Gaming on an iMac. How its Gotten Worse & a Goodbye to Apple

Jurisprudence said:

What is the point in giving a system 4gb Vram on a GPU designed primarily for gaming (Its not a Quadro) if you cannot use it. Its just marketing BS. Apple know it. Nowhere was it stated that a function available on a 2011 iMac was not available on a 2013 model. You can blame Nvidia all you want but Apple made the choice to go with them not ATI knowing this would be removed.

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So the feature was removed from Nvidia? If it was Apple that removed the feature i could see your point but if the fastest mobile video card on the market (the 780mx is) does not have that feature how can you blame Apple?

I have the 2012 iMac with the 680mx and i used it to play games for a while but in the end it was much cheaper to just build a dedicated gaming rig, for $1500 Aus i built a rig that has much better graphical performance then my iMac, it also doubles as my HTPC running XBMC. I now use my iMac for my work in the Abobe suite and web browsing ect.

shaunp said:

This is the main gripe I have with the iMac, the graphics performance isn't enough to drive the in-built display, let alone multiple displays for high-def gaming.

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That's just so completely wrong... On what are you basing that assertion?

The number one rule to being a mac owner IS....... DO NOT EXPECT IT TO PLAY GAMES AS WELL AS A WINDOWS COMPUTER.

The hardware is certainly capable nowadays but OSX is just not ready. OpenGL is far inferior to DirectX. You cant say "Well I spent $2500 on this computer and it cant play games?" its a mac. It's just not ready for it software wise.

antman2x2 said:

The number one rule to being a mac owner IS....... DO NOT EXPECT IT TO PLAY GAMES AS WELL AS A WINDOWS COMPUTER.

The hardware is certainly capable nowadays but OSX is just not ready. OpenGL is far inferior to DirectX. You cant say "Well I spent $2500 on this computer and it cant play games?" its a mac. It's just not ready for it software wise.

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I expect it to play games on Bootcamp as well as other PCs for the specs.

OpenGL is even inferior on OSx to OpenGL on Windows. Run Unigine Benchmark on both OS and tell me what you think

I love working on a Mac. But i would never buy one for gaming.

QCassidy352 said:

That's just so completely wrong... On what are you basing that assertion?

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From numerous reviews that say they turned the resolution down to 1080p and had to lower the quality. Use Google!

If it works for you good, but personally I think the whole all in one with laptop components for a desktop computer idea sucks.

Aahh, reading this thread only confirms what I have heard many times in the past, I should just buy a PC to do gaming and get it over with, but I don't really want to. I like flight sims, they are very demanding at times and I was hoping the poor performance I understandably get on my old 2008 MBP in BootCamp would nowadays not be an issue if I wanted to game on a modern Mac. The thought of paying good money for a Windows PC gives me flashbacks of the years of bad computing experiences I had on a PC.

I was really hoping to finally replace my MBP with a new iMac with it's far, far better and modern CPU/GPU/SSD,Memory specs and not have to even think for a second that it wouldn't be able to handle games better than a PC costing less than half the price. It was disturbing enough spending money on the crappy Windows software to Bootcamp with.

Gaming on a Mac is a very poor choice.

If one's determined to do so, start with a really fat wallet, and really low expectations.

Then after wasting countless hours, dump it and build a serious gaming rig on another platform.

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Gaming on a Mac is a very poor choice.

If one's determined to do so, start with a really fat wallet, and really low expectations.

Then after wasting countless hours, dump it and build a serious gaming rig on another platform.

antman2x2 said:

The number one rule to being a mac owner IS....... DO NOT EXPECT IT TO PLAY GAMES AS WELL AS A WINDOWS COMPUTER.

The hardware is certainly capable nowadays but OSX is just not ready. OpenGL is far inferior to DirectX. You cant say "Well I spent $2500 on this computer and it cant play games?" its a mac. It's just not ready for it software wise.

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OpenGL is not inferior at all, in fact most professionals would state the contrary. You can't blame a open source API that is used in most gaming consoles, mobile devices and is supported by all major operating system as the cause, blame apple for their lack of support in updating their graphic API on all their OS's to be more consistent, and ancient graphic drivers that continue to lag severely behind their windows counterparts.

First off, don't feed the troll.

Second, Mac gaming isn't THAT terrible. I just got done playing Diablo 3 which is really improved with the new loot changes.

That being said, most of my real gaming happens on consoles. It's nice just to play the game, and not mess with tweaks and settings and options trying to get the best blend of performance vs appearance.