iMac and Battlefield 3. Wut?

The 6970M is technically the same thing as the desktop 6850, so it should meet the recommended settings...I just wouldn't expect it to run on all highest settings.

jimbaw said:

thanks it would be pretty hard for any pc to run battlefield 3 in the highest settings, even harder for a Mac not designed for gaming.

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Lol true. I'm excited for BF3 too, preordered mine a long time ago. I remember playing BF2 on like low-medium settings, so I think I'll be fine with my iMac.

At the iMacs resolution of 2560 x 1440 your going to need to upgrade to the 2GB video memory. Then you'll run it fine.

A Macbook Pro said:

At the iMacs resolution of 2560 x 1440 your going to need to upgrade to the 2GB video memory. Then you'll run it fine.

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Not necessary to run it at native resolution. In fact, bumping up most modern games to the 27" iMac's native resolution is asking for terrible FPS. I would say start at 1080p and go from there.

Do what I did. Build a separate gaming PC for BF3 and get a 27" ACD to play it in all it's glory.

Logos327 said:

Not necessary to run it at native resolution. In fact, bumping up most modern games to the 27" iMac's native resolution is asking for terrible FPS. I would say start at 1080p and go from there.

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You have no idea. Lowing the resolution is the last thing you want to do. You can run the native resolution at high settings even for Crysis 2 so I don't know whether you don't know what your talking about or are trying to sound smart.

A Macbook Pro said:

You have no idea. Lowing the resolution is the last thing you want to do. You can run the native resolution at high settings even for Crysis 2 so I don't know whether you don't know what your talking about or are trying to sound smart.

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For the past 5 years I have had computers with mobile graphics cards and never once seen a game run better at native resolution than at a lower one. Maybe the imac's gpu is as amazing as you say it is, but 1440p is a s***ton of pixels and seems overkill on a mobile gpu.

Edit: Wait that is a lie. League of Legends is the one exception to that I have seen, but that is in no way a taxing game.

Anecdotal but...

I know it's not exactly conclusive but I've recently played through the new Deus Ex on full graphics on my top spec iMac (2GB VRAM) without much of a hint of slowdown. I'm pretty sure Battlefield 3 leverages the same or similar DX11 technologies for the prettiness so I reckon you'll be able to knock the graphics up quite a long way.

A Macbook Pro said:

You have no idea. Lowing the resolution is the last thing you want to do. You can run the native resolution at high settings even for Crysis 2 so I don't know whether you don't know what your talking about or are trying to sound smart.

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It depends on what you mean by "can run". Some people don't mind playing at 30 fps, but some prefer to go with a lower resolution/medium settings and play at 60+ FPS.

theSeb said:

It depends on what you mean by "can run". Some people don't mind playing at 30 fps, but some prefer to go with a lower resolution/medium settings and play at 60+ FPS.

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Good point. I am of the latter. Or I should say, I would rather have consisten frames between 30-60 rather than have less than that at higher settings.

Playing battlefield 3 beta on Imac 6970m 2gb

I'm currently playing battlefield 3 beta on a 3.4ghz i7 Imac 27" with the AMD 6970m 2gb.

After tinkering with the settings for a while, I am getting an avg 30-50 fps on native resolution with almost all ultra settings.

However, this is NOT fullscreen. Rather, I am playing windowed at about 17". So it seems that it can be done. If you ever try to play anything on these imacs at 1080p, it looks like absolute crap. You're always better off playing at native even if you have to window and crop.

Hope this helps.

BTW at 1440p always turn of Anti-aliasing.

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Also, slightly overclocking the AMD 6970m from 680mhz to 710mhz & raising the memory clock from 900 to 920 definitely adds 4-8 fps and doesn't raise the temps more that 1-2 degrees celsius.

I know that seems crazy to overclock a mobile gpu, but its nice to know that you can do it. I can't condone doing to for prolonged periods of time, and never push it too far.

A Macbook Pro said:

You have no idea. Lowing the resolution is the last thing you want to do. You can run the native resolution at high settings even for Crysis 2 so I don't know whether you don't know what your talking about or are trying to sound smart.

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No friend you are noob who does not know about GPU and inherent power requirements. NO iMac can do it's native resolution as NO PC without SLI'd GTX580's can do that resolution in newest most demanding games. 30fps is not fun to play at either, you want 60+ to be comfortable and not have mouse lag and screen tearing. Crysis 2 was not very hard on the machine unless you installed the high res pack and DX11 patch. Which then again, you will not be able to play at native resolution on an iMac. A Desktop 6970 or a GTX 580 could possibly do it at reduced settings, otherwise you need a dual card setup.
Maxdub's experience above seems the most plausible.

So now that the open beta is out has anyone tried it who's running the same specs as the OP (6970m). If so how's that working?

Crysis 2 with 6970m 2gb

After reading the last couple of posts, I decided to test Crysis 2 on the 27" imac with the 6970m 2gb.

It ran well and looked really great on low/"gamer" settings at native 1440p resolution with about 34 fps, which i don't mind at all. It never dropped below 30 fps.

