A new dawn for Mac gaming? Apple’s M4 Mac mini uses hardware-accelerated ray tracing

• Apple introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the Mac mini
• The base model of the M4 Mac mini will use 16 GB of unified memory
• This is Apple’s most affordable desktop PC, starting at $599

Apple’s big reveal of the M4 chips last week promised significant improvements across the board for its Mac devices, and the M4 Mac mini could get one of the biggest upgrades – a feature called ‘hardware-accelerated ray tracing’ for gaming.

The Cupertino company has considered gaming on previous Apple Silicon Macs, but its last base model, the M2 Mac mini, used just 8GB of unified memory (similar to the MacBook Pro’s base M2 and M3 models), and because this memory is shared between system memory and video memory (hence called ‘unified’), it meant those chips couldn’t handle advanced graphics like ray tracing. However, the base model of the M4 Mac mini, starting at $599 (£599 / AU$999), comes with 16GB of unified memory.