Transcript
Micah Sargent (0:00)
Coming up on Hands On Mac. Let's take a look at using game mode on Mac as well as connecting gaming controllers. Stay tuned, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Welcome back to Hands On Mac. I am Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at a special mode that is part of your Mac. It is a mode that allows you to kind of kick in, kick the system into high gear, so to speak, whenever you are gaming on your system. And so when it comes to using a Mac, you know, you may be thinking, okay, well, not really heard that that's for gaming, right? Well, you'd be surprised because there are a lot of games that, yes, you can play on the Mac, but that specifically you can play well on the Mac. They are games that are full powered, full featured, and work quite well. So I wanted to talk about that today and kind of tell you about what it means to have game mode running and what you can do with that. So let's head over to macOS to take a look. So here we are on Mac os and you can see I have Steam running and I have a game that is here. And the first thing you need to understand is that game mode on the Mac only turns on if you have your game in full screen. So by default, most games that you play on the Mac that you can start on the Mac are probably going to go full screen. And when they do that is when game mode kicks in. So I am going to click play on this game and we will see it launch and when it does, it shoots over to the side to show us the screen and immediately we're presented with a notification at the top that says game mode prioritizes the performance of this game while in full screen. Now let's talk about what that means. So when you go into game mode, it will make sure that the game that is in full screen has the highest priority access to your CPU and your gpu. So that means that nothing else is going to get to pull on your processing as much as that game. And also it lowers the usage of background tasks. So anything else that's running in the background isn't going to get as much access to resources. Kind of at the same time it makes those two things available. Something else that happens that's pretty cool is that it actually doubles the Bluetooth sampling rate. What does that mean? It means that Bluetooth is checking in even more frequently than it would otherwise do, which helps when you have controllers connected to your Mac and you're using something like Airpods So when you're playing a game, it is moving at a quicker pace than just kind of having music in the background. And it needs to be synced together so that the movement across the screen of the person is matched with what you're hearing. And if you don't have a wired connection with your headphones, if you're using that wireless connection without that Bluetooth sampling rate being bumped up, you will notice a difference between the two. Now I'm going to show you what you can do when it comes to game mode and I think you might be a little bit disappointed in terms of what functionality is available to you. So I have my game in full screen here. I'm gonna take my three fingers, put them down on the trackpad and swipe over so that I can access the main screen here. My game is still running in full screen to the right and up in the top. Now I see a little controller that symbolizes that currently game mode is running. If I click on this, I can see what game is using game mode, which in this case is Sunhave. And then the only option I have is to simply turn game mode off. So yes, all you're given is a toggle to turn game mode on or off. Game mode is a feature again that optimizes that gaming experience with lower latency and giving you kind of that smooth look and feel that is available to Macs with Apple Silicon and that are running macOS sonoma 14 or later. So that is what you get access to whenever you have game mode turned on. You can also take your cursor and in some cases move it to the top of the screen and kind of keep swiping up and it will summon the Mac menu bar which will give you the ability to turn on or off game mode There I find the easiest way because some games will kind of take over that little section again, that three finger swipe to the right to come back to the main screen and then control game mode from here. The other thing that I want to show you outside of game mode is that there may be times when you want to use a controller to access and interface with the devices, the games that you're playing on your Mac.