Allthingsfox

MPS Digital Studios

Wayne,
In the tests with native apps, it did much better than the PowerPC Mac mini with the Core Duo and a little better with the Solo.
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'About graphics
The new Mac minis take a different approach to graphics than their predecessors. Last year, Apple trumpeted the ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32MB of dedicated DDR memory instead of a graphics structure that borrowed its memory from the system. But in the new minis, that’s exactly what Apple uses. The mini’s integrated graphics feature is a mixed bag, though, since it adds to and subtracts from the previous graphics features.
The Intel mini’s GMA950 graphics chip has 64MB of RAM dedicated to it from the main memory. That’s twice as much RAM as the Radeon 9200 had, and it’s faster system RAM than ordinary video RAM. But after you figure in an additional 16MB reserved for general system setup, a standard 512MB Mac mini is left with only 432MB of operating RAM once the 64MB is diverted to the graphics system.
On the plus side, these minis are the first minis that support Tiger’s Core Image technology, which gives you more special effects capabilities. For example, you can now see the ripple effect as you add a widget to Dashboard. We also found that resizing QuickTime and DVD Player windows was much smoother than on the G4 Mac minis.
The GMA950 chip also supports H.264 HD video playback. In our test of an HD movie trailer for IMAX’s Deep Sea 3D (H.264 encoding at 1,440 by 1,080 pixels), the Core Duo model played the video back smoothly. The Core Solo model, however, dropped frames, leading to distracting, stuttering video—even after we upgraded it to 1GB of RAM.
When it comes to graphics-intensive 3-D games, our tests of the Intel-native version of Unreal Tournament showed disappointing frame rates of 12.2 per second for the Core Duo and 10.4 per second for the Core Solo—compared with 14.5 and 13.9 for the 1.42GHz G4 mini and the 1.25GHz G4 mini, respectively. But during casual game play, when we used the lower settings that are more suited for the mini, we got decent performance from the game.
When we tested the Universal version of Nanosaur II, which takes advantage of the fast Intel processors, we found frame rates increased by roughly 33 percent over the previous Mac minis. And the suite of bundled board games—with 3-D game pieces and reflections—play perfectly on both systems. However, if you’re looking for a super high-quality gaming experience, you’ll get much better performance from the latest iMacs.'
heath