Many have been examining the specs of the new Intel-based Mac mini since it was introduced by Steve Jobs at last week's Apple event. Of the changes from the previous G4-based mini, the one item that has raised the most eyebrows is the move from ATI Radeon 9200-based graphics to the Intel GMA950 chipset. The prime concern? Intel's graphics chipset does not use its own dedicated graphics memory, but uses part of the mini's main memory in a sharing arrangement. "Shared graphics memory" and "high performance" are not two phrases people are accustomed to associating with one another.

It turns out, it's not something to fret about.

As Apple's senior director of desktops, Tom Boger, explains, the new graphics system is actually a significant upgrade for the mini. Unlike the ATI chipset used in the previous mini, the GMA950 is programmable, allowing the new units to support Mac OS X Tiger's Core Image realtime graphics features for the first time. Boger also indicates that the new mini seems to hit about 10-40% higher framerates in 3D games as compared to the G4 models. (It's unclear whether we're talking Rosetta or Universal apps, or just which Intel mini is being compared to which G4 model, etc.) Xbench tests show that, on native code, OpenGL is over twice as fast on the new minis vs. old.

Another big boon for the new mini is the recent set of reports indicating that the Core Duo version is capable of playing back processor-intensive 1080p h.264 video, the most demanding video file format of all. The Core Solo is not going to be able to hit that mark, however, but we're gussing it will be easily up to the challenge of playing back high definition MPEG2 transport streams (the most commont format for HD video at present).

All that said, it seems Apple may have worked quite a coup with the new mini, putting themselves in a position to grab a nice chunk of the living room. The mini running Bonjour enabled Front Row (for crazy simple media sharing) may be the perfect home theatre PC.