By dropping the resolution to 1080p I was able to play at medium/"advanced" settings with about 44 fps. However, this looked absolutely AWFUL! 1080p on these imacs is gross and fuzzy.

Playing at 1440p on low settings looks absolutely great. To some degree the resolution seems to make up for the low settings.

Is that with high res texture pack and DX11 patch? You need to download those separately.
If not, Crysis 2 is no more demanding than Call of Duty. But good to know for console vanilla version.

eggplanty said:

So now that the open beta is out has anyone tried it who's running the same specs as the OP (6970m). If so how's that working?

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See my above post for your answer.

maxdub said:

I'm currently playing battlefield 3 beta on a 3.4ghz i7 Imac 27" with the AMD 6970m 2gb.

After tinkering with the settings for a while, I am getting an avg 30-50 fps on native resolution with almost all ultra settings.

However, this is NOT fullscreen. Rather, I am playing windowed at about 17". So it seems that it can be done. If you ever try to play anything on these imacs at 1080p, it looks like absolute crap. You're always better off playing at native even if you have to window and crop.

Hope this helps.

BTW at 1440p always turn of Anti-aliasing.

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Also, slightly overclocking the AMD 6970m from 680mhz to 710mhz & raising the memory clock from 900 to 920 definitely adds 4-8 fps and doesn't raise the temps more that 1-2 degrees celsius.

I know that seems crazy to overclock a mobile gpu, but its nice to know that you can do it. I can't condone doing to for prolonged periods of time, and never push it too far.

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I'm also playing the beta as well but I don't know much about advanced graphic settings, I have the same spec iMac as you and I'm wondering what drive you are using? and what is the optimal setting for playing full screen, thanks!

Hello everybody my question on this topic is that I am running a IMAC 9.1 with 9600 x video card and BF3 is saying I have to run version 285.something in order to play BF3 my version for nvidia is 179.something and wonder if theres anyway around that. If anybody has any idea be more than wiling to listen I am running 7 home premium with boot camp 2.0. Thank you ..

Estate said:

I'm also playing the beta as well but I don't know much about advanced graphic settings, I have the same spec iMac as you and I'm wondering what drive you are using? and what is the optimal setting for playing full screen, thanks!

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I don't know what you mean when you ask what drive I am using. If you mean the hard drive, which seems irrelevant, it's the 1tb 7200rpm hdd.

As for full screen, I gave up on that so that I could have the best graphics possible. So, I wouldn't know. I just imagine that I'm playing on a normal size screen and not the behemoth in front of me.

However, I just downloaded the new ATI driver released for Battlefield 3, and it added 7-12 fps with Battlefield 3 beta! A huge difference.

Also, I have been overclocking my GPU using the sapphire tweek utility to 700 mhz and a memory clock of 900. This as I mentioned earlier adds quite a bit of fps as well.

Hope this info helps. Just play around with your settings.

I played the demo for about 2 hours last night on my 2001 iMac 27". I have 8GB ram and the 6970 with 1GB. Played through Bootcamp using the 11.9 drivers installed.

I was able to play the game at native resolution (2560x1440) and 1920xwhatever without any issues. The default gfx setting of Auto looked great to me as well.

For giggles, I turned them up to high and, while the picture looked better, it wasn't THAT much better and I did not notice a difference in performance.

I plan to play some more this weekend so if anyone can tell me the keyboard combo to display FPS, I can do that and respond with FPS at various graphical settings - if that will be helpful.

gregd33 said:

I played the demo for about 2 hours last night on my 2001 iMac 27". I have 8GB ram and the 6970 with 1GB. Played through Bootcamp using the 11.9 drivers installed.

I was able to play the game at native resolution (2560x1440) and 1920xwhatever without any issues. The default gfx setting of Auto looked great to me as well.

For giggles, I turned them up to high and, while the picture looked better, it wasn't THAT much better and I did not notice a difference in performance.

I plan to play some more this weekend so if anyone can tell me the keyboard combo to display FPS, I can do that and respond with FPS at various graphical settings - if that will be helpful.

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So you can play BF3 at 2560x1440 on Ultra with your iMac in DX11? Weird as a GTX580 can only muster 25-40FPS at that res and a GTX580 is easily twice as fast as 6790m.

I just played BF3 with 1080p, medium settings. For my eyes it looks very nice and gives me very fluent FPS.

derbothaus said:

So you can play BF3 at 2560x1440 on Ultra with your iMac in DX11? Weird as a GTX580 can only muster 25-40FPS at that res and a GTX580 is easily twice as fast as 6790m.

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I think there is some odd things going on with the demo. I don't think it is really accepting the changes from AUTO to anything else. I don't know if this is done on purpose in order to get more pre-orders (I'm a cynical old man) or if its not working.

From what I have read, to run on Ultra requires a crazy machine with SLI and all the latest hardware.

Whatever my settings are actually set at (regardless of what the video setting in game shows) I am pretty happy with it... that said, I think that if I see it really running in ultra, I would be shocked at how good it can really look.

What is the key to show FPS? I will change the settings in-game (IF they mean anything, I don't know) and report the differences for each setting.