A new dawn for Mac gaming? Apple’s M4 Mac mini uses hardware-accelerated ray tracing

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• Apple is introducing hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the Mac mini
• The M4 Mac mini’s base model will use 16GB of unified memory
• This is Apple’s best-value desktop PC, starting at $599

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Apple’s big reveal of the M4 chips last week promised significant enhancements 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 the last base model M2 Mac mini only 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 the gaming library for Macs is continuing to grow, and the mention of hardware-accelerated ray tracing for games like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Control (which can be found on the official Mac mini page), suggests it could finally be 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 the best gaming PCs available is unlikely, the $599 (£599 / AU$999) price is a steal considering the performance enhancements present within the M4 chip.

The prices of GPUs (specifically Nvidia’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 the Resident Evil 4 remake and Cyberpunk 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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