The M4 Mac Mini is a surprisingly powerful little machine, and it's kind of own in my heart for how fast and efficient it can be. It has a surprisingly capable GPU that leaves the competition from Intel and Qualcomm in the dust as far as integrated GPUs go (of course, not counting future generations), which, in theory, makes it a great option for lightweight gaming.

But there's more to gaming than raw performance, and the Mac Mini is still a Mac, which means gaming is hindered significantly. But I wanted to know exactly what kind of experience you can expect with gaming on a Mac. I've always heard the horror stories, but this is my first chance to experience it firsthand. So, is gaming on an M4 Mac Mini any closer to the ideal experience? Well, not really. Let's take a closer look.

Game compatibility

The elephant in the room

The first and biggest thing to address is how many games you can actually play on the M4 Mac Mini, and the answer is, unfortunately, not that many. This is only anecdotal evidence but my Steam Family library, shared across four people, includes 595 games. Once I filter for games compatible with Mac, that list cuts down to just 112 titles. And that's not specifying games native to Apple Silicon, which narrows the library down even further. You can find a list of games that run natively on Apple Silicon here, and to be fair, there are quite a few.

The big Apple Silicon games you've probably heard about, like Death Stranding Definitive Edition and Resident Evil Village are only available through the Apple App Store. On Steam, they're not even compatible with macOS at all, meaning I couldn't try them. I've mentioned before that this strategy from Apple to lock in people to its own ecosystem is going to hurt it in the long run in terms of its gaming ambitions.

It's also possible that not every game listed as compatible on Steam will actually work. Epic Games notably removed support for macOS in Rocket League a few years ago, but Steam still lets me install it. However, I was completely unable to launch it. It's a pretty major exclusion for me, considering Rocket League is one of my favorite multiplayer games.

There's also another method you might want to consider for playing games on your Mac, though, and that's using the Heroic Games Launcher. If you have Windows games on the Epic Games Store or GOG, you can play them through Heroic because it automatically lets you use Wine or Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to make those games run on macOS. Still, there are going to be big gaps in your library if you're coming from Windows or even Linux.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the games I come back to most frequently for performance testing, and it's a great one to start with because it has a built-in benchmarking tool. All you need to do is set the graphics settings you want and run the built-in benchmark, which adapts to the settings you choose. This makes it easy to compare performance across devices, too.

On the M4 Mac Mini, running the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1080p and the graphics preset set to Highest resulted in an average framerate of 42 frames per second, as you can see below.

For an integrated GPU, that's extremely impressive, and even more so when you remember this computer is dead quiet the entire time. What's more, Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't run natively on Apple Silicon. It's a well-optimized game, but it's still made for Intel processors and running through Rosetta.

By comparison, I ran the benchmark with the same settings on the Asus Zenbook S 14, powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, which sounded like a jet engine the entire time the game was open, even just in the menu. Here are the results from that:

Indeed, the Intel processor ran the game at 31 frames per second, a good bit lower than what the Mac Mini can offer. It's very hard to ignore how powerful the Apple M4 chip is.

Bioshock Remastered

2K Games' Bioshock Remastered is a much older title — a 2016 remaster of a 2007 game at that. But it is one of the games I tend to run more frequently for these tests, and one of the few that also supports Mac, even though, again, it's not running natively on Apple Silicon. This is another title made for Intel processors.

Despite its age, I expected Bioshock Remastered to struggle a bit more, but what I found was a game that ran at a near-perfect 60 frames per second all the time. Running at Quad HD (1440p) resolution and with anisotropic filtering set to 16x, it was smooth as butter, though I did experience the occasional hiccup, which I think may have been due to loading areas. I even recorded some footage using the Steam game recording tool, so have a look below:

Unfortunately, the game seems to be capped at 60FPS, but it would be interesting to see if the Mac Mini could push it further.

Alien: Isolation

Next up, I played Alien: Isolation from Sega. This is a 2014 title, but at least it's originally made in that era, so it's much more demanding than Bioshock Remastered, and it shows. Environments in this game are very detailed and impressive to look at considering the game's age. I played the first 20 minutes or so of the game with the resolution set to 2560x1440 and all the graphics settings maxed out.

I found it to run at about 25-45 frames per second, though there was quite a bit of variation. At times, the game was absolutely playable, but it did slow down often, so I would probably recommend lowering the settings a bit for an ideal experience. Still, it was certainly impressive to see this game running on this kind of hardware. You can see a short recording of my play session below:

Again, this title is not optimized for Apple Silicon, either, which makes this all the more impressive. However, it is a slower game, at least in the first few minutes, and spaces are very confined, so it's easy for it to run well.

