Mass Effect 2 on the MacMini!!

[mabaker]

Let me report to you guys that to my big astonishment my new MacMini with the weakish 9400 is still able to play Mass Effect 2 in Bootcamp. It is definitely playable and 90% of the times astonishingly fluid. Quite amazing for a 2010 game to be able to be run like that.

Good game, pretty much dumbed down compared to Deus Ex but still one of the better ones out there.

I was very concerned before I got the game cuzz Mac Mini didn’t seem much of a gaming computer but it runs it well. So go ahead and get it and it will run on your mini, too.

 

[aki]

yeah even tho they arent by the same team or anything, i can also report that both dragon age origins and the mass effect games run passably on weaker hardware, somewhat amazingly

of course in some senses its a pity to waste the cool looks of these games; but they are all great games so if you can run em play em i say

 

[EDarkness]

So far I play pretty much all PC games (Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Batman, Call of Duty, etc.) on my Mac Mini in Boot Camp. Games play pretty well and I haven't had any problems at all. Sure, I can't play at maximum resolution, but everything still plays great and runs great even at almost max settings. Pretty amazing, actually.

 

[BigWidowsPeak]

It seems that playing games is most effective when you have a boot camp partition; I downloaded the Mac version of Dragon Age Origins and it runs terribly. I have the same chipset, the 9400m, on my Aluminum Macbook (model before the 13" got the 'Pro' induction) and I don't get playable FPS at any resolution or graphics setting. I'm upgrading my hard drive in a few weeks so hopefully I'll be able to try a Boot camp install using a friend's PC version. (Temporarily of course) I'll be upgrading my RAM too; I have the minimum amount which is 2GB and I will be swapping that for 4GB soon but I can't see how that would bottleneck it to the point where everyone is getting much better results than I am.

 

[MyDesktopBroke]

Many companies make sub par ports to the Mac. That's why bootcamp runs some games better.

 

[aki]

dragon age for mac is a cider port and yes it's true it therefore doesn't run quite as well as a windows-native bootcamp install. for seriouser hardware this is less of an issue but I can imagine on something like a mac mini the difference between mac and windows performance might become more of a problem

as far as ram is concerned - well, i have to say, 2GB is not pretty I'm sure going to 4 will help at least in part.