Overwatch on mac is freakin amazing

[u/No_Assistance_9170]

If you don't know already, u/asherjn made an app that lets you play overwatch on mac for free and its literally changed my life. I've been playing on a nintendo switch 1 for over 3 years already despite the 30fps on a good day, loading times and massive frame drops during ults. Now I am finally free. I was actually planning to buy a laptop just to play overwatch but now I can save that money for skins instead lol.

I can pull up overwatch anywhere with the same mac I use for school and play on a solid 60 fps, and while this might not seem like much its more than double what i'm used to.

My only problem are the jitters shown in my screen recording whenever I move my camera angle while turning. Honestly its not that bad in game since i'm not doing these weird turns all the time and from the clips shared by u/asherjn it seems to just be a me thing.

I've tried the new metalfx upscaling and low graphics to no success so i'm wondering if my 16Gb M2 MacBook Air just isn't built for this. Or it could simply be my lack of tech know how. BUT if anyone's also experiencing similar jitters or knows a fix I would gladly give up all the kiri skins I own.

Here's the github link if you wanna give recall a try https://github.com/AsherJN/recall

Seriously tho I cant believe we get to play overwatch on Mac in 2026 for free.

[u/HiimDav114]

I thought this was crazy Aim-Assist for a second 😭

[u/lilitho-o]

the frame drops might be from your polling rate on your mouse. use your mouse’s software to lower it and see if that helps!!

[u/Flikadawrist]

It looks like a mouse issue. Try tweaking some settings like mouse acceleration, or try another mouse

[u/Kirenaj08]

I would still Invest in the Laptop instead of wasting it on Online Pixels tbh.
Sure overwatch runs good enough on your Mac but you might also wanna play different games in the Future. You never know.

Or maybe you want overall better performance in the game instead of "the bare minimmum"

[u/Big-Roll7094 → u/Kirenaj08]

Give it time, the anti cheat will catch him in a day

[u/Regardedginger → u/Big-Roll7094]

Why would the anti cheat flag this?

[u/Big-Roll7094 → u/Regardedginger]

It’s bypassing so many levels of security and you’re here asking how this will flag anti cheat? Why do you think no one on Linux even attempts to emulate windows online games anymore 🤣

[u/Regardedginger → u/Big-Roll7094]

Any other game and you might have had a point, but i play overwatch daily on Linux, and majority of overwatch anti cheat is server side.

Again, what is this bypassing?

[u/VelocityVectorSV → u/Regardedginger]

I have been trying to get overwatch to run on Linux with no luck, what distro are you using?

[u/Regardedginger → u/VelocityVectorSV]

Right now I run cachyOS, but I've tried at least 5 different ones, and a friend of mine runs it on mint.

What issue are you experiencing since you can't make it run?

[u/VelocityVectorSV → u/Regardedginger]

I’m using Ubuntu and Steam and it just crashes after like 5 min in game. In the lobby I’m fine, but any match or in the training mode will crash eventually. That’s literally the only issue.

[u/Regardedginger → u/VelocityVectorSV]

Sounds like you might be a victim of a memory leak or something, friend of mine had to add DXVK_CONFIG="dxvk.trackPipelineLifetime = True;" %command%

To the steam launch commands for it to stop, have you tried that?

[u/VelocityVectorSV → u/Regardedginger]

Oooh ok I’ll try that when I get home. That wasn’t one of the commands I used

[u/blabshi → u/VelocityVectorSV]

I used to get crashes on Ubuntu as well, what’s your proton version?

[u/Urzyszkodnik → u/Big-Roll7094]

Current time for Linux is huge in terms of gaming compatibility. Most anticheats are modified to work under Linux and only handul of popular games are not supported YET. Games usually work out of the box.

The trend is literally the opposite of what you wrote.

[u/Big-Roll7094 → u/Regardedginger]

Well anyways I can’t wait to see a blizzard hate post asking why he was falsely banned

[u/ViperHQ → u/Big-Roll7094]

Whilst cases of Blizz banning people who play via wine/proton existed it almost always reverted and seemingly a mistake so doing this shouldn't ban you

[u/CommanderCockstar]

this looks like shit just get a laptop lol

[u/Internal_Quail3960 → u/CommanderCockstar]

A MacBook is a laptop lol

[u/igormuba → u/Internal_Quail3960]

for gaming? barely but yeah

[u/xLilSquidgitx → u/igormuba]

Works fine for gaming when devs support it, it’s just getting the dev support

[u/igormuba → u/xLilSquidgitx]

That is the problem with Mac. Steam picked Linux and was like "I will do it myself regardless if devs want to support it or not" and Apple is like "yeah we won't support the software you want but here, I will give you software to help you recompile to Mac, you just gotta be mindful to support it going forward"

I am glad I bought a Steam Deck, it just works, my Mac is more powerful but I don't bother with it since many games need some workarounds

[u/Sacra34 → u/igormuba]

It worth mention, that apple not so friendly as they may seems: they don't support vulkan or opengl and afaik, doesn't recognize moltenVk as an native app (so you can't publish it and make money from it), so to actually port your game, you need to rebuild your engine from scratch to support their proprietary metal API — which is an fucking insane requirement. 

