Apple wants gaming to become part of the Mac. It of course has Apple Arcade, which is a subscription service that unlocks hundreds of arcade-style games across Apple platforms. There's also the new game porting toolkit for Mac released in June, and that makes it simple for developers to launch games on macOS. But Apple's latest pitch to gamers and developers is simple: You'll want to use Apple Silicon's performance improvements to play the best games. With the release of macOS Sonoma's new Game Mode feature, your Mac computer can detect that you're playing a game and devote every available resource to gaming performance. But does this ominously named Game Mode feature really improve performance?

How Game Mode on macOS Sonoma works

macOS Sonoma's new Game Mode activates automatically when you're running a game in full screen mode. It won't be available when a game is running in its windowed version. Essentially, Game Mode works by giving the game you're running priority over CPU and GPU performance allocation when enabled. Apple also says it reduces latency when using wireless accessories such as AirPods or a controller, though it's not as clear how this works.

After experiencing a demo of Game Mode at a macOS Sonoma briefing last month, I was pretty confident that enabling Game Mode actually did improve performance while playing games. But to be sure, let's take a look at how my M2 MacBook Air responds to CPU and GPU stress testing with and without Game Mode enabled.

How Game Mode improves gaming performance

Establishing a baseline for performance

Game Mode diverts resources from other system processes to prioritize games, so it's likely that CPU-based tasks will take a performance hit when this feature is running. For example, if you have something running in the background while playing a game, the Game Mode feature will limit how much CPU and GPU performance can be allocated to that task. To figure out how this distribution of system resources works, I settled on using Geekbench 6 as a CPU benchmark and Rise of the Tomb Raider as a GPU benchmark.

First, let's find out how performance differs in the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark with Game Mode enabled and disabled. Though it'll turn on automatically, you can manually shut it off by clicking the controller icon in the menu bar.

The numbers above show that not only does Game Mode slightly improve frame rate, it adds consistency to the gaming experience. While disabling Game Mode did result in higher peak frame rates, it also saw frame rates drop to as low as 1.78 fps. That isn't playable, so in this test, enabling Game Mode does have an advantage. It's also worth noting that the benchmark was run at the maximum 2940x1912 resolution, so you might get more out of your Mac by choosing a less demanding resolution.

However, while this does show that Game Mode improves gaming performance, it doesn't show what happens to everything else in the background. To test this, we're going to run the Geekbench 6 and Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmarks simultaneously with Game Mode enabled and disabled. Before we get to that, let's run the Geekbench 6 while it is the only application running to get a performance baseline.

Running Geekbench 6 and Rise of the Tomb Raider with Game Mode on

With Game Mode enabled, I fired up a Geekbench 6 benchmark and then immediately started a Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark, so the two tests were running simultaneously. In this type of situation, macOS Sonoma's Game Mode should preserve the performance of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Similarly, we should see worse Geekbench 6 scores while running a game in Game Mode than in standalone tests.

While the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark successfully completed with the same 30 frames per second average with Game Mode enabled, the same can't be said for Geekbench 6. The resulting single-core score was 272 points lower than when Geekbench 6 was the only application running. More interestingly, the multi-core score decreased at a disproportionate rate, which suggests that macOS is allocating more cores to games when Game Mode is enabled. Overall, it's impressive that with Game Mode turned on, the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark doesn't take any noticeable performance hit when Geekbench 6 is running in the background.

Running Geekbench 6 and Rise of the Tomb Raider with Game Mode off

To be sure that Game Mode is actually the reason why Rise of the Tomb Raider flourishes and Geekbench 6 takes a hit, we'll need to perform the same test with Game Mode turned off. Based on the known behaviors of Game Mode on macOS Sonoma, this situation should cause both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Geekbench 6 to suffer performance drops. But since it isn't being actively throttled with Game Mode, we should see a better Geekbench 6 score from the M2 MacBook Air in this test.

The results turn out to be about on par with what we expected with Game Mode off, as Geekbench 6 scores spike and Rise of the Tomb Raider frame rates slightly dip. However, the real gains from Geekbench 6 come in the multi-core score, since the single-core score dropped by a few hundred points. While running both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Geekbench 6 benchmarks simultaneously, the Geekbench 6 multi-score score was 6,713 with Game Mode on and 8,576 with Game Mode off. This all but proves that Game Mode allocates more CPU and GPU cores to games, which can cause background CPU processes to take a significant hit.

Should you use Game Mode on macOS Sonoma?

Game Mode is enabled on macOS Sonoma by default, and for good reason. Unless you have specific processes running in the background while you game, there's no reason to disable Game Mode. As these synthetic tests show, Game Mode isn't just a marketing ploy by Apple to get you playing games on the best Macs out there. The feature actually does make a difference, and it's worth using anytime you game with macOS Sonoma.