Metro Exodus

Fast forwarding a few years, we have Metro Exodus, a much more modern title released in 2019 (though the Mac version came in 2021). For this one, I set the resolution to Quad HD and all the graphics presets to the highest level, aside from motion blur and the "Advanced PhysX" option, which I kept disabled. This is a much more demadning title, but to my surprise, it actually ran more smoothly than Alien: Isolation.

During my short playtime in the first few minutes of the game, the game held up in the high 40s to mid 50s in terms of frames per second. However, oddly enough, this is the only game where using Steam's game recording took a massive hit to the performance, with the game running at an unplayable 16 frames per second while recording. I have a short clip below, but keep in mind it doesn't represent the experience when you're not recording the screen.

One thing I found out is that this was also the only time I managed to make the Mac Mini's fans audibly spin. This game is clearly very demanding, but it was still perfectly playable until I started recording.

No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky is a shining example of proper Apple Silicon support. Not only does it run natively, but it was also one of the very first games on Steam to do so, whereas many of the big games you may have heard about had their native releases only on the Apple App Store. I was very interested to see what could be done with native performance, and sure enough, it's pretty impressive.

What makes No Man's Sky impressive isn't so much the level of detail, but rather the fact that it's a huge open world with lots of interactive elements. I ran the game at the full Quad HD resolution of my monitor and maxed out the graphics settings, and the Mac Mini ran the game gracefully, rarely going below 60FPS. Most of the time I played it seemed to be around 66FPS, though it often went up into the 70s and even 80s. To be fair, I did only play the initial few minutes of the game, so it wasn't exactly hectic.

Still, the game runs exceptionally well, except for one thing: it did not allow me to record the screen using Steam's recording tool. I did capture the screenshots above, but naturally, I can't convey how smooth the game plays with still images. Regardless, it's a very smooth experience on macOS.

Cyberpunk 2077

In July 2025, CD Projekt Red brought Cyberpunk 2077 to macOS with native compatibility for Apple Silicon platforms, with releases across Steam and the Apple App Store. As one of the games best known for how demanding it is, I was very curious to check it out running on the Apple M4, and sure enough, it was fine.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty demanding game, but the macOS port comes with a dedicated graphics mode that automatically adapts to whatever Mac model you're using — it's easier to do that with such a limited scope of hardware options. I can't say exactly what graphics options are set in this mode, but the game targets 30 frames per second in this mode, and it generally sticks to it. Using Steam's in-game performance monitoring tool, I could see the game almost always hovered around 30 to 33 frames per second, with the occasional drop into the 20s, but never below that. Visual quality is also more than good enough, and it's very impressive that this tiny computer can run the game so well while recording footage of it, and while the fan remains barely audible.

What about Windows games?

Around the time Apple introduced Apple Silicon, the company also introduced the Game Porting Toolkit, a technology that made it easier for developers to bring their games over to macOS. Importantly, this tool also relied on technology similar to Wine to allow almost any Windows game to run on macOS, and while it was initially difficult to set up, things have changed somewhat.

The Heroic Games Launcher allows you to play games from the Epic Games Store and GOG on your Mac, using the Game Porting Toolkit to run Windows games on your Mac through a translation layer. I decided to try this out with one of the few titles I own on the Epic Games Store, Daemon X Machina, which was released for Windows in 2020. Unfortunately, I couldn't use Steam's performance capturing tool to get any FPS values, but I did record footage using the built-in macOS screen recorder, and it's honestly very good. I did have to convert the recorded video with Handbrake, so there may be some loss of quality compared to what you'd see while playing the game.

The game seems to run at a solid 60 frames per second while using the Maximum graphics preset, though there are some very obvious stutters every now and then. In more action-packed games, this may become a problem, but for the bit I played, it was actually totally fine.

Gaming on macOS is still a challenge

What this all tells me is that the Mac Mini has the potential to be a great machine for gaming, and Apple is clearly interested in making that happen seeing as it keeps courting developers to bring games over. And while things have improved a bit since my initial test in 2024, the situation is still not something Apple can brag about.

The company has been quieter on the gaming front in recent months, but developments are still happening with the Game Porting Toolkit, and more games are coming over natively, as slowly as that may be happening. Hopefully, we'll eventually be at a point where gaming on Mac isn't a hurdle, but that's not the case just yet.