- Apple introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the Mac mini
- The base model of the M4 Mac mini will use 16 GB of unified memory
- This is Apple’s most affordable desktop PC, starting at $599
Apple’s big reveal of the M4 chips last week promised significant improvements across the board for its Mac devices, and the M4 Mac mini could get one of the biggest upgrades – a feature called ‘hardware-accelerated ray tracing’ for gaming.
The Cupertino company has considered gaming on previous Apple Silicon Macs, but its last base model, the M2 Mac mini, used just 8GB of unified memory (similar to the MacBook Pro’s base M2 and M3 models), and because this memory is shared between system memory and video memory (hence 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 improve its Macs gaming credentials, as the game library for Macs continues to grow and mentions of hardware-accelerated ray tracing for games like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown And Control (found on the official Mac mini page), suggests this is possible Finally It’s time for Apple to make a serious move in the gaming PC market (possibly consoles as well).
Could the M4 Mac mini’s price offer competition to Windows gaming PCs?
Considering the small size, Apple’s claims of gaming capabilities, and the price of the M4 Mac mini, I believe it will definitely shake up the desktop gaming PC market. While you’re unlikely to come away with the best gaming PCs on the market, the $599 (£599 / AU$999) price is a bargain considering the performance improvements present in the M4 chip.
The prices of GPUs (particularly Nvidia’s high-end GPUs) leave some gaming experiences out of reach for many PC gamers. With the M4 chip you 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 coincides with Apple’s moves to bring more popular games to Mac devices like the Resident Evil 4 recreate and Cyberpunk 2077shows us that gaming is slowly but surely becoming a strong selling point for the company, and the M4 Mac mini seems to be the next big step in the right direction…