The 24-inch iMac recently got updated Apple Silicon inside, with the M3 chip now powering the popular all-in-one desktop. It's an undeniable productivity powerhouse, with a great screen, a FaceTime HD camera for video conferencing, and tons of advanced hardware inside to handle almost any task you can imagine — except for one.

Gaming has long been an afterthought on the iMac line, with the hardware tailored for professional use. And we all know professionals don't play silly things like games, right? But then, with the iPhone 15 Pro being able to play console-level games like Resident Evil: Village, maybe it's finally time for Apple to embrace gaming on the iMac.

The power of Apple Silicon

The main reason that Macs weren't used for gaming wasn't developer support; it was that the hardware was seriously underpowered for the task. The best Macs currently all run Apple Silicon and are exponentially more powerful than the options from the PowerPC or Intel eras. Those older iMacs also had thermal issues on simple tasks because Apple wanted them as thin as possible while still using relatively warm-running processors.

Thankfully, with the M1, M2, and M3 ranges of Apple Silicon, thermal issues are a thing of the past. The efficient ARM architecture is powerful at fewer required watts, and it can handle far more than older iMacs. The biggest leap recently seems to be the GPU in the M3, which now supports hardware ray-tracing. It's not going to be enough to outpace a Windows desktop with a dedicated graphics card just yet, but the potential is there for AAA gaming.

We looked at gaming on the M1 Pro MacBooks, and titles like Rise of the Tomb Raider could manage 60FPS or more at 1080p and the highest in-game settings. The GPU in the M3 is substantially more powerful than the one in the M1 Pro, so perhaps even smooth 1440p gaming could be possible. And with Apple bringing out new CPU iterations yearly, the gap between gaming on an iMac and PCs will shrink.

Game selection and support

All the computing power in the world is useless for gaming unless you actually have video games to play on it. For most of the iMac's lifespan, the only games that ran on macOS were real-time strategy titles like Civilization or casual games for puzzles, card games, and digital versions of board games. The graphics cores on most iMacs just weren't up to the task of 3D shooters, even if somebody had ported them to run on macOS. Nowadays, Apple has tried to rectify this, issuing a game porting toolkit for developers that makes it easier to see if their games will run on Mac and optimize things if they can.

This tool is very recent, however, so don't expect to see many big-name Windows games make the jump to macOS just yet. One notable exception is Kojima Productions' Death Stranding: Director's Cut, which was announced to be coming to Mac at WWDC this year. While that's good news, this game was released in 2019, and we'd love to see more modern titles make the jump. Apple Arcade does have a solid number of titles to play on Mac, but as they also run on the iPhone and iPad, the selection tends to skew toward the casual gamer. A few games are console quality, like Stardew Valley, but these are in the minority.

You could play games through the cloud

Instead of porting games directly to macOS, there are multiple ways to stream your games and play them that way. Steam Link streams your Steam library installed on a gaming PC to your iMac. It does need both machines to be on the same network and also requires a gaming PC, so it's not for everyone. What is more viable are cloud-based streaming services like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming, which offload all the heavy processing to cloud servers elsewhere and stream the output to your iMac. This way, you can play the latest games even if they don't have macOS support, but you will likely have a subscription fee for the cloud game streaming service to pay for.

iMacs can play games, but you have to be aware of the limitations

The hardware inside iMacs has come a long, long way from its early days. The shift to Apple Silicon has generated a seismic shift in how much power is available to macOS, and AAA games like Rise of the Tomb Raider can be played at smooth frame rates. With the release of the M3 series, maybe we'll start seeing more modern games make their way over to be playable on iMacs. Until then, you can still take advantage of the powerful hardware with game streaming or playing the more casual games found on Apple Arcade.