah, and another thing. It doesn't have a built-in fan for cooling the CPU. So, it's all passively cooled with their new heat sink system that they have here. But, we see the same thing in high-end cell phones, and that's exactly what they pulled this chip out of. I did run Geekbench 6 on this just to kind of get an idea of single and multi-core performance. Single core is looking super strong here with a 3,583. Even the new Panther Lake chips fall far behind what this does in single core, but they do have more cores. And with this, we only have six cores. We're up to 9,000. So multi-core is falling behind the newer chips, but single is really strong. I was surprised to see this. We're going to start off light here. I've got Hades 2, and going into this, I knew we'd have a pretty good time with it. Up in the top right hand corner, I've got the built-in Apple overlay. So this will let us know exactly what's going on with the game itself. It'll also let us know the API it's using. Newer games out there that are specifically made for Mac are going to be running Metal and they're going to work great with this chip. Going back to older stuff, it will have to use a Rosetta kind of emulation layer there. So, I'm not sure how that's going to perform, but I will be throwing a few of those in here. Also, I went through my Steam library just to find some uh games that were compatible with Mac. And here's Drive Rally. I wasn't sure how this was going to perform because I have tested this in the past on lower-end Intel chips with integrated graphics and performance was not great. But since this game does use the metal backend, we're up to a resolution of 2816 by 1762 ultra settings running at 60. It's not a super hard game to run, but it's awesome to see what it's doing here. >> Shadow of the Tomb Raider was another one that I wanted to run. I usually just do the benchmark here. And I'll tell you, I did notice one weird thing with this unit. If you plug this in over USB type-C to HDMI, with some games, you do get less performance. I ran this a couple times connected to my monitor, and I was only seeing an average of 30 FPS by the end. Same settings here. We're at 800p low, but with it directly on the built-in screen, we had an average of 42. And if you take a look at that performance overlay, you'll notice that it says Rosetta. Basically, this has to emulate the x86 version here and kind of translate it to metal. So, there's an extra layer here that needs to be emulated to run this game. If it was based on metal, I do believe that we could run this game here at 60. I also tested Silk Song and kind of the opposite happened here. This was kind of odd because on the built-in display, I was only seeing an average of around 56fps, but as soon as I plugged it into an external display that supported a higher refresh rate, we're now over 100 FPS with this game. So, there's definitely some firmware bugs that need to be worked out here, but Silkong is one of those that should play just fine on this. I mean, there shouldn't be an issue with it running at 60, so there's something going on there. I also tested out Bioshock 2 remastered using the default settings. So, it's at medium 800p. And this one gave me some issues trying to get it up and running. It's just an older game. Even though it's the remastered version, I couldn't get my controller working with this game at all. No matter what I tried. Before we move into some higherend stuff, I know there's some people out there that have kids and might want to know how Roblox runs. I don't play this game personally, so I'm not sure what game to get into. It doesn't seem like there's a bunch going on in this one from videos that I've seen online, but it's at 60fps and I've taken the settings up to maximum here. >> Here's Resident Evil Village. And this is one from the App Store, so it fully supports metal. I used the default settings and it's using some metal scaling here, but the game looks so good. And I did play this like a year ago on the iPad with the M1. had some bugs then, but it looks like you could definitely run this at 60 all day. Roocop Rogue City. And to tell you the truth, I did not expect this kind of performance. We've only got 8 gigs of unified memory here. And this is definitely digging in deep to swap. So with swap, it's going to use SSD storage as our random access memory. And I'm not exactly sure how Mac OS handles this if it knows that it needs to use the real RAM for VRAM because it's going to be much faster and kind of offloads everything else over to swap or if we're digging in swap with the VRAM here. But if you take a look at the performance overlay, you can see the metal layer here is using 3.4 gigs of RAM and the app itself is a little over six. So, we're well over the 8 gigs of unified memory here. It's got to be using swap somewhere. But it's kind of crazy to see this game here running over 40 FPS on average on an iPhone chip. And it is a metal enabled game, so it's very optimized for these CPUs. And of course, the last one we have here is Cyberpunk 2077. And with the Apple version of Cyberpunk, it'll automatically kind of configure everything for you. It is using the metal scaler, and it's taking the resolution down to 708x 443. This usually sits at 30 fps, but I went into the settings and took it up to 40 because I noticed it's pretty stable there. We do get some dips, but it's crazy to see this running on an iPhone chip. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn't be surprised that within the next eight months we see this come to iPhone and maybe not work for the older iPhones, but the newer ones. I think it could definitely be done by CD Project Red. And I got kind of excited because I did see frame generation here. It's FSR 3.1 frame gen, but unfortunately it doesn't work great on this chip at all. It does take the frame rate up, but it's so choppy with that frame generation enabled on this setup. So, can you game on the new MacBook Neo? Yeah, you definitely can. But should you? I don't really think you should. At least with higherend stuff. Indie games and older PC games do work pretty well on this. Even though it's using that Rosetta translation layer, it really comes down to those games not really needing much performance to run in the first place. So, it does kind of translate really well over here. Now, I will have an emulation video coming up. I've been doing some testing here, and I want to get some higherend emulation out of the way with a high single core performance here. I do think this could be an awesome little emulation machine. So, if you're interested in seeing a video like that, make sure you hit the like button and think about subscribing. But that's going to wrap it up for this one. If you do get your hands on one of these and test some games, let us know what games are running well in the comments below. Like always, thanks for watching.

In this video we take look at gaming on the all new MacBook Neo! This is apples cheapest MacBook ever and it powered by an iPhone CPU, So can it game? We test Cyberpunk 2077, RoboCop, Hades 2, Silksong, Bioshock 2 and a few more to see if this low cost MacBook can game. Buy a MacBook Neo on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4s0V1Qo Follow Me On Twitter: https://twitter.com/theetaprime Follow Me On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/etaprime/ Vip-URCDKey 25% code for software: ETA Windows 11 Pro Key($25):https://biitt.ly/RUZiX Windows 11 Home Key($23):https://biitt.ly/SQKqi Windows 10 Pro OEM Key($20):https://biitt.ly/KpEmf Windows10 Home Key($17):https://biitt.ly/2tPi1 Windows 10 LTSC 2021 Key($15): https://biitt.ly/W564e Office 2019 pro key($63):https://biitt.ly/o0OQT 2016 pro key($32): https://biitt.ly/xWmvn Buy Windows 11 Pro Key at: https://www.vip-urcdkey.com DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you! 00:00 - Introduction & The $599 MacBook Neo 01:25 - Specs, Display, & No Cooling Fan? 02:30 - Geekbench 6 Benchmarks (A18 Pro) 03:15 - Hades 2 Performance 04:05 - Drive Rally (Metal Backend Test) 04:55 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Rosetta Emulation) 05:55 - Silksong Display Bug 06:45 - BioShock 2 & Roblox Test 07:30 - Resident Evil Village (App Store Version) 08:15 - RoboCop: Rogue City (Testing 8GB Swap Memory) 09:10 - Cyberpunk 2077 on an iPhone Chip! 10:15 - Final Thoughts & Upcoming Emulation Video THIS VIDEO IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!