I am trying to run a recent build of MAME on a Mac Mini from 2012 (MacMini6,1) that has 8GB of RAM installed in it (2x4G) and an SSD. I’ve found that under Mojave, MAME runs but slows down on a regular basis. I used to run the same games on an older MacPro3,1 (2008) which had zero problems with slowdown, albeit it did have a dedicated GPU.

I’m a bit surprised that I’m seeing such poor performance on the Mini, given that its CPU is faster in pretty much every benchmark in comparison to the Mac Pro’s Xeon; the only exception is when you look at heavy multithreading performance and 8 cores will simply beat out the Mini’s 2 cores (4 threads).

So trying to figure out what might be the issue here I’m thinking that perhaps it is due to the shared system RAM that gets used by the Intel Graphics 4000? Before I drop $70 on a RAM upgrade for this old mini, I’m curious if that would even make a difference. I know it won’t increase VRAM (and that is not the desire), but does the integrated graphics RAM usage fight with system RAM/SWAP/Compression/etc.? FWIW, I am not really running anything else on the Mini when observing this sluggishness. Otherwise, the box seems fast enough for basic tasks.