Gamer iMac

[cybert]

Hi Guys,

I am about to buy a new imac, and I was thinking on the model 27" with the 2 GB of Video RAM.

The only thing I am doubting now is, will this machine be a kick-ass gaming machine? (I have never had a mac before, but I want one). I play a lot of games like max payne 3 etc, and I have read that with vm-ware fusion and/or bootcamp these games will work in OSX.

Anyone who can give me some advice? (is the ATI card good enough etc, or should I wait for the update with a geforce card?)

 

[miles01110]

will this machine be a kick-ass gaming machine?

No. It's a Mac. That said it should run most modern games acceptably well - the 6970M is still a decent graphics card.

 

[forty2j]

The top 2012 mobile graphics cards have 2x the performance of the 2011's. That's the primary reason I'm still waiting. The 6970m is a fine card. The 7970m is a certifiable beast, and the 680M tops it.

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No. It's a Mac.

I'm really hoping this shift back to Nvidia comes with some serious driver support, to get OS X performance and Win performance into some sort of parity. Probably just wishful thinking though.

 

[DeF46]

Hi Guys,

I am about to buy a new imac, and I was thinking on the model 27" with the 2 GB of Video RAM.

The only thing I am doubting now is, will this machine be a kick-ass gaming machine? (I have never had a mac before, but I want one). I play a lot of games like max payne 3 etc, and I have read that with vm-ware fusion and/or bootcamp these games will work in OSX.

Anyone who can give me some advice? (is the ATI card good enough etc, or should I wait for the update with a geforce card?)

Yes, no, it's all relative. No if your idea of a kick ass gaming machine is 60 FPS all the time. Yes, if you just want all your games to be smooth and playable at 30+ FPS. Depends the game too, some will easily run 60 FPS, others are hurt by the 2560 res.

Keep in mind:
* Forget emulation if you want the best of the GPU, you install games in Windows and use BOOTCAMP.
* You CAN do a moderate amount of overclocking the mobile GPU, the fans can keep the temps in check
* You DONT want to scale down, even on a 27 inch, trust me, it looks bad. Exception for racing games and action games where there is not much small text or labels, and a slight bluriness doesn't matter, in which case scaling down to 1920 is ok (still personally I never scale down in fullscreen, prefer a custom res and run windowed 2240x1260 for example which 16:9)

pS: definitely wait for upgrade if you plan on keeping this Mac for two+ years. Keep in mind the 6970M has been out for a while now, and after WWDC rumors it's very likely an updated iMac will appear between now and September.

 

[cybert]

Keep in mind:
* Forget emulation if you want the best of the GPU, you install games in Windows and use BOOTCAMP.

Do you mean then a dual boot system? Or is VMware Fusion or parralelles a good solution to not reboot the system?

 

[leman]

Do you mean then a dual boot system? Or is VMware Fusion or parralelles a good solution to not reboot the system?

VMs are not fast enough, you need to dual boot windows.

I used to play games like Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Guild Wars 2 beta, Diablo 3, WoW, Witcher 2, BF3 and several else. All of them run at native resolution (BF3 struggled, so I had to switch it to 1080p) with medium/high settings at 30+ fps. If your main reason is gaming, then really, get a PC.

 

[forty2j]

Do you mean then a dual boot system? Or is VMware Fusion or parralelles a good solution to not reboot the system?

You can run "casual" games in a VM. You don't want to do anything serious in there. The only reason to do that is if your desired game doesn't exist in OS X and you don't' want to reboot.

Win performance > OS X performance > Win in an VM performance.

 

[DeF46]

Do you mean then a dual boot system?

Yep as forty2j said.

I reboot every day several times for gaming in Win7, and web development in OS X. It's not a problem at all for me, been doing this for 2 years now (late 2009 with the 4850M). How it works for me is that I was already used to Windows, and so I use Chrome in OS X, and in Windows. SO right now for example, I didn't reboot after a session of gaming, I'm browsing in Windows with Chrome. I'll reboot when I actually work

When I didn't touch Windows in a long time (long break from games) I admit I was a bit disorientated by the different UI, but it came back quickly. When you reboot daily between game/work partitions, it's second nature you don't mind the UI difference that much.

Only recently my boot time in W7 was getting slow and finally, I realized "why do I keep this P.O.S. aVast on there since I upgraded from XP???" So I removed aVast, and installed on-demand anti virus instead (ie. right click and scan). Much better.

If you don't install a lousy anti virus scanner with "resident protection" the reboot times is really short (imho).

Point is, Windows 7 is more secure, and in the rare occasion that I fall again prey to a zero-day exploit (happened once with a Adobe PDF Reader plugin), it's a gaming partition, I'll reinstall. I prefer to take that 0.01% risk of spending one day installing stuff than having slow boot and obnoxious "upgrade" messages from an anti virus the 99.99% of the time.

 

[DeF46]

Or is VMware Fusion or parralelles a good solution to not reboot the system?

Emulation is always going to have a performance penalty even if the Intel CPU runs code natively. The main culprit is that the vast majority of PC games tend to be optimized for Direct X, while OS X is using OpenGL. So there is a translation there with a cost; That said there are more and more Mac native ports coming out nowadays on Steam.