The system sounds pretty sweet, but does the graphic card have enough power to use photoshop cs and illustrator cs well enough for a graphic designer...
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Imac G5
- Thread starter deadfrog
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Chaszmyr
macrumors 601
The graphics card is definitely 100% sufficient for any sort of thing like photoshop or illustrator.
It may however prove not quite as good for things like high-end games (World of Warcraft, for example) or video editting. It will however still do these things, just not at peak performance.
It may however prove not quite as good for things like high-end games (World of Warcraft, for example) or video editting. It will however still do these things, just not at peak performance.
ok cheers, i dont get much of chance to play many games anyhow but it would be nice to be able to break the workload up a bit with the occasional game... am guessing that doom3 will be out of the question or at low end 640x480 though going by speculation....
would people recommend this over a powerbook / ibook?
would people recommend this over a powerbook / ibook?
dieselg4
macrumors regular
For using static graphic programs, like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., you reallyonly need enough of a video card to push pixels on the screen. The bulk of the image's information is in your available RAM or scratch disk. If you open a 150 MB .psd and have 256 MB ram, you'll be usisng your scratch disk heavily. Wheather or not you have a 32MB card or a 256 MB card doesn't make much of a difference to Photoshop, but the amount of RAM you have will. The more RAM you have, the les likely you'll be accessing your scratch disks.
Video and action games are diffenent becasue they are rendering multiple images or surfaces on-the-fly. They need to be able to process changes very quickly. The large amound of memory and the fast GPU's on high end video cards take alotof the procesing burden of the CPU. Video cards also usually have faster ram than your ave. computer, so data for mapping, etc., is handled much more quickly.
Somehow Quartz extreme fits into this too. I remember another user saying that Quartz Extreme ony works in the rpesence of a >32 MB video card. Its speeds up your GUI, among other things.
Video and action games are diffenent becasue they are rendering multiple images or surfaces on-the-fly. They need to be able to process changes very quickly. The large amound of memory and the fast GPU's on high end video cards take alotof the procesing burden of the CPU. Video cards also usually have faster ram than your ave. computer, so data for mapping, etc., is handled much more quickly.
Somehow Quartz extreme fits into this too. I remember another user saying that Quartz Extreme ony works in the rpesence of a >32 MB video card. Its speeds up your GUI, among other things.
crazzyeddie
macrumors 68030
deadfrog said:
People exaggerate when they say the 5200FX Ultra is worthless. I predict that Doom3 will run at 800x600 with mostly medium settings on the iMac G5.
And it is definitely better than a Powerbook or iBook because it not only has a faster processor, but that processor is a G5. Also the hard drive is faster (Serial ATA 7200rpm vs ATA100 4200/5400rpm). The front side bus is also many times faster (600mhz vs 167mhz). RAM, too.
The 5200FX Ultra is WORTHLESS. It was the BUDGET version of Nvidia's PREVIOUS generation of video cards. Tacking all sorts of extra words on the end, such as Ultra, does nothing to change the fact that its performance is horrendous when compared to modern day offerings. Even the Mobility 9700 that is in the latest Powerbooks will perform better than the 5200. See the following article here:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html
The 5200 is so far down on the list of benchmark scores that its utterly laughable. That card blows and has very little hope of running Doom3 at all. Apple screwed up yet again and saddled another perfectly acceptable machine with SUBpar graphics. They could have chosen a much faster offering but instead went with a card that is getting quite crusty around the edges.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html
The 5200 is so far down on the list of benchmark scores that its utterly laughable. That card blows and has very little hope of running Doom3 at all. Apple screwed up yet again and saddled another perfectly acceptable machine with SUBpar graphics. They could have chosen a much faster offering but instead went with a card that is getting quite crusty around the edges.
Spock
Contributor
Celeron said:
You have to remember the iMac is made to be the center of the digital hub for light things like editing movies in iMovie, checking You E-Mail, using the ITMS. Apple was smart about this, if You are looking to buy a computer and looking at video cards You are going to want a Powermac and spend more money.
Spock said:
Pros don't buy their computers to play games on. Consumers are the ones that expect to be able to play games. The imac's crippled video card is a huge, huge problem. A 5200FX makes sense in a dual-g5 used for photoshop or FCP. It does *NOT* make sense in a machine that's people are likely to buy with the expectation of running games.
-vga4life
vga4life said:
Fer cryin outloud!! can we get off this "5200FX sucks and is worthless" theme? the iMac is not a machine gamers machine period. Any body who knows games needs knows damn well they will have to look elsewhere than than the iMac. The 5200FX is fine for Photoshop and Illustrator and iLife which is what the machine being sold for. Just like the last two iMac, Apple is going to sell a ton of them (and those machines weren't directed at gamers either)
Chaszmyr said:
i'd like to think that people have been able to use photoshop for many years now. if that's true, than:
a 1ghz g4 can run the program
a geforce 2mx can run the program
etc. etc. etc.
people love to bash hardware, and say it's completely worthless for program "X" when program x has been running on previous hardware with worse specs for some time, quite handily.
it'll run it just fine. nice and speedy, I would imagine. just give yourself the ram to do it right.
100% bull.dswoodley said:
Apple's imac marketing pitch features games prominently. There's no mention of illustrator at all, and one single solitary mention of photoshop filters at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/imac/processor.html
Seriously, go surf around http://www.apple.com/imac and count all the references to games and gaming performance. Hell, http://www.apple.com/imac/graphics.html is all about the supposed "blazing" gaming performance provided by this septic video card. Note how the impressive looking bar graphs don't give actual frame rates, only percentage "performance increase" numbers over a 1.25 GHz G4 imac (model not specified).
Apple is claiming this machine is good for games, when it's clearly marginal. The lack of any better graphic options on the imac g5 really hobbles it.
joshua_msu
macrumors regular
The Apple store by me (Oakbrook, IL) has the new iMac's in. The display was better than I thought it would look (although I dont know the resolution on the 20 incher), but I thought it was pretty ugly overall. I just dont like the whiteness of it, and that huge amount of space between the screen and thge bottom of the unit.