Our graphics performance testing starts with four of UL’s macOS-ready 3DMark benchmarks. Steel Nomad Light is a 1440p test without ray tracing, focusing on raw graphics rasterization, while Steel Nomad (no “Light” in its title) is more advanced. Solar Bay is where ray-tracing testing comes in, and the Wild Life Extreme test pushes Macs to their limits at 4K resolution.
We also measure gaming performance using the 2022 strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 via Steam, which we run exclusively on Macs. In the game’s Battle benchmark, we run the test at Ultra and Low settings at 1080p resolution and record the average frames per second (fps).
Finally, we’ve adapted our Cyberpunk 2077 test, which we run on Windows gaming PCs, to Macs. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings push systems to their limits without frame generation or resolution upscaling, using the Ultra and all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive graphics presets at 1080p and 1440p for Macs, or 1200p and 1600p for MacBooks.
We don’t have 3DMark numbers for the M4 Pro Mac mini, but we have comparable gaming benchmarks showing a generational improvement. Back to 3DMark, however, you can see a similar throughline of results to the first set of tests.
The M5 Pro Mac mini dominated this set of 3D benchmarks, but the HP Z2 Mini workstation served as something of a rival. Although the Z2 Mini had far more shared memory for its GPU to work with, the M5 Pro delivers up to 307GBps of memory bandwidth, compared with the 256GBps the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 can deliver.
As for gaming, we saw marked improvements from the M4 Pro to the M5 Pro in the Mac mini, in both Total War and Cyberpunk 2077. The latter game I was unable to test at a higher resolution due to time and logistical constraints, but the Overdrive settings would have ground the game to a near halt, and even Ultra would likely have been barely playable.
Of course, compared with most PCs containing dedicated GPUs, these numbers aren’t much—and the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips clearly outpace the M5 Pro here, too. Still, these games can be made (via ticking down some detail settings) to be plenty playable without AI assistance. Apply AI rendering, and the situation improves significantly.
The M5 Pro mini reached 83fps in Cyberpunk’s recommended mode for Macs (which includes image upscaling), with V-Sync disabled and no ray tracing. Further modifying the settings, with frame generation and ray tracing enabled, got me to 140fps, and the game looked gorgeous. Of course, applying improved path tracing dropped these results like a rock, down to 49fps on average, and the image looked markedly worse. So for demanding games, you’ll want to tinker with the settings to find your right mix. Cyberpunk, though, is among the more demanding popular Mac titles out there.
Overall, the M5 Pro Mac mini was quieter than the M6 model during multi-core testing. While the M6 model leaned toward the lukewarm side, the M5 Pro version felt a little hotter under load, though nothing concerning. This is probably why you don’t see M5 Max versions of the Mac mini: The M5 Pro already pushes the thermal limits of the Mac mini chassis.
