Can the 2011 Mini Play Games Like GTA: San Andreas?

[Lynn Belvedere]

Is the HD 3000 good enough to play a game like that perfectly, with no lag?

Thanks in advance.

 

[blanka]

Don't know the specific game, but I would guess it won't play great. The HD series is mostly focussed on video decoding and FullHD playback, and with the HD4000 Intel seems to finally get a little decent 3D power. Get the Radeon if you want to use 3D, and that is scoring already half the OpenGL score in CineBench of a decent iMac.

 

[takezo808]

Don't know the specific game, but I would guess it won't play great. The HD series is mostly focussed on video decoding and FullHD playback, and with the HD4000 Intel seems to finally get a little decent 3D power. Get the Radeon if you want to use 3D, and that is scoring already half the OpenGL score in CineBench of a decent iMac.

Benchmarks are for Uber Geeks.

Mac Mini 2011 comes with Intel HD 3000 not 4000 HD. It's acualy slower. However GTA San Andreas is a low impact 3D game, as it is a port of a PS2 game. It will run fine on a Mac Mini. I play Diablo 3 on mine. It runs great.

Note: Mac will auto alocate ram installed as video memory. installing 8 GB will enable 512MB of video memory instead of 256MB on the default 2GB.

A lot of games run on the new Intel HD series. Intel GPUs are ment for low power. At 599 the mac mini is very affordable. 200 dollars more may be too much to spend for the amd gpu one depending how much games you do play.

$400 GPUs are only good for geeks to run benchmarks and get high scores and make graphs so they can pat themselves on the back.

The Intell HD series is for the regular people who have better things to do.

Though I would wait a bit as Apple may update the Mini. the 4000HD has a 60% improvement over 3000HD. descrete Nvidia GPU may come with 512MB ram instead of only 256MB (though don't base gpu on this alone as the AMD 6630m is over 2x more powerfull than the 3000HD even with 512MB video memory simply because more horse power.)

Basically an updated Mac Mini even at base model would be a very powerful computer with the fastest integrated GPU solution availible. The new descrete Nvidia GPu will also be abaout 60% faster than the AMD 6630M and may ship with 512MB of vram. Which may warrant the extra 200 dollars.

long live mac mini

 

[Poki]

Please don't blame power users who want to buy exactly what they need and therefor have to look at benchmarks. After all, Aperture, FCP and especially Motion need quite a bit of graphics power.

And yes, the base model plays GTA:SA quite nicely.

 

[Outrigger]

Benchmarks are for Uber Geeks.

$400 GPUs are only good for geeks to run benchmarks and get high scores and make graphs so they can pat themselves on the back.

yup, people who buy the 680gtx or 7970 buy it so they can look at graphs and scores.

is that from a survey you took or a keen observation or just something that popped into your head because you have no use for it, therefore, others must not have any use for it either?

 

[Elven]

The current Mac Mini is a capable computer, but I concur with other people here, to wait and see what comes in September.

 

[Stan Mikulenka]

Hi takezo,
here is my "useless" Vid. card FPS on Diablo 3...
Show me yours: