AMD: Why would you get a MacBook Neo that can’t play games?
We love the MacBook Neo around here, but we’ll also be the first to admit that it has some limitations, especially when it comes to its gaming capabilities. AMD of course knows that too, and is targeting the Neo specifically in its latest marketing materials.
AMD’s latest ‘Unleash Your Potential’ campaign directly calls out the MacBook Neo, claiming that Apple has made some compromises to it. Specifically, AMD states that ’15 of the top 20 games’ don’t run on the MacBook Neo. In contrast, AMD-powered devices will let you access nearly all the games from Steam, Epic Games Store and PC Game Pass.
And in case you were wondering what these games were, in no particular order:
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
- Total War: WARHAMMER II
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows
- Battlefield 6
- Borderlands 4
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Counter-Strike 2
- DOOM: The Dark Ages
- F1 25
- Far Cry
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Enhanced
- Marvel Rivals
- Monster Hunter Wilds
- Starfield
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
- Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
That’s not all either. AMD, using a HP Omnibook X Flip with an AMD Ryzen 5 220 under the hood, also highlighted the other various advantages it has over the base MacBook Neo, which include touchscreen support, a higher base storage and more I/O ports. They also tout that it offers up to 57% better multitasking, up to 38% faster content creation and up to 2x faster WiFi compared to the MacBook Neo and its A18 processor.
With all that being said though, taking a look at the Ryzen 5 220, it comes with a Radeon 740M integrated GPU. Sure, being an x86 processor does mean that it will technically run most games, but the Radeon 740M isn’t a particularly impressive iGPU.
In third party benchmarks, that chip only managed about 40fps in low settings at 1080p in F1 25 and 23fps at low 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077, games that AMD tested in. GTA was probably its best performer, getting around 44fps at high 1080p settings. So yes, while AMD is technically correct that the Ryzen 5-powered laptop will be able to run these games natively, whether it runs well enough to actually be considered playable is perhaps a different story all together.
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