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Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

> The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds.

At the same price? I would be surprised if that is the case. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $300 on eBay. For that money, you can get a used i5 business desktop and a new low-profile RX 6400 for about that. At that price point, you'll see much better visuals and framerate for most games on the Windows PC (or you could run Linux). The PC owner can then later buy a better desktop system and put the same GPU in it. And later still the PC user can upgrade the GPU.

With the M1 Mini, that's basically it, and if you want to upgrade anything, you are buying a completely different system.

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I've generally been quite negative on Mac's prospect throughout this thread, but even I would expect a M1 mini to wipe the floor with an 8th gen i5 (or whatever businesses are currently retiring) and RX 6400 for the games that are supported.

I haven't found an exact comparison, but here is what I found in a quick search.

M1, Unigine Heaven, 1080p, Medium settings, 56 fps average:

https://youtu.be/DzIrmSFqzYk&t=271

Ryzen 5, RX 6400, Unigine Heaven, 1080, Ultra settings, 46 fps average:

https://www.alktech.co/articles/asus-dual-radeon-rx-6400-4gb...

At least for the RX 6400 test, the bottleneck is the GPU itself.

Let me just reframe the argument.

- People shouldn't buy Apple hardware for the games, but there's clearly an audience of Apple users (that have these devices for _other_ reasons) for a lot of games, so supporting it should be an easy win. Source 2 already had a Metal build (via Dota 2). Valve cut away a confirmed audience larger than Steam Deck owners.

- Don't get hung up on "the M1". Apple's higher end models scale quite well, the Pro is very common and the Max, while mostly a bad investment solely for games, would scale well if there were games to run on it.

> should be an easy win

That presumes that Mac users are even interested in playing games... in any large enough numbers.

Why would you think that? The CPU is likely to be a non-issue for lower end gaming and the RX 6400 has significantly better theoretical performance and memory bandwidth.

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