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If you ask Mac gamers to name one survival game, you’ll probably hear Ark: Survival Evolved… a lot. That’s because in Ark, if you survive long enough, you get to tame, control and even ride dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. And while its focus is on multiplayer, it also includes a single-player offline mode.

• Games

In Ark, you survive and thrive by collecting resources, crafting items, taming animals including the aforementioned dinosaurs, forming or joining tribes and fighting off the other humans on the island. If you’re good enough, you can advance to upgrading your dinosaurs with lasers. Really.

But this is a persistent world, where (bad) things keep happening even when you’re away from the game. You’ve been warned.

In this review:

And it’s not just hard to survive in Ark, it’s also known for being hard on your computer, so our tests this week are focusing on our more powerful Macs. Does your Mac have what it takes? As always, we’re here to help you figure that out.

And as we always do, we will be testing the game on several different Macs, with a focus on higher-end models. Also, note that in multiplayer you’ll need a good internet connection to keep from dealing with literally deadly lag.

First things first, is the game any good?

Mar 01, 2018  Can my Mac run Ark: Survival Evolved? There’s no question that a high-end Mac can play this game at our default settings. Frame rates of 49 FPS (2014 iMac) and 81 (2017 iMac) put our iMacs in the Smooth and Very Smooth range respectively, while our 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro (using the dedicated graphics card) hit a barely Playable 30 FPS. For select EA games (that are available on both PC and Mac), you can buy a title once on Origin, and when you log into Origin on either Mac or PC, that same game will appear in your newly unified (Mac/PC) My Games library. The Mac catalog includes titles from both EA and its publishing partners.

After being on Steam Early Access for two years, Ark: Survival Evolved was finally released in August of 2017.

While a popular game as far as having a large user base (obviously important for a multiplayer game), Ark: Survival Evolved received mixed reviews.

Players like the depth of the game and its open world, but excessive grinding and a hostile environment for new players on public servers take away some of the fun.

The game has a 70/100 Metascore, which is ok, and 68% positive reviews on Steam from almost 150,000 users.

A closer look at the reviews reveals the mixed feelings players have about the game. TJ Hafer’s detailed review at IGN concluded:

ARK: Survival Evolved has some great moments of battle with prehistoric beasts, but just as many of AI bugs and grind.

Ian Birnbaum at PC Gamer largely agreed:

Feeling real fear in a game—fear of failure, fear of loss—can be really fun. Escaping that fear can be dramatic, and the tragedy of almost getting away can be unforgettable. But when so much of Ark is grinding drudgery, the consequences of its unforgiving style are hard to enjoy.

My Take: Ark: Survival Evolved is a survival game with some real strengths and some significant weaknesses. If you’re willing to put in the time, and die and lose your work over and over again, you can rise to a level where things get really fun.

But if you’re not willing to put up with the grind and the established user base, it may be too frustrating of a game for you.

Into first-person shooters? These are our favorites:

Ark: Survival Evolved Mac requirements

These are Ark: Survival Evolved’s Mac system requirements (minimum):

Checking system requirements is particularly important for extremely demanding games such as this one. Unless you have a high-end Mac, you’d be wise to pay extra attention to the game’s requirements…

The Test: Can you run Ark: Survival Evolved on Mac?

So you’ve decided you’re willing, but is your Mac up to the challenge?

To evaluate how well Ark: Survival Evolved runs, we’ll test it on these models:

• iMac (5K, 27-inch, Mid-2017): 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 580 (8GB)
• iMac (5K, 27-inch, Late 2014): 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M290X (2GB)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, Touch/Mid-2017): 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 560 (4 GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016): 2.0 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris Graphics 540 (1.5GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2013): 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris 5100 (1.5GB)

Be aware that Intel Integrated Graphics cards are not officially supported, but more on that below.

Why these machines? Our purpose is to help you understand how well this game runs on different setups. And hopefully, one of these setups will be similar enough to yours to give you a clear idea of what to expect. We usually have a more varied selection of hardware but as this is a highly demanding game, we will focus on high-end models this time:

• High-end Macs (the 2017 iMac, 2017 MacBook Pro, and 2014 iMac)
• Recent entry-level Macs (the 2016 MacBook Pro)
• Older Macs (the 2013 MacBook Pro)

Games

These are the settings we used to test Ark: Survival Evolved using our in-house FPS counter Count It for a fixed duration of 5 minutes:

• 1280×800 or equivalent resolution
• Graphics Quality: Medium
• Single player, local game (i.e. internet connection is no longer a factor)

Why these settings? Remember, we are testing vastly different machines. Some high-end, some not. 1280×800 and Medium settings won’t impress anyone, but they are acceptable and should meet the requirements of the average gamer.

