Gaming Machine?

[roxics]

So I bought my 2012 mac mini a couple weeks back and I'm pretty happy with it. It needs more ram but aside from that I will use it for daily stuff and video editing.

I like having two macs in the house, my old macbook being the other one.

My girlfriend lives with me and she's using a PC I built for her back in 2009. She's a casual user of most things but plays Sims 3 all the time. I'd like to get her into a mini as well and make this an all mac house. So I was thinking that when the new minis come out maybe getting one for her.

But I'm curious if the machine will be powerful enough to play Sims 3 with the new GPU in it (whatever that will be). She has a 1080p monitor so it would be nice if she could play at full resoution but I don't think she does now.

Right now she's using the onboard graphics (AMD from 2009) and it's slow for her. Her dedicated GPU died a couple months back, an nVidia 9600GT. Which was supposidely never compatible with the game to begin with but it worked better than the onboard.

Still both the nVidia and the onboard are older GPUs and I was curious if the new intel integrated Iris would be up to the task.

What do you think?

 

[Pakaku]

Is Sims even that demanding of a game? I kind of doubt it.

 

[blanka]

The 9600GT is about 50% faster than the HD4000, which is NOT Iris. The Mini has a Ivy Bridge chip, not a Haswell. It is even faster than the HD5000 in the Macbook Air, which has a slight edge over the 2011 Mini HD6630 (+10%).
But, the 9600GT is an old chip with less functions.

What also helps: run Bootcamp. The same card under Windows performs 50-100% better than on OSX.

If we will see an Iris equiped HD5200 in the next mini, it will double the performance and lift it to the 650GT levels found in the iMac.

 

[roxics]

The 9600GT is about 50% faster than the HD4000, which is NOT Iris.

You know it's crazy you say that because that was the card I owned 5 years ago in my PC. Now I just bought a new mac mini with a video card 50% slower than I had half a decade ago. Something is not right here lol

 

[mslide]

I'm not too confident that it would run well on the next mini. My wife has been playing the Sims 3 since it came out and the Sims 2 before that. It always seems like those games are pigs and require decent machines, with dedicated graphcs, to run well. She's currently using an older PC with a 5770 card in it and we both agree that it runs like crap at 1920x1080. That 5770 is probably a lot faster than an HD4000, not sure about haswell iGPUs.

If you go with a mini, I'd definitely play it in Windows.

 

[MrGIS]

So I bought my 2012 mac mini a couple weeks back and I'm pretty happy with it. It needs more ram but aside from that I will use it for daily stuff and video editing.

I like having two macs in the house, my old macbook being the other one.

My girlfriend lives with me and she's using a PC I built for her back in 2009. She's a casual user of most things but plays Sims 3 all the time. I'd like to get her into a mini as well and make this an all mac house. So I was thinking that when the new minis come out maybe getting one for her.

But I'm curious if the machine will be powerful enough to play Sims 3 with the new GPU in it (whatever that will be). She has a 1080p monitor so it would be nice if she could play at full resoution but I don't think she does now.

Right now she's using the onboard graphics (AMD from 2009) and it's slow for her. Her dedicated GPU died a couple months back, an nVidia 9600GT. Which was supposidely never compatible with the game to begin with but it worked better than the onboard.

Still both the nVidia and the onboard are older GPUs and I was curious if the new intel integrated Iris would be up to the task.

What do you think?

I am a 2011 mini server owner, but not a gamer. Common wisdom is that the mini is a fine computer, but by no means a gamers rig.

 

[blanka]

You know it's crazy you say that because that was the card I owned 5 years ago in my PC. Now I just bought a new mac mini with a video card 50% slower than I had half a decade ago. Something is not right here lol

Correct: your math is wrong. If the 9600GT is 50% faster, the new mini is 33% slower, not 50%

If the Sims runs like crap on a HD5770, it's a crap game! That card is pretty fast, it was the best card in the MacPro for a while.

 

[roxics]

Well I agree that it's a crap game. I keep telling her it must be coded like junk. But she likes the game either way. Even if she always complains about the speed.

 

[corvus32]

Have an iOS device?

For $7, she can just play it on that.