The new FM26 graphics engine runs smoothly on Macs

Football Manager 26/Sports Interactive

The beta version of Football Manager 26 is out. The arrival of the new match engine, alongside a slight bump in required specs, might have Mac owners wondering whether the new game will play well on their hardware. Here’s how it performs on a Mac that just scrapes past the recommended requirements.

Football Manager 26 Required Specs For Mac

The minimum required spec for Football Manager 26 on Mac is as follows:

Processor: Apple M1 or Intel Core M

Memory: 4GB RAM

Graphics: Apple M1 or Nvidia GeForce GT 750M or Intel HD Graphics 5000 or AMD FirePro

The recommended spec bumps that up slightly to:

Processor: Apple M1

Memory: 12GB

Graphics: Apple M1

In other words, it looks like you really want to be on any Apple Silicon Mac to get the best chance of running Football Manager 26 smoothly.

The Spec Of My Test Machine

I’ve been testing the game on an M1 MacBook Pro from 2021, so one of the earliest Apple Silicon machines there is. It has the following spec:

Processor: Apple M1 Pro (10-core)

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Apple M1 Pro (16-core)

So, the test machine is a step above the recommended requirements, but not massively so.

How Does Football Manager 26 Run On The MacBook Pro?

In short, very smoothly. With the move to the enhanced Unity match engine, I was fearful that it would prove too much for the M1 MacBook Pro, or that there would be a lot of lag and stutter during game action. But if anything, the match engine in Football Manager 26 runs more smoothly than the one in Football Manager 2024.

I’ve tested using both an external widescreen display (3,440 x 1,440) and the Mac’s own internal display and the game action has been very slick on both, with very few dropped frames or glitches. Perhaps the more modern graphics engine is better optimized for the Mac’s graphics hardware than its predecessor was.

Likewise, the new in-game UI is relatively slick on the MacBook hardware. There’s a lot of online criticism about the design of the new UI, with many early testers complaining about glitches and poor layout (some of which is justified), but in terms of raw performance it’s slick and responsive.

Occasionally, it takes a while for a screen to draw. The fixtures list is particularly prone to this problem, but having watched streamers such as Kevin Chapman playing on high-end PC hardware, this appears to be a game-wide bug, not an issue that is a result of relatively low-powered graphics hardware.

In short, overall Football Manager 26 performance on a Mac is very impressive. Unless you have a M1 MacBook Air/Mac mini with only 8GB of memory, which is beneath the spec I tested, I’d be confident the game will play on your Apple Silicon Mac without any problems.

Widescreen Support In Football Manager 26

As I mentioned my widescreen display, I thought it was worth touching on widescreen support in Football Manager 26.

There’s a lot of online noise about the game not exploiting widescreen displays, but that’s only partially true. Yes, the game’s main UI does not fully expand to take full advantage of widescreen displays. That means you get blank space on either side of the UI, which goes to waste.

Sports Interactive studio head Miles Jacobson has said he wants to make the new UI fully adaptive in time, but it seems unlikely that’s going to happen in the lifespan of Football Manager 26.

However, the new match engine does stretch right across the expanse of a widescreen display, so you do get a more immersive experience during match highlights. Granted, in-game highlights make up a relatively small proportion of the total time you spend in Football Manager and it is disappointing the main UI can’t take advantage of the extra space, but it’s not quite the case that Football Manager 26 doesn’t offer widescreen support.

Samsung has announced that it’s secured a partnership with Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou museum that will bring no less than 25 of the gallery’s most famous and revered masterpieces to Samsung’s online digital Art Store, enabling Samsung TV owners to download digital versions of the artworks to use as stunning low-power screen savers on their TVs. This being, of course, a far superior solution to your TV just leaving a big black rectangle in your room when you put it into standby.

La Fée électricité by Raoul Dufy is one of 25 masterpieces held at the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris that’s about to be added to Samsung TV’s Art Store.

Photo: Centre Pompidou

The 25 Centre Pompidou paintings set to join Samsung’s Art Store from November 25 include Frida Kahlo’s The Frame, Piet Mondrian’s New York City, Wassily Kandinsky’s Get-Rot-Blau, Henri Matisse’s La Tristesse du Roi, Raul Dufy’s La Fée électricité and other works from the likes of Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Yves Klein and Peter Doig. The collection spans more than 100 years of art history, reflecting what Samsung describes as “Pompidou’s role as a living archive of the modern art world.”

The Art Store is available on multiple models in Samsung’s 2025 TV line up, but the “turning a TV into a painting” concept is at its most impressive in the brand’s The Frame and The Frame Pro models. Thanks to such features as remarkably effective anti-reflection matte-finish screens, customisable bezels, flush wall mounts and, in the Frame Pro’s case, external wireless connections boxes so that you don’t have to connect any messy source cables to the TV, the customary differences between TVs and paintings really do get scrubbed away.

The Frame Pros also feature an upgraded “Neo” Quantum Dot LED screen compared with the regular Frame TVs, but experience suggests that the new Pompidou masterpieces will look remarkably life-like no matter which Frame TV you play them on.

Other Samsung TVs that now carry the Art Store and so will be able to access the Centre Pompidou collection include its premium Neo QLED 8K, Neo QLED 4K and even relatively basic core QLED models.

Adding the Centre Pompidou masterpiece collection to Samsung’s Art Store obviously vastly increases the number of people who can enjoy these works of art on a daily basis, without having to physically travel to the museum. There’s an added bonus to the Centre Pompidou collection joining the Samsung Art Store right now, though, since the museum is about to shut its doors for what’s described as a “once-in-a-generation renovation”. So the Art Store will enable art lovers to keep enjoying the museum’s masterpieces in glorious ultra high resolution while we wait for the refreshed Pompidou to open its doors at some point in 2030.

“Centre Pompidou has always stood at the intersection of art and innovation,” says Gaële de Medeiros, Head of International and Economic Development at the Centre Pompidou. “Through this [Samsung] partnership, our collection continues to be seen, shared and lived with, even as our physical space transforms.”

“Art doesn’t lose its power when walls close, it finds new ones,” adds Daria Greene, Head of Content & Curation at Samsung. “Through The Frame [TVs], these works can exist beyond geography, inviting people to experience modern art as part of their everyday lives.”

The new Centre Pompidou’s artworks will join collections already available on the Samsung Art Store from such galleries as The Met, The Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Musée d’Orsay.

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Google’s Pixel 8 Pro

Ewan Spence

Earlier this month, Google refreshed the Pixel Refurbished store by removing the whole Pixel 6 family, leaving only the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel 7a. Many were asking when the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro would be available in the store.

This weekend, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro models are now available in the store.

Pixel 8 And Pixel 8 Pro Arrive In Google’s Refurbished Store

With the main line of Pixel phones moving up a step to the Pixel 10 family, bumping up the models available in the refurbished store would keep the same gap between the various online options available directly from Google. Now that the initial launch window for the Pixels is over — and presumably Google casting half an eye at the holiday seasons — it’s time for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro to show up.

The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones are refurbished units. As with the Pixel 7 family already on sale and previous Pixels sold through this part of the store, they will have undergone several tests, and some parts will have been replaced as required. Special attention is paid to the battery, housing and screens during the process, as well as an update to the latest version of Android.

Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and AI

Crucially, the launch of the Pixel 8 family was the point where Google leaned into artificial intelligence, labelling them “AI-first” smartphones, with the Tensor G3 chipsets introducing extensive silicon to support local AI processing; if mobile AI is a key consideration in a purchase, the edge that the G3 offers over the Pixel 7 family’s G2 is the most significant difference between the sevens and the eights.

Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro Price

Pixel 8 Pro pricing starts at $699 for the 128 GB model (which represents a $300 saving on the retail price for a new model). The Pixel 8 starts at $489 for the 128 GB model (down from $699) and $539 for the 256 GB model. Check the latest Pixel prices here.

Not all colors and storage options are immediately available. This is likely down to the fluctuations that any refurbished product will face, rather than a specific choice. If there is a particular color and storage option that you want in a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro, you’ll need to keep a close eye on the storefront.

Now read the latest Pixel, Galaxy, and smartphone headlines in Forbes’ weekly Android news digest…