M6 Mac Mini gaming: Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3 on the 24GB M6 Mac Mini: native and FSR Quality results across presets and resolutions, with a Medium/Ultra image comparison.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the sort of game where I'd happily accept lower framerates in return for visual fidelity. On the 24GB M6 Mac Mini, there's a fair amount of room to make that choice, particularly at 1080p where Medium gets close to 60fps without upscaling.
For testing I found a ledge in the Emerald Grove camp where I could look out over the surroundings. That static view ran slower than the typical top down view I'd typically have during gameplay outside of cutscenes, so I've used that as a pessimistic view of performance. I think it's a useful demanding example from that session, though I haven't established a lower bound for performance across the whole game.
Native rendering
I tested Low, Medium, High and Ultra at 1080p, 1440p and 4K with any upscaling disabled.
Baldur's Gate 3 · Native · average FPS
| Preset | 1080p | 1440p | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 79.97 | 61.08 | 38.93 |
| Medium | 57.31 | 43.54 | 27.02 |
| High | 39.67 | 31.2 | 21.58 |
| Ultra | 38.73 | 30.34 | 20.64 |
One capture per setting. Hover averages for min / avg / max; min and max are one-second rates, not percentile lows. Colours: below 30 fps red, 30–59 yellow, 60–89 green, 90+ cyan.
nyaaBench capture
Static view from a ledge in the Emerald Grove camp. One capture per setting. This scene ran slower than typical top-down exploration during the supplied play session; it is not a measured worst case for the entire game. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
Medium at 1080p averages , while Ultra averages . That's enough of a difference to make Medium attractive, especially given how much of the presentation it retains. High and Ultra are much closer to each other in these captures.
At 4K, Ultra still manages , though that is below where I'd want to settle. Medium reaches , so playing at that output resolution gives upscaling a more useful role.
Medium versus Ultra
The drop from Medium to Low was much more apparent to me than the steps above Medium. At Low, vegetation lost contrast and shadowing, and the scene looked noticeably flatter. Medium, High and Ultra all looked wonderful, and the changes above Medium felt more like incremental improvements to texture detail and depth than a different overall presentation.
1080p MediumHold Shift to zoom1080p Ultra
FSR Quality at higher resolutions
I prefer to start with scaling disabled so the results provide a useful baseline for other machines. For actually playing, though, FSR Quality gave a softer but serviceable image at 1440p and above, so I repeated all four presets at those two resolutions. There are no 1080p FSR captures in this set.
Baldur's Gate 3 · FSR Quality · average FPS
| Preset | 1440p | 4K |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 80.57 | 55.08 |
| Medium | 60.03 | 41.85 |
| High | 44 | 31.79 |
| Ultra | 42.99 | 31.33 |
One capture per setting. Hover averages for min / avg / max; min and max are one-second rates, not percentile lows. Colours: below 30 fps red, 30–59 yellow, 60–89 green, 90+ cyan.
nyaaBench capture
Static view from a ledge in the Emerald Grove camp. One capture per setting. This scene ran slower than typical top-down exploration during the supplied play session; it is not a measured worst case for the entire game. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
At 4K, Ultra with FSR Quality averages , compared with 20.64fps without scaling. Medium with FSR Quality reaches , which leaves more room to trade image quality for performance.
I also tried FSR Ultra Quality and liked the image, but found the practical performance uplift small.
At 1080p I'd leave FSR off entirely, because the loss of clarity isn't worth it to me. Medium gives a good balance, but for this particular game I wouldn't mind the lower frame rate at High or Ultra in return for the extra detail. At higher resolutions, FSR Quality is a more useful compromise, with the usual caveat that these figures describe this scene rather than every encounter or location in the game.