I've generally been quite negative on Mac's prospect throughout this thread, but even I would expect a M1 mini to wipe the floor with an 8th gen i5 (or whatever businesses are currently retiring) and RX 6400 for the games that are supported.
Why would you think that? The CPU is likely to be a non-issue for lower end gaming and the RX 6400 has significantly better theoretical performance and memory bandwidth.
- People shouldn't buy Apple hardware for the games, but there's clearly an audience of Apple users (that have these devices for _other_ reasons) for a lot of games, so supporting it should be an easy win. Source 2 already had a Metal build (via Dota 2). Valve cut away a confirmed audience larger than Steam Deck owners.
- Don't get hung up on "the M1". Apple's higher end models scale quite well, the Pro is very common and the Max, while mostly a bad investment solely for games, would scale well if there were games to run on it.
