Aerofly performance on M1 Mac Air

I recommend using the search function in this forum, because a lot has already been written here about using the FS 4 with a Mac.

I'd bring up the online reported Mac Air M1 resolution of 2560 x 1600 compared to a 4K monitor's 3840 x 2160. You would not fully enjoy the modern large monitor rewards if playing 'desktop' FS4 on a device that is similar in screen size to the larger iPad pro but which offers significantly lower resolution. You could see a similar resolution to 1440p's 2560 x 1440 which might be acceptable seeing that you would change from Aero on a phone to Aero on a 13" diagonal screen.

My FS4 takes up 220 GB of storage, will your Mac Air still have a good reserve of storage capacity? Look at the total price of FS4 with the aircraft bundle and decide if the benefit is worth the total cost.

I have no Mac experience but my M1 iPad pro's FS Global shows no apparent slowness compared to my PC's FS4. The iPad pro and Mac Air hardware differences seem relatively minor but the 'PC' operating system on the Mac Air might make a big difference.

The iPad pro's M1 is not trying to handle the vastly more sophisticated FS4 scenery graphics usually handled by the PC's large and expensive dedicated graphics card. Would you be content with possibly having to select low and medium Graphics Quality Settings? but then the Mac Air display resolution would be less demanding.

Hopefully some viewers with relevant Mac Air experience can advise you.

No one helping our friend out?

Quote from Quackus

Hello, I am currently considering buying the Aerofly FS 4 bundle on Steam, as I already have it on my phone and really enjoy it.

However, my Mac is quite a low-end M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and 8 cores, so I was wondering about the performance and how well Aerofly would run on it (fps, graphics etc)

I also currently do not own and probably cannot get proper flight sim equipment (yolk/throttles/pedals) so I would like to know if its worth it to buy Aerofly FS 4 knowing this.
I plan on purchasing on Steam through steam balance/gift cards, so I can't really refund it if it doesn't run that well.

And one last thing, would anyone have any input into whether I should just buy the aircraft bundle for mobile instead of getting the PC/Mac version of aerofly? I have global scenery and one or two planes, but I'm looking to just get more stuff/planes


Thank you.

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I recommend you buy the game and if Aerofly does not work properly, ask Steam for a refund within 2 weeks if i’m not mistaken.

As a reference for Mac machines:

On my Mac Studio with M2 Ultra 32GB Aerofly uses 5 to 6GB of ram, 22% of the GPU, and I am able to set everything at maximum graphics and running at 60fps with a 1920x1080 display.

I would say in your setup it would be a bit more constrained - but there isn’t a demo that you could run to test drive the performances.

To be fair, Aerofly doesn’t seem to use that much of the resources like other more taxing sims.

I have a 2020 M1 MacBook, 8GB of RAM, and 8 cores, like yours.

Aerofly runs very well in Ultra Graphics; I downloaded it from the AppStore.