

Of course, don’t expect it to run the latest triple-A games at 60 FPS. For casual gamers, it’s good enough, and a vast improvement over the gaming performance of previous Mac models.

To summarize, the Mac Mini M1 is not a gaming machine, but it can run a lot of games at decent frame rates and graphics settings. If you do choose the 8 GB version, be aware that some apps like Google Chrome tend to hog a lot of memory when many tabs are open.

However, if you want to squeeze as much performance out of the Mac Mini M1 as possible (and hold up for the long term) 16 GB of RAM is recommended. Long story short, for most casual users, the Mac Mini M1 8 GB is sufficient. The only area where the 16 GB version shows an improvement is with video rendering at 8K or higher resolutions. Most benchmarks show an equal score between the M1 8 GB vs 16 GB versions. Previously you could buy an 8 GB version and then buy another RAM stick later on to upgrade, but now you can’t do that (unless you want to try soldering on new chips, which is possible but pointless).Įven though most apps will run fine with 8 GB of RAM, most people recommend the 16 GB version as a way to future proof your Mac Mini M1. It’s also a different type of RAM that you’re used to, the M1 RAM is called LPDDR4 and clocked at about 4,266 Mhz. But is it worth investing a bit more money for the 16 GB version? What you need to know about RAM on the M1 machines is that each stick is soldered onto the M1 board. The 8 GB version is about $200 cheaper than the 16 GB one. Most M1 Macs come in two versions 8 GB or 16 GBs. Recently the game was patched and optimized for M1 and now you can easily reach 60 or more FPS at 1080P. One example of this would be CS GO, which was barely playable on the M1 Macs. Most developers are patching their games to run on M1 chips or at least run well on emulators. It’s a little tricky to find an emulator that will deliver the best in-game performance on your favourite game.
#Emulator for mac mini Patch#
Another notable mention is Baldurs Gate 3 which just recently received M1 patch support and runs quite well.įor a list of M1-compatible games, visit Apple Gaming Wiki.īear in mind, the performance on emulators varies too, and developers often only optimize their games for specific emulators. Most games built with ARM will run well on Apple’s M1 chip while also consuming less power than on other machines. World of Warcraft runs very well on Mac Mini M1 and you can expect above 60 FPS at 1080P. One notable mention would be World of Warcraft, which was one of the first games to receive day 1 support. There are quite a few games that were built on the ARM architecture and most of them run quite well on M1 chips. In other words, old-school games that were built with OpenGL and 32-bit, won’t work on a Mac without an emulator. On another note, Mac has also dropped support for 32-bit applications. It’s up to the developers to optimize their games for the new architecture. The Steam platform is compatible with Apple’s M1 chip but not every game in your Steam library will run. Minecraft – 60 + FPS Does Steam Work on Mac Mini M1?.Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Low settings: 50-60 FPS.The good news is the performance on the M1 chip is similar across the board, except for certain base Mac models that only have a 7-core GPU. Here are some of the most popular games and the expected frame rates on the Mac Mini M1. So you want to know what kind of performance you can get when gaming on a Mac Mini M1. However, you will be happy to know the Mac Mini M1 can manage quite a lot of games at reasonable frame rates. While the performance is good, it’s not good enough for most modern games. Therefore i suspect this is mostly down to a lack of hardware power however i would recommend trying some of the fixes listed on their FAQ either way.If you’re primarily planning to play games, you shouldn’t buy the Mac Mini M1. 8GHz below what it is supposed to be (macs tend to do that a lot). this isn't spectacular by any means and is actually well below what Dolphin recommends and very few users have listed chips of that grade as working and all of those were at stock clock speeds not. If you are using a 2014 macbook air you likely have a down-clocked dual core i5 4250U chip and 4gb or ram using onboard intel 5000 graphics. This inefficiency can lead to some emulators requiring much much more powerful hardware than the original console did. This is why most emulators have problems even on very high end hardware and in some cases having too high end hardware can actually break games by making them run too fast for their engine. The gamecube is built to run gamecube games and the Mac is built to run x86 applications in a Linux environment. First off comparing the raw power of your macbook to the original console isn't a valid comparison.
