A new dawn for Mac gaming? Apple’s M4 Mac mini will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing
It’s about time, Apple
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Apple’s big reveal of theM4 chipslast week promised significant enhancements across the board for its Mac devices, and theM4 Mac minicould get one of the biggest upgrades – support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing for gaming.
The Cupertino company has considered gaming on previous Apple silicon Macs, but the last base modelM2 Mac minionly utilized 8GB of unified memory (similar to base M2 and M3 models of the MacBook Pro), and because this memory is shared between system memory and video memory (hence being called ‘unified’) it meant those chips couldn’t handle advanced graphics like ray tracing. However, the base model of the M4 Mac mini starting at $599 (£599 / AU$999) comes with 16GB of unified memory.
It’s no wonder Apple is looking to boost its Macs gaming credentials, as thegaming library for Macs is continuing to grow, and the mention of hardware-accelerated ray tracing for games likePrince of Persia: The Lost CrownandControl(which can befound on the official Mac mini page), suggests it couldfinallybe time for Apple to take a serious step into the gaming PC market (potentially consoles too).
Could the pricing of the M4 Mac mini provide competition for Windows gaming PCs?
Considering its small size, gaming capability claims from Apple, and the pricing of the M4 Mac mini, I believe this will certainly shake things up in the desktop gaming PC market. While going toe-to-toe with thebest gaming PCsavailable is unlikely, the $599 (£599 / AU$999) price is a steal considering the performance enhancements present within the M4 chip.
The prices of GPUs (specificallyNvidia’s high-end GPUs) leave some gaming experiences out of reach for many PC gamers. With the M4 chip, you’ll have the luxury of a 10-core CPU and GPU and the aforementioned 16GB of unified memory (which some pre-built gaming PCs don’t have).
This alongside Apple’s move to bring more popular games to Mac devices like theResident Evil 4remake andCyberpunk 2077, shows us that gaming is slowly but surely becoming a strong selling point for the company, and the M4 Mac mini appears to be the next big step in the right direction…
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Isaiah is a Staff Writer for the Computing channel at TechRadar. He’s spent over two years writing about all things tech, specifically games on PC, consoles, and handhelds. He started off atGameRantin 2022 after graduating from Birmingham City University in the same year, before writing atPC Guidewhich included work on deals articles, reviews, and news on PC products such as GPUs, CPUs, monitors, and more. He spends most of his time finding out about the exciting new features of upcoming GPUs, and is passionate about new game releases on PC, hoping that the ports aren’t a complete mess.
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