Any gamers out there with their Mac Minis?

[ozziegn]

New Mini user here and I'm so impressed with my new M2 Pro machine. I was a MacBook user for over ten years but I recently decided to go back to the desktop route because I rarely took my laptop(s) out of my house. So I decided to get a Mini and I chose the M2 Pro even though I knew I would never do anything that would stress the machine to its limits. I wanted to see how well it would run one of my all time favorite games Half Life 2 from the late 90s. I didn't know what to expect because we all know Apple computers in general aren't known to be good for general gaming.

But this machine continues to impress me. I'm running HL2 at full native resolution on one of my 28" 4K monitors on high video quality in game settings with over 200 frames per second. This is crazy for such a small computer that is dead silent 99% of the time. So impressed with the power of these Mini machines.

So that leads to my original question. Any Mini owners out there running games on their machines? If so, feel free to post pictures of your setup.

 

[Juicy Box]

I have the M2 Pro Mac Mini with the 19-core GPU, and I play games on it.

I wouldn’t really call myself a “gamer“, as I mostly play older, classic games on consoles.

I do occasionally play games on my Apple TV, but very rarely do I ever play any mobile game on my iPhone or iPads.

For my Macs, I play a mix of games, mostly older ones, some from the early 90s. On my M2 Pro, Mac mini, I primarily play Warcraft 3 Reforged, and World of Warcraft.

Warcraft 3: Reforged is not a native Apple Silicon game, but runs very well at 4K, 165hz, with maxed out graphical settings, at least during gameplay.

I don’t know why, but the starting screen where you pick my type of game, you wanna play, like campaign or custom game, it is crazy laggy. But once you actually start the game, it’s super smooth.

I haven’t played much World of Warcraft lately. I did test the game with the M2 Pro, and it plays pretty well. One thing that I noticed about the M2 Pro Mac mini is that the system prioritizes lower fan speed over lower temps. With World of Warcraft, it seemed like the system would only start ramping up the fans when the GPU would get crazy hot.

If I remember to do it before playing World of Warcraft, I would manually set the minimum RPM of the fans to around 2000 RPM. You can barely hear the fans, but it would greatly improve the GPU temperature as well as the game performance.

 

[ozziegn]

I have the M2 Pro Mac Mini with the 19-core GPU, and I play games on it.

I wouldn’t really call myself a “gamer“, as I mostly play older, classic games on consoles.

I do occasionally play games on my Apple TV, but very rarely do I ever play any mobile game on my iPhone or iPads.

For my Macs, I play a mix of games, mostly older ones, some from the early 90s. On my M2 Pro, Mac mini, I primarily play Warcraft 3 Reforged, and World of Warcraft.

Warcraft 3: Reforged is not a native Apple Silicon game, but runs very well at 4K, 165hz, with maxed out graphical settings, at least during gameplay.

I don’t know why, but the starting screen where you pick my type of game, you wanna play, like campaign or custom game, it is crazy laggy. But once you actually start the game, it’s super smooth.

I haven’t played much World of Warcraft lately. I did test the game with the M2 Pro, and it plays pretty well. One thing that I noticed about the M2 Pro Mac mini is that the system prioritizes lower fan speed over lower temps. With World of Warcraft, it seemed like the system would only start ramping up the fans when the GPU would get crazy hot.

If I remember to do it before playing World of Warcraft, I would manually set the minimum RPM of the fans to around 2000 RPM. You can barely hear the fans, but it would greatly improve the GPU temperature as well as the game performance.

Good info. Thanks...

 

[MasterHowl]

How are you running HL2? Does it work on the M2? :O

 

[ozziegn]

How are you running HL2? Does it work on the M2? :O

HL2 runs perfectly on my M2 Pro Mini. But I did have to do some software changes which was easy in my opinion. I used the link below and I followed the instructions to a tee. Everything works great.

 

[MasterHowl]

HL2 runs perfectly on my M2 Pro Mini. But I did have to do some software changes which was easy in my opinion. I used the link below and I followed the instructions to a tee. Everything works great.

Thanks

 

[padams35]

Casual gamer using a 2018 Mini. Mostly space sim gaming (Factorio, Kerbel, Juno new origins, Civilization: Beyond Earth). The i8-8500 has all the CPU I need. The UHD630 is junk, but the 2018s are eGPU friendly. With a 6600XT-8GB eGPU I can run casual games and older titles in 4K 60fps.

I also got myself an M1-Pro laptop for Christmass, but I haven't yet had time to compare gaming performance. Also bookmarking this page to try your Source Engine 32->64b link for HL2/Portal2 nostolgia when(if) I someday have more time.

P.S: Anyone using a gamepad style controller? I've tried two different ones, but at best the mac mini only recognizes a single button input at a time making it useless for any game requiring multi-button combos. My dream is to hook the mini up to my TV and do Mac gaming from the couch, but so far the only couch gaming is console gaming.