Running Oblivion Remastered on an M series Mac

If you’re an Elder Scrolls fan, but also the owner of an M series Mac, you may be wondering if you can run the new Oblivion Remastered release on your computer. This post is here for you!

The main upshot of this is, if you want to try this at all, then you need to do it with a Wine install. Parallels is the usual solution I hear bandied about for gaming on a Mac–but Parallels only supports up to DirectX 11, and Oblivion Remastered’s system requirements explicitly say version 12.

So Parallels is not an option. (And a lot of you may be going GOOD, anyway, because if you’re a Mac user to begin with, you don’t really want to bring Windows into the picture if you can avoid it. At least, I certainly don’t.)

This means your only other course of action (at least, if you want to run directly in macOS as opposed to trying a Linux VM, or installing Linux as an alternate OS on the machine) is to try to do it on a Wine install. You have two different general ways to approach that:

Install Wine directly
Use a wrapper that sits on top of Wine and does the heavy lifting for you

More behind the fold.

Installing Wine directly

If you want to try this route, go to WineHQ.com and follow their instructions for installing on macOS.

I can confirm that doing so via Homebrew definitely works. What I don’t know yet is how well I can get a Wine prefix, going this route, to let me do a Steam install. And by extension, put games into it.

Installing a Wine wrapper

Crossover

Crossover is by far the most widely known Wine wrapper for macOS–and it’s also pretty much the driving force behind Wine being available on macOS to begin with.

The main disadvantage of considering Crossover for this approach is that it is a paid product. So if you want to try to run Oblivion Remastered on it, you’d need to pay for the game and for Crossover. And if your budget squawks at that, legit.

But for what it’s worth, also keep in mind that most of Crossover’s profits go right back into Wine development. And, its UI is really nice and by and large makes it so that you don’t have to worry about a lot of the fiddly requirements of setting up a Wine prefix. (You can get into the actual config of a prefix set up this way if you want to; Crossover does let you do that. But you don’t have to.)

Right now I can personally confirm that Steam installs beautifully via Crossover. I have also launched both Skyrim and Oblivion Remastered following that route. (But Skyrim runs a lot better for me than Oblivion Remastered does. See below.)

This is likely to be the route I’ll take, personally. I re-installed the trial version of Crossover, which lasts for 14 days, and that should be plenty of time to confirm if I can get graphical performance out of Oblivion Remastered superior to what I can get on the Deck. Even though I have the tech chops to make the base level Wine try to behave, I don’t have the patience–when what I really want to be doing is actually just playing the game! And so far, Crossover is striking me as my best route to do that.

Other wrappers

If the prospect of paying for Crossover doesn’t appeal to you (for whatever reason), then there are a couple more options to consider if you want a wrapper on top of your Wine. These are:

I poked a bit at Porting Kit, but found its UI clunky in comparison to Crossover. YMMV.

And I saw a couple other names pop up in my searches, though at least on cursory inspection, those were either no longer being developed.

In particular, I saw a lot of pages talking about Whisky–which did seem promising, until I saw that its developer in fact explicitly backed off of developing it any further, and made a point of encouraging users to go to Crossover instead. Ars Technica even covered this on their site! Whisky does appear to still be available for download, but keep this in mind. Unless somebody forks it, it won’t be getting any further updates.

What I can confirm so far about running the game on my system

I can install and launch Oblivion Remastered using Crossover on my laptop–an M1 MacBook Pro laptop, with a Max chip and 32GB of RAM.

However: performance is really not good. Just derping around in the town square of Chorrol, I was getting single-digit FPS. I’ve been experimenting with various settings, but so far, I haven’t been able to get anything that gives me FPS that doesn’t suck. And that’s aside from the question of whether it actually looks good.

So far, the various videos I’ve found about running Oblivion Remastered via Crossover are reporting in on higher-end M series machines, M3’s and M4’s. So if your system is on that end of the M series spectrum, you’ll probably have better luck with this than I am so far.

For the time being, unless some patches drop that’ll make the game more playable (either via the game itself, or via Crossover), the Steam Deck looks like my option.

Reference links

Here’s a collection of things I’ve looked at so far to try to investigate settings:

Play Oblivion Remastered on Mac

Editing to add

4/28/2025: Wow, this post is getting a lot of visitors. Hi, visitors! I’d love to hear about anybody’s reports of getting the game working well on your Macs. Especially if you have an M1 Mac, like mine!