Civ 7 Mac specs

[Isengardtom]

Usually Civ 7 is more CPU heavy I believe. M4 pro is pretty powerful

 

[Lazy sweeper]

M2 8 gig here, Civ VI and HK plays like a charm. Very happy for this announcement. Tnx Firaxis.

 

[Riconatic]

Do we think an M4 Pro would be able to run the game at 4k high settings?

Bit hard to estimate, but let’s try. In general 3dmark wildlife extreme puts m4 pro somewhere around 4060 mobile category. This means about 20k 3dmark wildlife extreme points.

And firaxis says their requirements for 4k high 60fps is desktop 4070. This means 36k wildlife extreme points.

So no. M4 pro is nearly 4k high 60fps GPU. Not in this game or imo any game.

Sources: mainly notebookcheck tests.

 

[Isengardtom]

Bit hard to estimate, but let’s try. In general 3dmark wildlife extreme puts m4 pro somewhere around 4060 mobile category. This means about 20k 3dmark wildlife extreme points.

And firaxis says their requirements for 4k high 60fps is desktop 4070. This means 36k wildlife extreme points.

So no. M4 pro is nearly 4k high 60fps GPU. Not in this game or imo any game.

Sources: mainly notebookcheck tests.

A lot depends on optimization too. Apple has worked with devs in the past such as with Larian so you could play Divinity Original Sin 2con an M1 iPad.
It’s entirely possible they did with Firaxis too to make Civ 7 more optimized for more basic systems

The minimum requirements are really low. M1 with 8 cores an 8GB memory
The M4 pro has a minimum of 16 GPU cores

 

[Epicycle]

Bit hard to estimate, but let’s try. In general 3dmark wildlife extreme puts m4 pro somewhere around 4060 mobile category. This means about 20k 3dmark wildlife extreme points.

And firaxis says their requirements for 4k high 60fps is desktop 4070. This means 36k wildlife extreme points.

So no. M4 pro is nearly 4k high 60fps GPU. Not in this game or imo any game.

Sources: mainly notebookcheck tests.

Any idea if the M4 Max with the 32 or 40 core GPU would change that answer? I'm looking at a new Mac laptop and was curious if it would play this in 4k.

 

[theadder]

Any idea if the M4 Max with the 32 or 40 core GPU would change that answer? I'm looking at a new Mac laptop and was curious if it would play this in 4k.

I’d really suggest waiting for the release before buying anything. We’ll have a lot more visibility about performance quickly. I’m still unsure exactly how my M1 Ultra is going to do with the game.

 

[Riconatic]

Any idea if the M4 Max with the 32 or 40 core GPU would change that answer? I'm looking at a new Mac laptop and was curious if it would play this in 4k.

Yes and maybe no. M4 MAX gets over 37000k in synthetic wildlife benchmark (40 cores). It is about 90% faster than M4 pro. That is about 4070 desktop gpu class and could be said to be 4k 60fps GPU.

However in Macbook pro format M4 max cannot be cooled for it give combined cpu/gpu at maximum all the time. Cpu heavy games start to decrease GPU perf significantly.

So with M4 MAX you will get much better GPU. How much better depends on application.

 

[Alashiya]

sorry if this come accross as dumb will it even run on a 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 Mac with 40 GB of RAM?

 

[Riconatic]

sorry if this come accross as dumb will it even run on a 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 Mac with 40 GB of RAM?

Intel macs are not supported.

Edition: And even if they would be I do not think your mac has graphics adapter for playing games. But you did not mention what is your mac exactly.

 

[Alashiya]

Intel macs are not supported.

Edition: And even if they would be I do not think your mac has graphics adapter for playing games. But you did not mention what is your mac exactly.

its a retina 5k, 27 inch, 2017

 

[Riconatic]

its a retina 5k, 27 inch, 2017

It has amd radeon pro 575 mobile gpu propably. I am not very knowledgeable on those, but as far as I know it should be around minimum gpu level.

But then again. Firaxis lists apple silicon as minimum requirement and zero indications that this game works on intel macs.

 

[Isengardtom]

On those macs you still have bootcamp, isn’t it?
That’s how I used to game on my intel iMac

 

[theadder]

There’s no support for Intel Macs. It won’t run.

 

[doolar]

Here’s a Chinese(?) guy playing on a MacBook Air and a Steam Deck, I don’t understand anything he’s saying, but it seems to run really well on both machines. I do my main gaming on the Steam Deck these days, but I also have a MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14”, so hopefully I’m good.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

There’s no support for Intel Macs. It won’t run.

As long as they support PCs, an Intel Mac using Bootcamp can run it. Lke the earlier poster, that's how I played most of my games up until 3 years ago, when I bought a PC for gaming.

The real problem with Intel Macs is that by modern standards the processors are getting pretty old. I don't know how well they'd do with Civ VII, but 3 years ago I could not play the largest maps in Civ VI without getting really bad fps in the late game and serious delays in rendering times. Thats one of the main reasons I bought a gaming-only PC, even though I still do all my work on a new M-based iMac.

 

[mantis2007]

Here’s a Chinese(?) guy playing on a MacBook Air and a Steam Deck, I don’t understand anything he’s saying, but it seems to run really well on both machines. I do my main gaming on the Steam Deck these days, but I also have a MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14”, so hopefully I’m good.

You can use auto-translated subtitles on YouTube if you don't understand Chinese. Thanks for posting this! First time I've seen Mac and Steam Deck gameplay. Both look better than you might expect, especially at launch.

 

[Isengardtom]

From what I can get from the comments it’s a M1 MacBook Air and the game runs at native res of 2560 x 1600 at 30-50 FPS


That’s pretty impressive given that’s really a base spec M series Mac with no active cooling. He does mention he didn’t do a long test so there may be throttling after

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

From what I can get from the comments it’s a M1 MacBook Air and the game runs at native res of 2560 x 1600 at 30-50 FPS


That’s pretty impressive given that’s really a base spec M series Mac with no active cooling. He does mention he didn’t do a long test so there may be throttling after

My experience from previous Civ games on Macs (back to Civ 2) was that there was a huge difference in requirements based on map size. The largest map sizes almost always tested my Mac to the limit, even when I had no trouble at high graphics setting on 'standard' maps.

Since apparently Civ VII will release with only standard map sizes as the largest available, we may not be able to test the real capabilities/limitations of the Mac vis-a-vis the game until the larger map sizes become available (as they surely will not long after initial release)

 

[doolar]

My experience from previous Civ games on Macs (back to Civ 2) was that there was a huge difference in requirements based on map size. The largest map sizes almost always tested my Mac to the limit, even when I had no trouble at high graphics setting on 'standard' maps.

Since apparently Civ VII will release with only standard map sizes as the largest available, we may not be able to test the real capabilities/limitations of the Mac vis-a-vis the game until the larger map sizes become available (as they surely will not long after initial release)

I think all previous experiences are out the window since Apple Silicon. It changed everything in possibly the largest shift in Apple CPU history (I’ve been a Mac user since the early nineties). But yea, time is the only truth sayer of course.

 

[theadder]

As long as they support PCs, an Intel Mac using Bootcamp can run it. Lke the earlier poster, that's how I played most of my games up until 3 years ago, when I bought a PC for gaming.

The real problem with Intel Macs is that by modern standards the processors are getting pretty old. I don't know how well they'd do with Civ VII, but 3 years ago I could not play the largest maps in Civ VI without getting really bad fps in the late game and serious delays in rendering times. Thats one of the main reasons I bought a gaming-only PC, even though I still do all my work on a new M-based iMac.

Yes, you’re right. I’m not sure about graphics performance, though.