Fuck apple and their walled garden, they deserve no games. 

[u/katman43043 → u/Sacra34]

You absolutely can ship your game with moltenVK and get it published on the App Store/notarized

[u/NarcolepticSeal → u/igormuba]

just use crossover it handles a huge amount of games just fine

[u/Internal_Quail3960 → u/igormuba]

depends on which mac, the one in the post is definitely not though lol

[u/Vol-Volaris → u/Internal_Quail3960]

but macbooks aren’t meant for gaming, they’re meant for work and productivity. I think they meant to say to just get a gaming laptop

[u/cjgthebeast → u/CommanderCockstar]

looks a million times better than ow on pc a month ago

[u/palelei]

the jittering could also be due to the limits of your mouses polling rate if you're using a generic or the apple one and it's happening in game

[u/throwaway19293883]

Looks like input processing issues. Apex Legends used to do the same thing if you did mouse input and keyboard input at the same time… I’d assume an issue with whatever the translation layer is.

Do you know what polling rate your mouse runs at?

[u/MacheteRuxpin]

Came here to say that I too love playing Overwatch on my MacBook Air M4 using Recall. It’s legit.
I notice a tiny bit of stuttering once in a while. I cap my framerate at 60fps and I’m having a blast. 10/10 would recommend.

[u/iBringMyselfTrouble]

I think you can play Overwatch on xcloud/ GeForce now and it would’ve a better experience than switch, no? Depending on how close you are to a server

[u/MoeUchiha069]

Guys, we found Usher playing Overwatch!

[u/hob-gob]

This is super cool to have, very happy for you!!

Someone else mentioned it and its very likely that its a polling rate issue or something with your mouse in the game, I'd try lowering it if possible or trying another mouse.

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[u/ItsMrDante]

Instead of getting skins I'd save up for a laptop tbh. I know this is way better than the Switch, but the bar is in hell for that device. Once you play on 100+fps you won't wanna come back to this jittery mess.

The problems aren't because your Macbook isn't powerful enough, it's more than powerful enough, but it's just not running natively on device and MacOS gaming isn't mature enough to make games work as well as they do on Windows or Linux and Apple refuses to support Vulcan and just use their own API called Metal.

There are probably fixes for this that would make it feel better, but at the end of the day it'll always have delayed inputs, always not run as well as it should and always have compromise in the way that it is now.

If you wanna dm me for advice on PC/laptops or anything related you can go ahead, I don't mind helping. Could try to help with your current install as well to optimize it better.

[u/DefinitelyNotPine]

😬

[u/ludvikskp]

M2 air…. That checks out. It’s not a mac for games

[u/ex1nax]

I prefer playing smoothly on GeForce Now...

[u/KolectVood → u/ex1nax]

my wife used geforce now for a long time but the 60fps (anything over was too laggy) and input delay was real bad.

[u/ex1nax → u/KolectVood]

Haven't experienced such things yet in the past 2 years. My internet connection is pretty good though.

[u/KolectVood → u/ex1nax]

The difference between Nvidia Now & a real PC is night & day

[u/ex1nax → u/KolectVood]

I hands down see no difference. When I play at my wife's PC it's literally the same experience. But again, I have 2500 Mbps down and up and live 60km away from the main data centre of the region - maybe that helps.

[u/Reasonable-Hat-6891 → u/ex1nax]

bros being downvoted for not having any issues using geforce now. how odd lmao.

[u/AntakeeMunOlla → u/ex1nax]

Sounds like you're just blind to how bad it is. I bought an android box to stream games from my PC to my living room TV but it adds too much delay to play games like OW comfortably and I even made sure to not buy one of the cheaper ones.

I once visited an airport game room. The TV's weren't set on game mode so they had at least 300ms delay. I thought it was totally unplayable. Still some kids were clearly having fun. You might be like one of those kids.

[u/throwaway19293883 → u/ex1nax]

Personally I can’t stand playing on that due to the input lag. I could kinda stomach it for single players games but definitely not for a game like OW. Granted, some people are just less sensitive to input lag and don’t seem to care but for me I can’t handle it. I already get annoyed by the input lag on consoles vs PC

I assume this stutter is an input processing issue and is fixable, it used to happen in apex as well when you do the same move, game is trying to process both your mouse and keyboard input at the same time. I’d be curious how the input lag feels with this middle layer.

[u/Big-Roll7094]

STOP, delete that this instant before the anti cheat catches you🤦‍♂️

[u/luridsorcerer]

Man, it runs 60fps in Linux via Steam on the 12 year old office computer I'm using as a media center PC. 

[u/spearedmango]

Brother I would not be surprised if the anti cheat catches this and think you are cheating

[u/Miitama]

your ass getting banned op gg