Enshrouded isn’t your typical game that you can just download and play on a Mac. But as avid gamers who love a challenge, we decided to find a way to play Enshrouded on MacOS. In this guide, we’re going to take you through the different methods we explored, and we hope that, from our discoveries to the effectiveness of each approach, you will get all the details to help you start your own Enshrouded Mac adventure.
Explaining The Different Enshrouded Mac Methods
Below you will see several Enshrouded Mac methods to play the game, but if you’re wondering which route to take, keep on reading to find out more about each method, so you can pick the one that sounds like the best fit for your Enshrouded Mac fun.
GeForce Now is the most well-known cloud gaming service at the moment, and it also has the biggest gaming library out there. Additionally, this is the only cloud gaming service that currently features a free option.
Features:
- A free (albeit limited) subscription plan.
- Ability to play with 4K and 120 FPS and use RTX technology with its Ultimate plan.
- Supports upwards of 1500 games.
Parallels is the best Windows virtualization tool available for Mac. It lets you create a Windows 10 or 11 Virtual machines directly in macOS and then use the VM to run a variety of Windows-compatible software, including games.
Features:
- Provides you with Windows OS functionality without the need for a separate Windows installation.
- Easy to set up and doesn’t take much space.
- The only option to get Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac.
Boot Camp Assistant is a built-in Apple app that comes pre-installed on Intel-based Mac models. With its help, users can install the Windows 10 OS in a separate partition on their Macs. Booting from that partition allows the Mac to function exactly as a Windows PC and lets it run all compatible software.
Note: Not available for Apple Silicon models.
Features:
- Provides native Windows 10 experience.
- Allows running all Windows-compatible programs and games as long as the Mac’s hardware can support them.
* At the time of writing, this method doesn’t work due to an error that shows up when starting the game. However, it’s likely that a custom fix will become available, or that an update to CrossOver might resolve the error, making this a viable option for playing Enshrouded on Mac. For this reason, we are still including this as a possible method.
CrossOver acts as a compatibility bridge that enables Windows-based applications to seamlessly run on macOS by translating their underlying code. It comes with a straightforward user interface and speedy setup process, although gaming performance and stability can vary among different titles. It’s essential to recognize that emulated games generally offer somewhat suboptimal performance compared to their native counterparts. Therefore, CrossOver truly shines when utilized on relatively powerful Apple Silicon machines, especially those equipped with the M1 Pro or higher, which ensure a much smoother and more enjoyable gaming journey.
CrossOver and Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit: As of recently, the powerful Game Porting Toolkit translation layer got integrated into CrossOver, making it possible for DirectX 12 games to be run with it. This makes CrossOver the current best option for downloading and playing games on Apple Silicon Macs.
Features:
- Makes it possible for Windows software to operate on macOS by converting their code.
- Has an intuitive interface, simplifying the process of getting Windows software up and running on your Mac.
- To achieve a smoother gaming experience, CrossOver is most suitable for users with an M1 Pro processor or higher.
Enshrouded on Mac with GeForce Now – Is cloud gaming a valid method?
When we started searching for a valid workaround for playing Enshrouded on Mac, the first place we checked was the cloud gaming scene. As it turns out, the only service that currently offers the game is GeForce Now and with it, we can stream Enshrouded to our Macs and play it remotely, without worrying about compatibility or system requirements.
Our 40 Mbps Internet covered the 25Mbps Internet speed requirements of the cloud service, so we were able to play the game with the full 1080p and 60 FPS permitted by our GFN plan. Additionally, we made sure to push the GeForce Now servers to their limits, so we set everything in the game’s graphics department to its max. As expected, this didn’t hinder the cloud servers, and the game’s performance remained smooth and steady. However, since our Internet tends to lag from time to time, the lag spikes did cause some choppiness and some pretty strong pixelization. The decrease of the image quality is actually a feature of GFN intended to keep the gameplay smooth by reducing the bandwidth used for the stream. In practice, however, this didn’t really do much to improve the smoothness of the stream, and we simply had to wait out the lag spikes (which, fortunately, were brief). Later, we disabled this feature from the GFN client settings since we didn’t find much use for it.
Aside from the occasional lag spikes, the experience of playing Enshrouded on our MacBook with GeForce Now was quite pleasant, and we can say that, at the moment, this is definitely the best method to enjoy this game on an Apple machine. The other methods that we will talk about next have some pretty serious downsides, which makes them difficult to recommend over the cloud gaming solution. Still, if you are interested to learn about them, here’s what we can say from personal experience.
Enshrouded on Mac with Parallels: A Rocky Ride
Using Parallels, a tool that creates a Windows-like environment on Mac, seemed like a promising way to play Enshrouded, however, our experience on an M1 Pro Mac with 32 GB of RAM was a bit bumpy. The game’s frame rate hovered around 30 FPS at the lowest settings, making for a less-than-ideal gaming experience. This means that while you can technically play Enshrouded on Mac with Parallels, the game might not run as smoothly as you’d like, unless you’ve got a really beefy Mac.
Can Boot Camp Run Enshrouded on Mac?
Boot Camp used to be a popular choice for playing Windows games on Mac, but it’s less common now with newer Macs running on Apple Silicon instead of Intel processors. Therefore, to play Enshrouded on Mac using Boot Camp, you’d need an Intel-based Mac with enough power (like a Mac Pro or high-end iMac), some free disk space, and a bit of time to set everything up. However, keep in mind that, even with the right hardware, Enshrouded might not run perfectly, but if you have a suitable Mac and want to give it a shot, our Boot Camp guide above might be just what you need.
Testing the Waters with Enshrouded for Mac using Crossover+GPTK
In general, CrossOver is a very good option for playing Windows games on Mac. It actually allows you to download the games locally and play them directly in your macOS. In the case of Enshrouded, however, for a reason that’s currently unknown to us, the game would crash and show us a “GPU not found” error message whenever we tried to launch it to CrossOver.
We do expect that a custom fix for this will eventually be discovered or that a future update to the CrossOver app will get rid of whatever’s causing the error, hence why we’ve still included this method in the table at the start of this post. However, until that moment comes, you won’t be able to play Enshrouded on your Mac with CrossOver, and will have to use one of the other solutions (we recommend the cloud gaming one).
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