My 2012 iMac is dying. Sounds like and airplane about to take over. Vintage so Apple won’t touch it. Repair guy says graphics card going so £600 to replace. Can’t afford new iMac at moment so considering latest version of Mac mini as a stopgap.
Read about GeForce now over the weekend and looking at the website considering it.
Question is does anyone have experience of using it with a Mac mini? I tend to place things like civilization, tomb raider, occasionally pick up CoD, lot of Star TrekOnline.
I have been using GeForce NOW since it was in beta on MacOS, and it's been great for me performance-wise. I also have a late 2012 iMac. When I play games on GFN, I do it over the gigabit ethernet cable, so primarily, the only issues I have with it are server-side (nVidia's side). We also have Google Fiber internet service (gigabit to the house), so that helps a lot.
I'm not a super-competitive gamer, but the games I play are mostly shooters - like Fortnite, Unreal Tournament, Doom 2016, Quake Champions, the Borderlands series, the Metro series, the Bioshock series, the Wolfenstein series, also Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the Deus Ex series. Some are online games, some offline, an increasing number are Windows-only titles, as you can see in my list above. I was dual-booting macOS and Windows 10, but repeating issues with Windows just made me discard it and uninstall. It was about that same time that I learned about GeForce NOW.
Like you, I always like to have a replacement plan in mind if/when my iMac dies. I've also kept my eye on the new Mini. Since Apple has made adding an external AMD GPU plug-in easy, it gives you a lot of upgradeability via a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for that GPU.
My personal ultimate 2018 Mac Mini Gaming Rig:
Base Model - $799
Samsung T5 1TB SSD - USB-C (MU-PA1T0B) - $159.99 (for backup)
Razer Core X - $299.99
XFX - THICC II Pro AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB - $199.99
BenQ XL2411P TN Gaming display - $199.99
Total $1658.96
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GeForce Now is running Steam games you've purchased on their servers, and you are essentially looking at a video feed. This means that the spec requirements are basically 'as long as you can play a video'. So the Mac Mini will have no problem, as even a chromebook would be able to run GeForce Now.
Not really "as long as you can play a video", because worrying about getting the timing right hitting the pause and play buttons while playing a video has NEVER been a thing. Games are far more interactive than that, so try GFN out for yourself and see.
Also, people seem to be having better performance by plugging into ethernet on their Mac, so don't do wi-fi.
