Mac Mini Intel GMA 950 Grraphics

I think it is fair to say that the mini is pretty good at everything except games. There you would be out of luck.

I think if you look through the history of threads here you'll see quite a few that relate to game playing on the Mac mini, including many that describe experiences with specific games.

What you'll find is that the mini is far from ideal as a games platform, and the on-board graphics is certainly not ideal for such usage, but even so, some games run well (or sufficiently well) to be playable.

That said, if your specific and sole use is for games, I'd really say the mini isn't for you. If you want a system for occasional gaming but which is intended primarily for 'serious' tasks, then the mini is an excellent system. If you have specific games in mind, maybe a good starting point is to look at the specifications the publisher gives for systems needed to play it. Sometimes such minimum specifications can be misleading, but at least it'll give you some idea of what will or won't run if you can't find reference to your specific games already posted here.

Absolutely. Its not like the Mac will crash and die/won't rum games. The graphics card isn't inadequate, but its nothing special. I play Halo on my mini G4 with no problems. However, I use it mainly for other tasks. So, basically you should be just fine.

Dean, it has to be said that the graphics sub-system in the mini is really the only weakness, and even then it's far less of a limiting factor than many people would have you believe. It's a cheap way to implement video, but that doesn't mean it's an ineffective one!

In a real sense, the faster of the two mini models is not far behind a dual processor G5 system in terms of ram processing power - and those systems were (and still are) extensively used in such environments as professional video production, publishing, web design, music production, photo editing and the like. The mini is good for all those sort of tasks too, with the only real concerns being the fact that as yet a lot of software is not yet 'universal', meaning it'll still run but require Rosetta, which slows things down a bit, and the speed of the hard drive, which is relatively slow in comparison to the other Mac models.

To overcome the performance issues concerning Rosetta, more RAM is always a good thing and of course making sure that where you can, you always use Intel-native (or universal) applications, such as the ones that actually come with the system. And to keep the hard drive speed in sensible perspective, it's the same speed as the drives used in laptops, and there are plenty of those being used for video, music, photo work etc. Certainly more than 'basic tasks'!!

FWIW, Age of Empires III for Mac requires a graphics card supporting hardware T&L, so the GMA 950 (which doesn't support it) may prove to be insufficient for this particular game.

T&L is Transformation and Lighting - basically the creation and movement of 3D objects on screen, with consequent changes in corresponding lighting effects.

The on-board graphics in the Mac mini doesn't provide the hardware resources to do this natively, and since it requires considerable processing to achieve realistic 3D object rendering, software that requires it (many games for instance) will not run well, or in some cases, not run at all, because in the absence of hardware T&L support, the CPU has to do all the work.

It isn't a simple thing however to say that since the mini doesn't support it, the system can't handle the applications that require T&L. In many instances when the graphics card doesn't support hardware T&L, the result isn't failure, but a less detailed or lower-resolution CPU-derived render instead.