M6 Mac Mini gaming: Valheim
Valheim runs great across the board on the M6 Mac Mini, though 4K and above might be too optimistic if you want to stay above 60fps.
These tests use the 24GB M6 Mac Mini. See the overview and measurement notes for the shared setup.
Valheim
Valheim is near and dear to me, I have so many cozy miemories of long nights playing t with friends. The low res textures don't mean there is little going on visually, with the music, excellent sound design, beautiful weather, lighting and post-processing doing a lot of work to give the world its charm.
I used the in-game Low, Medium and High presets with the Native 3D resolution setting. Like most people I've played with I'd normally disable motion blur and depth of field, but I've left them enabled here to be true to the presets. There is a Very Low preset available, but I did not test it.
Valheim · Mac Mini M6, 24GB · average FPS
| Preset | 1080p | 1440p | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 117.55 | 98.54 | 48.29 |
| Medium | 85.18 | 74.91 | 41.09 |
| High | 54.6 | 52.84 | 36.83 |
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
Freeplay using the in-game presets. Manual gameplay; routes and capture lengths vary. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
At 1080p, High averages , while Low reaches about double that with . It was a smooth experience, though somebody with a high refresh-rate monitor could be forgiven for playing at lower presets - it didn't look much different visually anyway.
The presets converge in performance at 4K, as we likely start to hit memory bandiwdth ceilings and overheads.
The resolution scaling interestingly can be set to as low as 160p, but even there at Low I couldn't consistently get beyond roughly 110–120fps. Given native resolution at Low was in the same range, something other than the GPU was likely limiting performance.