Every Mac gaming thread starts with the same question — will it run on mine? — and answers it with anecdotes. Someone’s M2 Air, someone else’s M4 Max, no resolution, no preset, and no way to tell whether the number came from ten minutes in or from the second hour. iPlayOnMac is an attempt to keep the answers and throw away the guesswork: one catalogue of games, one place to put a measurement, and a filter for the machine you actually own.
What the catalogue is
Every game has a card and a page, and both show a frame-rate range rather than a verdict. The range is the span the site has actually seen for that title across the machines people measured it on — not a review score, not a “runs great” badge. A game nobody has measured yet says so instead of showing a zero.
Then you tell it which Mac is yours. The dock at the bottom of the screen holds the whole Apple Silicon line-up down to the GPU variant and the amount of unified memory, and picking one turns the range into a single number for that configuration. Be clear about what that number is: it is a projection, the catalogue’s range put through the site’s chip model, not a measurement taken on your exact machine. It is there to answer “roughly where do I land”, and it gets better as the range underneath it gets better.
Around that sit the filters, and they combine the way you would ask the question out loud: by genre, by how the game runs on macOS at all — Native, CrossOver or Parallels — by resolution and settings preset, and by whether the result is even worth your evening. Every one of them lives in the address bar, so a filtered list is a link you can send someone.
Where the numbers come from
There is no lab here. Every number in the catalogue was sent in by somebody who played the game on their own Mac, and it arrives with the context that makes it mean anything: which chip variant, how much memory, which resolution and preset, native or translated, upscaling on or off, frame generation on or off.
Nothing goes live on arrival. A submitted measurement is held as pending and stays visible only to the person who sent it until a human has looked at it; until then, nobody else’s catalogue moves because of it. That is the slow part of this site, and it is the part that makes the fast part worth reading.
A frame rate without its machine, its resolution and its settings is not a measurement. It is an opinion with a decimal point.
How to add one
Open the dock, choose “Submit a benchmark”, and answer three short screens: what you played, what you played it on, and what you saw. The optional fourth part is the one that helps most — how you measured, which scene, and anything you want to add in your own words. A summary shows you every line before it is sent, and each line jumps back to the step it came from.
If the game is not in the list yet, submit the game instead: paste its store link and the catalogue picks up the title, the cover and the release date from there. That one is moderated too — a catalogue is only as good as the last thing somebody let into it.
This blog will carry the rest: notes on how the chip model is built, what a submission gets checked against, and what changed when it turned out to be wrong. When there are measurements worth a chart, the charts here will be made of them.