Intel calls out Intel-based MacBooks as bad gaming machines and points out own flaw

Intel has done the unimaginable and pointing out the poor gaming performance of Intel-based MacBooks in a new call during which the company was trying to hype up its new 11th generation H-series laptop chips.

It is not a hidden secret that Macs are not meant for gaming, especially the Intel-based ones. Neither do most developers bring their games to Macs nor does Apple actively put in any effort to attract AAA game developers. That is just how it has been since forever, no matter how many times Apple shows Tomb Raider to demonstrate performance improvements between Mac generations.

Intel does not give up talking about Apple

However, Intel seems to have forgotten the script. Ryan Shrout, Chief Performance Strategist at Intel, spoke about the performance of the company’s new 11th generation H-series laptop chips, and focused heavily on the well-known fact that most games do not support macOS. This clearly signaled how threatened Intel feels from Apple’s new portable Mac chips. However, the presentation got more interesting right after that.

The company compared gaming using a virtual machine on macOS to natively gaming on a PC. We doubt anybody ever plays Valheim on a virtual machine even on Windows. Intel even put up this amazing slide where it compared gaming on Windows via Bootcamp on a 16-inch MacBook Pro, which is powered by an Intel chip, to a new Intel laptop powered by an Nvidia RTX 3060.

Let’s face the facts here: the performance improvements are primarily due to the powerful graphics card in the Windows laptop, rather than the processor. If somehow Intel wants to say that its newer chip brings about this performance improvement, the company is very obviously pointing out the “poor gaming performance” of its own chip in the MacBook Pro. It is kind of disappointing that despite the MacBook Pro using an older and weaker 5600M graphics card, the new Intel MacBook could not demonstrate major leaps in benchmarks even with an RTX 3060 graphics card.

Intel, and Microsoft, have been talking a lot about Apple since M1 Macs were first launched. We enjoy this heated battle between companies as much as anybody else, but would really love it if Apple pulls out all the stops and starts a marketing campaign to respond to these companies, like the good old days.