Again, people need to dial back their expectations here. You aren't going to see cutting edge games running well through emulation. There is a reason Apple made such a huge emphasis on native apps, native is always going to run much faster.
They didn't demo gaming to suggest this is a great machine for gaming, they demoed it to show that it was possible at all. The previous version of Rosetta during the PowerPC->Intel transition was not known for performance.
If gaming is important to you and you want a Mac then you want an Intel Mac or whatever games are released for Mac ARM. Emulated games are not going to compete with native.
It was very odd seeing Lara walk through an area with dappled bright light, and her body remain uniformly lit. It may be that the game has a very basic lighting engine though.
It is like many triple A games in that it has a wide range of settings, all the way from full potato to RTX (it was ironically one of the first games to support that).
But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances.
It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
> But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances.
Having gone and checked, no. Not even close.
(Nor would it be plausible to expect to. But it's clear Apple have made a choice here, and that is that if you're a user who wants legacy software or desktop gaming, Apple do not care about you compared to their margins. It's that simple.)
The maxed out mac mini cpu is a 6 core 3.2Ghz i7 with turbo boost to 4.6Ghz. I wonder if they can beat that with a newly ARM optimized MacOS? The current i7 has tons of power still as an 8th gen Intel cpu.