The Results: MacBook owners, stay away from this one…

We knew going in that the hardware requirements for Ark: Survival Evolved were challenging on the Mac side, and our results confirm that.

Recent Macs with dedicated graphics cards had no trouble with the game at our default setting, but everything else struggled at best.

As a reminder, this is how we describe the different levels of performance:

Can my Mac run Ark: Survival Evolved?

There’s no question that a high-end Mac can play this game at our default settings. Frame rates of 49 FPS (2014 iMac) and 81 (2017 iMac) put our iMacs in the Smooth and Very Smooth range respectively, while our 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro (using the dedicated graphics card) hit a barely Playable 30 FPS.

While these are OK results for a game known to be demanding and poorly optimized for the Mac (more on that below), we still would have hoped a brand new iMac could have blown the FPS out of water on medium settings. And a brand new MacBook Pro barely hitting playable on medium settings is disappointing, to say the least.

This is what can be expected when turning the settings to high:

Takeaway: If you have a high-end Mac, you can expect to play this game at our default settings with no problem, and you can probably bump things up a bit and still have a silky smooth experience. But playing the game at maximum settings may be outside the reach of anything but a tricked out iMac Pro.

Can you play Ark: Survival Evolved on a MacBook Pro?

Things get tricky here, as they often do with more demanding games. Our 2016 MacBook Pro was nearly Borderline at 19 FPS with our default settings. With settings turned to the minimum it was firmly in the Borderline range at 27 FPS. While this is not ideal it indicates that the game should be playable on newer machines with integrated graphics.

As unbelievable as it sounds, you literally have to wander around your own apartment trying to find out what your password is. So, if it takes you 10-20 minutes just to turn on the bloody computer, how long do you think it's going to take you to track down Mulder and Scully? Don't the programmers think the main character might know their own password?

Ultimately it’s a decision for you whether you want to spend your time and money on a game you’ll have to play at very low graphics settings.

Takeaway: If you have a recent Mac with an integrated chipset you may find the game playable. We hit high Borderline on a 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro with all the settings at their minimum. Whether that’s an acceptable tradeoff is up to you. How much do you want to ride those dinosaurs?

But what if you have an older Mac?

As you’d expect, the news gets worse. Our 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro stayed firmly in the Unplayable range, maxing out at 15.5 FPS with all the settings on minimum. If you have an older Mac with a dedicated graphics card, however, there’s a good chance you’ll be in better shape.

The difference between our 2014 iMac and 2013 MacBook Pro indicates that it’s the graphics card that’s doing much of the heavy lifting here, and a look at Ark’s system requirements (see below) indicates that even older machines with a dedicated card might well be fine.

Takeaway: Our older Macs with integrated graphics were unable to even approach the Playable range with our default settings and lowering those settings to the minimum didn’t move the needle enough to put this game close to Playable range. Sorry, you’re out of luck with this one.

Bottom line: Ark: Survival Evolved is demanding on hardware and does not seem to be well optimized for Macs. You’ll need a computer with a dedicated graphics card to get the most out of this game. A newer (last 2-3 years) Mac with integrated graphics should be able to make Ark playable but at low graphics settings.

Perhaps Rust, the other big MacOS survival shooter, will be better optimized. We shall see in an upcoming Performance review…

Note: While Metal support was said to be coming to Ark, the last mention of that was in December of 2016; repeated requests for updates have gone unanswered.

Download Ark: Survival Evolved for Mac

Survival Evolved is available for download from all the major digital stores including Steam and Humble Bundle.

Ark: Survival Evolved Mac Review

Ark: Survival Evolved is one of the most popular online survival games out there. While the reviews are mixed, they all agree that there are some great gameplay elements. And DINOSAURS! Unfortunately, its high hardware demands severely limit the Macs that can run it.

Disclaimer: Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission (this is how we pay the bills). This commission comes at no additional cost to you.

The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows .. or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

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