EVE General Discussion

If you've got beefy enough a Mac, you might as well run the Mac client because of the hassle that is created by having to reboot every time you want to play the game (including just logging in to change skills). The real problem with the client is that it is immensely wasteful with video RAM — effectively, everything has to be loaded into memory three times (once by DirectX, once by Cider, once by OpenGL) before it can be chummed into something that appears on the screen. Everything else works as it should, but the one area where EVE can really start to punish any system is also the one area where the OSX client is the most inefficient. Still, enough oomph will solve that problem through sheer brute force.

The problem is that, as mentioned, a Mini doesn't really qualify as “beefy enough”, and to such a degree that it's questionable whether going Windows native offers much of an improvement to begin with.

On the other hand, it will still run the OSX client well enough to let you do some basic AFK-gameplay maintenance: alter sell orders, fiddle with industry, change skills and all that. Hell, my Air allows that without starting to cough up blood… well, not much at least. So in some cases, it might actually be worth doing both: an OSX install for the small stuff; a bootcamped Window install for longer sessions of heavy lifting.

The short answer is "maybe."

I run EVE on the same Mac Mini, except with only 2 GIG of RAM. With everything turned down to the bare minimum, I get the occasional stutter (frigging gas clouds) it's still very playable. The game does throw my Mini's fan into full-blow wind tunnel mode, though. If you're having serious frame rate problems with everything turned down, perhaps you are having heat issues.

Anyway, booting a real version of Windows on your Mini will eliminate the emulation layer (the Cider wrapper), but you're still stuck with the on-board Intel graphics which, while not the worst chipset they ever shipped, isn't very good. That's the major bottleneck you're likely running into.

My current plan is to replace--soon--this Mini with an iMac sporting an NVIDIA card, which is likely the most viable option for you as well.

I do not know the technical details of a Mini Mac, but assuming it can run a decent Windows version with DirectX 9 or 10 should you go for Windows. Using the native OS has a good chance that you can run the game at its best settings or just save more power than you would with using a non-native system. If this does not appeal to you then stay with what you have and spare yourself the effort, because there is no difference in game content whether you run EVE on Windows or not.