Now that the Mac mini is available with an M2 Pro, Apple is making the case that it’s a great gaming computer. As the Mac mini site states, you can “jump into graphics-intensive AAA games like No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village with fluid frame rates and high fidelity—all enabled by the incredible GPU performance of M2 or M2 Pro.”
And with really good native support for Xbox and PlayStation controllers in the latest version of macOS, yes, you can certainly have a good time gaming on a Mac that costs less than $2,000. But after kicking the tires for a while and comparing them against PC offerings, it’s clear that Apple has a very long way to go.
Apple Silicon is fantastic, but the holistic gaming experience on a Mac is as frustrating as ever. If Apple is going to woo gamers, it has a lot of work ahead of it.
Performance is decent, but the price is not
Firing up Resident Evil Village on our Mac mini—our $1,800 configuration has the full M2 Pro chip with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD—and it’s clear the chip can handle modern AAA games. With the game’s Prioritize Graphics preset at a 1080p resolution, performance varies from around 70fps to over 120fps, depending on the location and action. Turn on the new MetalFX Upscaling feature in Quality mode and performance jumps about 30 percent or so with no real discernible loss in quality. You can even crank it up to 4K resolution and play at 40-60fps in Prioritize Graphics mode.
That’s perfectly respectable performance, especially for a computer as tiny and silent as a Mac mini. But it gets crushed by a comparably-priced Windows gaming PC. A prebuilt gaming PC like the one I frequently play on, with a Ryzen 9 5900X and GeForce 3070 Ti, currently retails for about $1,850 a Best Buy. And it absolutely destroys the Mac mini in game performance.
Resident Evil Village at the same settings runs at three times the framerate. The same strenuous outdoor courtyard that hovers in the mid-70s on the Mac mini runs over 220fps on the PC. At 4K resolution with upscaling enabled, I got well over 120fps, not 40-60fps. Hell, the PC runs at 1440p resolution with ray tracing enabled at 160fps here. Ray tracing isn’t even available on the Mac.
The same scene at 1080p with the Prioritize Graphics preset and upscaling enabled. The Windows PC (right) is over 2.5 times faster.
It’s hard to find modern games to benchmark because the pickings are so slim for the Mac. For fun, I ran our Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark on the Windows PC. At 1920×1200 with the High preset, the Mac clocks in at 118fps. The PC doubled it at 234fps!
Of course, these computers are only comparable in their price. The Mac mini is a fraction of the size and essentially silent, while the gaming PC is big and full of fans. But performance is an utmost concern for gamers. Games have to look great and run smoothly, now and in the future. And the fact …….