Vampire Survivors on M1 Mac: Can your Mac run it?

Vampire Survivors can run on M1 Macs via Rosetta 2.

It’s hard to explain how such a simple game can be so addictive. Vampire Survivors has taken the gaming community by storm, securing itself a spot among the best-selling games on Steam for weeks now.

This top-down retro-looking action game is all about facing endless waves of enemies and staying alive for as long as possible. That’s the entire premise, but it works!

More M1 gaming? Our M1 & M2 Games hub features 200+ Mac games we have tested and confirmed as M1-compatible.

Art	Game	Genre	64-bit?	64-bit	API	M1 Support	Performance
	Vampire Survivors	Action	Yes		TBC	Rosetta	Excellent

Vampire Survivors M1 Mac benchmarks

The table summarizes our results as well as results from other members of the community:

As a reminder, this is how we describe the different levels of performance:

• Below 20 FPS: Unplayable: Laggy gameplay, full of stutters and slowdowns.
• 20-30 FPS: Borderline: Can be OK in slow-paced games. Still, not optimal.
• 30-45 FPS: Playable: Acceptable for most (most gaming consoles do this).
• 45-60 FPS: Smooth: Fluid gameplay, with no perceivable stutters.
• 60+ FPS: Very Smooth: For hardcore and professional players, a luxury for most.

We usually aim for 30 FPS, because 30 FPS is enough to guarantee a smooth and fluid experience for most casual gamers.

Vampire Survivors M1 Mac support

Vampire Survivors runs on M1 Macs with Apple Silicon via Rosetta 2.

As you can see below, the game is still exclusively written for Intel-based Macs, but thanks to Rosetta 2, Vampire Survivors can nonetheless run great on M1 Macs.

What is Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 is a translation process that enables M1 and M2 Macs to run apps built for Intel-based Macs. This is not an app you’ll have to open and or interact it. Install it once, and it’ll take care of the rest.

Vampire Survivors Mac requirements

These are the game’s official Mac requirements:

⚠️ According to these system requirements, a Mac with integrated graphics should not be able to run it. But we can confirm it’s definitely possible.

Is Vampire Survivors worth it?

IGN describes this game well:

It may look extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors’ clever one-stick shooter idea a chance to sink its teeth into you it might not let go for a while.

That has been exactly my own experience. I was overwhelmed to learn that even attacks were automatic. All you need to do is move and collect experience points while avoiding the monsters. But 3 minutes later, I was in. This is an extremely addictive game and is perfect to play on the go on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for an accessible and fun game you can pick up for just 10-15 minutes at a time, look no further than Vampire Survivors.

Vampire Survivors Mac download

You can download Vampire Survivors from Steam.

Why you should trust us

While similar sites opted for 100% community-based submissions and results, we decided to stick with a semi-open setup. Of course, your contributions are essential for us, but we still perform a significant part of the benchmarks published on our site and verify all submitted tests before including them on the site.

We spend hours per week testing games on our 2 Apple Silicon Macs, and you can rest assured that someone on the team has verified all the information you’ll read on Mac Gamer HQ. Our tests include digging into the Terminal, running benchmarks, and more.

Our Machines :

We performed our in-house tests on the following machines:

• 14-inch MacBook Pro (2021): Apple M1 Pro chip with 8-Core CPU, 14-Core GPU, 16 GB RAM
• MacBook Air (2020): Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU, 8 GB RAM

If you have more questions, or your own M1 test results to share, on this game or another, hit us up on the comments below on our private Discord server!