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Gaming on iMac

bottleneck said:
Well it gets close, but: AMD 7970M - Mobile Monster - Better than a GTX 580!! - 31% Better than 680M I don't know.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970M.72675.0.html
Click to expand...

The 680M would also be a great chip, but it seems to have three strikes against it as a candidate for the iMac:

1) The desktop 680 has poor OpenGL/CUDA scores compared to the 500 series. The 7970M series is a better balanced card for people doing 3d, video specialized video processing.
2)nVidia seems to be having trouble meeting demand for the 28nm chips. Apple tries to prevent those sort of supply constraints.
3) ATI seems to be the preferred partner lately anyways.

---

As for playing games, yes, a PC is obviously the first choice for a dedicated gamer. But for casual or occasional gamers, the iMac works jut fine.

My iMac is primarily for work: Animation, video, graphics and development. Apple's stability and reliability in the past has saved my butt more than once when all the PCs in the office failed. It just happens to play games well too.
 
Occamsrazr said:
I just use Mac OSX. It obviates the registry.
Click to expand...

As far most users are concerned it really just does the same thing in a different way.

http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

Check out the appsweep functionality with Hazel.

Anyway - that is going a bit off topic. :)

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kitsunestudios said:
As for playing games, yes, a PC is obviously the first choice for a dedicated gamer. But for casual or occasional gamers, the iMac works jut fine.

My iMac is primarily for work: Animation, video, graphics and development. Apple's stability and reliability in the past has saved my butt more than once when all the PCs in the office failed. It just happens to play games well too.
Click to expand...

I am going to be getting an iMac soon and I will be playing games on it. My needs have changed a lot over the years. Being married I have less time for gaming than I once did. I do however have countless games I have purchased (on Steam mainly) that I haven't even had a chance to play.

The 7970m will play pretty much anything at the moment at 30FPS+ at 2560x1400 in full detail with a few exceptions. Yes, BF3 and Crysis will struggle at those settings. LFD2 and TF3 which I play a lot will be playable with everything turned up to the max.

My current PC is an overclocked Core i7 920 @ 4GHz with a GeForce 470 and it will struggle at the same settings.

I really think the top end iMac with the 7970m will be a fine platform for gaming.
 
You could just upgrade the 470 to a newer card and your PC will be great for gaming.
 
Sue De Nimes said:
In fairness I never needed to reinstall XP either.

This whole thing of having to frequently reinstall Windows is a myth. It is akin to a mechanic replacing the engine in a car because the fan-belt snapped. Yes, it fixes the problem but it isn't a clever way of dealing with it.
Click to expand...

It really depends on your usage profile. If you are installing/uninstalling new software very often, the system will sooner or later became corrupt or bloated/unusable. Users with office usage profile won't see this problem. But I studied computer science + I used to be an avid gamer, which means that I always added some new software (games, programming utilities, stuff I wanted to check out etc.) to my computer. Windows XP would either become a memory hog or blatantly refused to boot approximately once in two month. Of course, it is probably possible to restore the installation without reinstall, but in fact, the reinstall is the smarter way to deal with it, as its often safer and quicker. Since Vista the MS OS is very stable though, not any worse than OS X.
 
leman said:
It really depends on your usage profile. If you are installing/uninstalling new software very often, the system will sooner or later became corrupt or bloated/unusable. Users with office usage profile won't see this problem. But I studied computer science + I used to be an avid gamer, which means that I always added some new software (games, programming utilities, stuff I wanted to check out etc.) to my computer. Windows XP would either become a memory hog or blatantly refused to boot approximately once in two month. Of course, it is probably possible to restore the installation without reinstall, but in fact, the reinstall is the smarter way to deal with it, as its often safer and quicker. Since Vista the MS OS is very stable though, not any worse than OS X.
Click to expand...

I also studied Computer Science in university. However the management of a Windows system didn't come up at any point on the curriculum. I have been gaming for a long time and my Windows based PC has stuff installed and uninstalled on a regular basis. I am still on the same install of Windows that I installed 3 years ago. It hasn't slowed down in any sort of appreciable fashion.

Reinstalling Windows as some sort of housekeeping operation is unnecessary and is most certainly bad practice. Commenting on Windows XP (2001 release date) is not relevant to anything.
 
Sue De Nimes said:
I also studied Computer Science in university. However the management of a Windows system didn't come up at any point on the curriculum. I have been gaming for a long time and my Windows based PC has stuff installed and uninstalled on a regular basis. I am still on the same install of Windows that I installed 3 years ago. It hasn't slowed down in any sort of appreciable fashion.

Reinstalling Windows as some sort of housekeeping operation is unnecessary and is most certainly bad practice. Commenting on Windows XP (2001 release date) is not relevant to anything.
Click to expand...

That I assume that you are using Vista or Windows 7. My post was about Windows XP because the topic I was responding to was Windows XP. And XP is still very popular, whatever the reason.
 
Occamsrazr said:
If PC is so great why don't you marry it and stop posting to iMac boards!
Click to expand...

I am buying an iMac - which is an excellent PC.

I don't buy into format wars - I got that out of my system back in the 80s.

There are reasons to buy a Mac - there are reasons to buy a Windows based computer. I don't think people should make a decision based on fanboy prejudice.
 
iCFX said:
Ah, I based my view on BF3 performance and WoW which isn't good idea since 7000 series is new and there aren't very optimised drivers.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...nce-than-gtx-590-according-notebookcheck.html
Click to expand...

Yeah, I noticed it said to expect it to perform somewhere between the 7870 and 7850 desktop models (As it uses the 7870's features with a lower clock speed) Tom's hardware had a review of the 7870/7850 earlier:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7870-review-benchmark,3148-6.html

So it's probably fair to say it'll perform between those two red bars. :)

Edit: Whoops, the note about it performing between the two is on this page: http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970M.72675.0.html
 
Last edited:
kitsunestudios said:
Yeah, I noticed it said to expect it to perform somewhere between the 7870 and 7850 desktop models (As it uses the 7870's features with a lower clock speed) Tom's hardware had a review of the 7870/7850 earlier:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7870-review-benchmark,3148-6.html

So it's probably fair to say it'll perform between those two red bars. :)

Edit: Whoops, the note about it performing between the two is on this page: http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970M.72675.0.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links, personally I underestimated the 7970m, nice little powerful GPU though.
 
Sue De Nimes said:
I am buying an iMac - which is an excellent PC.

I don't buy into format wars - I got that out of my system back in the 80s.

There are reasons to buy a Mac - there are reasons to buy a Windows based computer. I don't think people should make a decision based on fanboy prejudice.
Click to expand...

I likeke fanboy prejudice
 
kitsunestudios said:
The 680M would also be a great chip, but it seems to have three strikes against it as a candidate for the iMac:

1) The desktop 680 has poor OpenGL/CUDA scores compared to the 500 series. The 7970M series is a better balanced card for people doing 3d, video specialized video processing.
2)nVidia seems to be having trouble meeting demand for the 28nm chips. Apple tries to prevent those sort of supply constraints.
3) ATI seems to be the preferred partner lately anyways.

---

As for playing games, yes, a PC is obviously the first choice for a dedicated gamer. But for casual or occasional gamers, the iMac works jut fine.

My iMac is primarily for work: Animation, video, graphics and development. Apple's stability and reliability in the past has saved my butt more than once when all the PCs in the office failed. It just happens to play games well too.
Click to expand...


Regarding nr (2

Both AMD and Nvidia has problem with 28nm manufactring. AMD has been out months longer then Nvidia but still have problems

However TMC said recently that the production is getting better and better. So that will not be a problem either way
 
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