so apple has told us about the new mac mini. i have one thing to say.....

shared video ram?!?! ICK!!!

A step backward for apple, but then the Mac Mini has never exactly been a gaming computer.

i know, but i still feel weird about my mac sharing system memory with the graphics. i doesn't settle well. not that people are supposed to use the mini for serious gaming or anything other than basic crap. but my fear is that this will trickle into the other products.

I sure hope not...

some more info about the new mac mini:
http://www.hardmac.com/news/2006-03-02/#5213

Bobsin, I wouldn't think so. The Mini is the low-end product, period. I'm really excited to see how the Power line comes out. And I'll still get me a quad core G5... soon™.

The Mac mini is not forgaming. If you want to play games on a Mac, get another Mac!

My Dell notebook has the Intel 915GM intergrated graphics, and Vendetta plays like a charm at 1400x1050. I'm certain that the Mac Mini and MacBook can play Vendetta just fine.

dan: easy to say if you can afford a better mac. i'd love to get my hands on a powermac, but the price tag is a bit high. if i were to get a new mac, i would head in the direction of a macbook which also has the integrated graphics.

gene: vendetta plays well on a lot of old equipment... how goes the integrated hold up agenst WoW? do you get serious bogging down in the major cities?

The only game I play on this notebook is Vendetta. I tried Half-Life 2 once, but it would bog down when I was fighting too many enemies.

Please tell me this game vendetta runs on the Imac G5 dual intel procs?

There is no Intel G5, but it does play on the Intel iMac. :)

U know, Its a habit....I have always called it that way since its release....Hence the fact that, untill a 1.5 month ago, I used to work for Apple...Makes one wonder...

LoL

Hi everybody, I was also planning on getting a macbook to replace my old tibook, until I saw these benchmarks:

http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd3.html

makes you wanna cry doesn't it? this integrated graphics card ain't no game. the thought that my old tibook probably runs vendetta at a faster fps than the new macbook is kind of unreal.

...now saving some more money to get the macbook PRO, which does have killer graphics, and comes with the backlit keyboard which I've always wanted :)

Good idea. I've never been a big fan of iBooks... er... macbooks either. :D

-Calder

Get a MacBook Pro.

I tested vendetta on my brothers macbook (the 1.83GHz one) and it ran okay (without shaders, of course), much better than on an ibook 1.2ghz.
But if you want to play lots of games, you really should get the mb pro.

I've been using the intel macmini for a couple weeks now and it runs VO ok as long as the settings are setup properly. Since the GMA950 graphics chip doesn't do hardware accelerated T&L, turning down the LOD settings gives a good speedup.

And os X 10.4.7 just fixed a bug with the GMA950 that allows texture compression to work properly, so VO will look nicer while using less video memory on the macmini and macbooks.

I have been playing on my intel mac mini with 2GB ram, i polay at 1440x900 near full graphics and it runs really smooth.