Borderlands 4 on Apple Silicon: M4 MacBook Air hits 10–20 fps via CrossOver with heat and throttling, while an M4 Max MacBook Pro runs high settings at 60 fps.
© A. Krivonosov
As Apple champions full-fledged gaming on the Mac, reality keeps getting in the way. A Reddit enthusiast put Borderlands 4 through its paces on a MacBook Air with an M4 chip — and the outcome was grim.
Using CrossOver to run Windows titles on macOS, the tester saw just 10 frames per second in combat and roughly 20 fps indoors. Even at the lowest graphics settings, the ultra-portable machine couldn’t handle the workload. The lack of active cooling made things worse: the Air heated up almost instantly, and performance nosedived.
For context, an RTX 5090 in our previous testing barely held 60 frames at 4K. Expecting steady frame rates from a slim, fanless notebook was always going to be a stretch.
It gets more nuanced with higher-end hardware. Another user with a MacBook Pro M4 Max and 48 GB of RAM managed to run Borderlands 4 at high settings at 60 fps — though the price of that configuration sits in the same league as a top-tier gaming PC.
This looks less like an Apple misstep and more like an optimization problem: Borderlands 4 simply isn’t ready for Apple Silicon yet. Even so, the takeaway is clear — the M4 MacBook Air isn’t built for heavyweight AAA releases, and CrossOver can’t change that.