The most popular MOBA game of all time, League of Legends, is played by millions worldwide. The game has been supported on the Mac for a long time, and even though Riot Games has not really explicitly mentioned macOS support as a priority – it is clear that the developers are bringing on improvements over time.
Today, we’ll take a look at how well League of Legends runs on the Mac and share an even better way to play the game.
Can You Play League of Legends on Mac?
You can play League of Legends on your Apple Silicon Mac, which includes the M1, M2, and M3, and it supports the Metal API Graphics layer.
So, while you do not get native support, it pretty much has all the features that you’d expect from a native title, thanks to the developers supporting Metal API, which aims to reduce the amount of friction it takes to develop games natively on the Mac.
How to Enable Metal API On League of Legends
If you are playing the game on Apple Silicon, you should enable Metal API on League of Legends to gain increased FPS. There are two ways you can enable it, a manual method and a script (both achieve the same thing.)
Method #1: Enabling Metal API Manually
- Quit League of Legends if you haven’t already
- Right click on the app and select Show Package Contents
- Open game.cfg with the TextEdit application
- Add the line MetalBetaTest=1 to the list of configs under General
Method #2: Enabling Metal API via Script
- Open Terminal on the Mac
- Run the following comand:
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curl -fsSL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jleem99/187155143851161e69be8a0c54a83a8c/raw/cf365118503feef7b2aa56e42a4a50e9b7da7a1b/league-of-legends-enable-metal-api.sh | bash
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League of Legends on Mac: System Requirements
League of Legends is currently supported on both Intel-based Macs and Apple Silicon Macs as well. Here are the game’s offiical Mac requirements:
| MIN SPECS | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel: Core i5-3300 |
| CPU Features | SSE3 |
| GPU | AMD: Radeon HD 6950
Intel: Intel UHD 630 Integrated Graphics |
| VRAM | 2GB |
| Free Storage Space | 16GB SSD |
| OS Versions | MacOS 11 |
| OS Architecture | x64 |
| RAM | 4GB |
| Recommended GFX Setting | High |
| Recommended Resolution | 1920×1080 |
⚠️ Note that ARM processors (M1, M2, and M3 Macs) are not officially supported, but we confirm they can run LoL just fine. More on that below.
Can Your Mac Run League of Legends: Benchmarks & Performance
Before we go into the benchmarks, there’s an important point to note, Metal API drastically increases your FPS on all Apple Silicon devices.
Therefore, after enabling Metal API through method we mentioned above, you’ll be able to play the game at much higher frame rates. Since the game is not completely native, it does not have MetalFX Upscaling. However, if you take a look at the benchmarks, you’ll see that it isn’t really needed in terms of the frame rates.
In terms of gameplay and overall stability, there are no major crashes or glitches on the game, and we haven’t experienced any bugs as well. This makes League of Legends a great port on macOS both for Apple Silicon and Intel-based Macs as well.
We’ve collected benchmarks from the MacBook M2 Pro and the MacBook M2 Air 15 inch.
| Model | 15″ MacBook Air | 14″MacBook Pro |
| Chip | M2 Chip, 8-cores | M2 Pro chip, 11-cores |
| Graphics | 10-Core GPU | 14-core GPU |
| Memory | 8 GB | 18 GB |
| Storage | 128 GB | 512 GB |
On both the laptops, we were greeted with extremely playable framerates, both crossing 60 FPS and even reaching the ~100 FPS range on some instances. There are absolutely no micro-stutters or really nothing to complain about.
Given that League of Legends is a competitive eSports title, the more the frames, the better. Therefore, while playing the game on the Pro obviously gave a better experience, the Air was great in its own right and we’d be happy to head to the Summoner’s Rift on either.
League of Legends on MacBook: Can it run on a base M1 MacBook Air?
Yes, League of Legends runs extremely well on the base MacBook Air, comfortably running at a locked 60 FPS even in more demanding scenarios. With the help of Metal API, any dips that you might have usually experienced with the game are completely eliminated.
This means that you can experience buttery-smooth framerates on the weakest Apple Silicon MacBook that has been released which means that the experience only gets better from here.
A part of this can be owed to the fact that League of Legends, is an atypical game. It is not graphically demanding, and has been there for a long time, which means that it has gone through several rounds of optimization. Couple that with support for Metal API, and its clear why it runs very well on the M1 MacBook Air.
League of Legends Mac Download
You can download League of Legends from the Riot Client. There is no other way to download League of Legends on any platform. Thankfully, besides enabling the Metal API, there’s not a lot you need to do besides that to get the game up and running.
Old 32bit bit games and badly coded games. Catalina vs lazy devs. Download Vainglory for now 😉
Catalina is a great update, new features, better security, better eGPU support and soon Navi support for cheap but super max settings gaming. Can’t blame Catalina for this mess, blame devs.
I agree with you here. Catalina is not to blame but also keep in mind that some developers simply don’t have the resources to update their apps.
I didn’t know Catalina had better eGPU support, can you tell us more about what’s improved?