It’s sort of weird, probably because I’m not really playing Hogwarts Legacy on a Mac. Rather, some far-off Windows PC in Italy in my case, is doing the actual rendering, and I’m just getting the image and using mouse and keyboard to move.”¯Â
I’m talking about Boosteroid, a game cloud-streaming service I was pretty skeptical about at first. But let me start over.Â
I thought I’d have a crack at playing an actual modern-looking game on my M2 mac, aside from Resident Evil Village. Everybody seemed to be impressed by Hogwarts Legacy, and to be fair, I am a minor Harry Potter fan, so I thought I’d give it a try. Normally I’d play through Crossover or Parallels, because I really don’t like the whole internet-only thing, but this game isn’t supported by either. Problem is, I already bought the game by the time I realized this. I started reading on r/macgaming and everybody said the same thing some guide sites said: Boosteroid is the only way to play Hogwarts Legacy on mac. I am in no way a Boosteroid spokesperson. In fact, in some ways I was impressed by this streamer, while in others not so much. So let’s go over both while we’re at it.
When did this Netflix for gaming happen?Â
Like most people I can’t say I’ve been even remotely interested in such services; I rarely want to watch streaming Apps anyway except for an evening with my girlfriend. My eyes are bleeding from too much work staring at screens so I just feel like a dog unleashed any time I clock out. I either hit the gym or get out to, you know, talk to an actual human being for once rather than a phone. That being said, I have been vaguely aware that Nvidia has a streaming service called Geforce Now, and that one seems to be doing pretty OK unlike Google Stadia which shut down a few months ago. But I’ve just never been interested. The reason for that is simple. Unlike watching movies, games require real-time rendering because of your own input. I tried GeForce Now a long time ago, and honestly, I could feel the added latency too much to enjoy it. Â
But that seems to have changed. I wasn’t even going to try Boosteroid. I only decided to do it once I saw it has a native mac App, and I was pretty impressed. And as I said, it’s the only one that runs Hogwarts Legacy. So, I tried a few other games supported on Boosteroid and GeForce Now to kind of get a feel for what’s going on. I tried Bioshock Infinite Remastered. I certainly noticed more image compression smudginess than when I ran the game natively through Parallels, but at the same time I thought it would be so much worse. There was added latency for sure. I got dropped once, but to be honest, that one happened because my girlfriend throttled the internet connection a bit too much.Â
Where there are big gains, though, is in the smoothness department. From”¯ what I saw, both Geforce Now and Boosteroid offer constant 60fps at 1080p, which to be honest is more than what you can get through Parallels on most games.”¯Â
But let’s get back to Hogwarts Legacy. I noticed I am locked to the High preset of the game and I can’t really move settings too much. While there was latency, once I turned off v-sync in-game that suddenly improved, which is weird, and it didn’t change anything else. Unless you have a weak connection I can honestly recommend Boosteroid. It certainly is better than I hoped and It’s cheap enough that I’d use it again if there ever is a game I really want to play without buying new hardware. In a way that’s what this new age is all about – less ownership and more renting.”¯Â
