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

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

Apple’s big reveal of the M4 chips last week promised significant enhancements 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 the last base model M2 Mac mini only utilized 8GB of unified memory (similar to base M2 and M3 models of the MacBook Pro), and because this memory is shared between system memory and video memory (hence being 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 ...