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Don't care much for multiplayer...

Anyway, the point of my post was to make it clear that iMac is absolutely sufficient for playing BF3 with decent quality on native resolution.

And because you stated that you don't care about what actual frames per second you are getting it nullifies your "opinion". An average of 20-30 frames per second outside may be good enough for an Xbox but c'mon.
 
And because you stated that you don't care about what actual frames per second you are getting it nullifies your "opinion". An average of 20-30 frames per second outside may be good enough for an Xbox but c'mon.

I don't get it: do you want to play a game or boast about irrelevant numbers? The only important thing is the difference about playable and unplayable and my experience with BF3 on the iMac is clearly the first one. Even during most intensive action scenes, with smoke/explosions/particle effects (things which usually bring the fps down to its minimum) there was absolutely no feeling of sluggishness. The game is responsive at all times and the animations are fluid - and this is all what people should care about. I though we learned to be smarter than to rely on dumbed-down numerical benchmarks (remember the 'my CPU/GPU/dishwasher/whatever has more Ghz/GB/Watt' ********?).

True, there are some games where 40 fps is barely playable (thanks to crappy coding) and then again there are games where 25 fps is enough. If BF3 is indeed running at 20-30fps, as you claim, then I'd say the coding team did a good jobs synchronizing animations and rendering. I for once am happy if I can play a game without distractions aka. performance degradation; and in my experience the iMac delivers this with ease in any modern game. You just have to forget about AA and that 'ultra" setting - if you want those, you obviously need a more powerful GPU. And a lower-rez display :)
 
Glad you are happy and it works for you. Some users have higher expectations. Saying it is good enough for you is exactly that, good enough for you. Numbers help wipe away opinion. So I stick with them. Others can then determine if that sounds good enough for them or not.
 
I don't get it: do you want to play a game or boast about irrelevant numbers? The only important thing is the difference about playable and unplayable and my experience with BF3 on the iMac is clearly the first one. Even during most intensive action scenes, with smoke/explosions/particle effects (things which usually bring the fps down to its minimum) there was absolutely no feeling of sluggishness. The game is responsive at all times and the animations are fluid - and this is all what people should care about. I though we learned to be smarter than to rely on dumbed-down numerical benchmarks (remember the 'my CPU/GPU/dishwasher/whatever has more Ghz/GB/Watt' ********?).

True, there are some games where 40 fps is barely playable (thanks to crappy coding) and then again there are games where 25 fps is enough. If BF3 is indeed running at 20-30fps, as you claim, then I'd say the coding team did a good jobs synchronizing animations and rendering. I for once am happy if I can play a game without distractions aka. performance degradation; and in my experience the iMac delivers this with ease in any modern game. You just have to forget about AA and that 'ultra" setting - if you want those, you obviously need a more powerful GPU. And a lower-rez display :)

No, you just don't know any better because you're used to it. Coming from my PC that ran the game at 60fps+, 20-25fps looks like stop-motion animation. I can't stand it, it literally arouses anger in me to watch. Furthermore, it would be terrible for multiplayer where every frame and every millisecond counts. Saying that the animation is "smooth and responsive" at those settings makes you look really ignorant.

If you don't play many games and can't tell the difference then great (ignorance is bliss I suppose), but don't post in this thread saying that everything is gravy. Especially for a multiplayer game.
 
Glad you are happy and it works for you. Some users have higher expectations. Saying it is good enough for you is exactly that, good enough for you. Numbers help wipe away opinion. So I stick with them. Others can then determine if that sounds good enough for them or not.

Would you enlighten me what a higher expectation than "well playable, smooth animations, responsive controls" might be? Somehow I get the feeling that you are trolling.
 
Don't care much for multiplayer...

Anyway, the point of my post was to make it clear that iMac is absolutely sufficient for playing BF3 with decent quality on native resolution.

The game is not worth $60 for the campaign. Campaign is extremely short and shallow, single player is not meant to be a full game at all.
 
No, you just don't know any better because you're used to it. Coming from my PC that ran the game at 60fps+, 20-25fps looks like stop-motion animation. I can't stand it, it literally arouses anger in me to watch. Furthermore, it would be terrible for multiplayer where every frame and every millisecond counts. Saying that the animation is "smooth and responsive" at those settings makes you look really ignorant.

If you don't play many games and can't tell the difference then great (ignorance is bliss I suppose), but don't post in this thread saying that everything is gravy. Especially for a multiplayer game.

1. I was not talking about multiplayer, only about single-player. Learn to read the posts before raging. Anyhow, if you are a hardcore gamer, why did you get an iMac in the first place? A decent PC would have been much cheaper and better suited for your needs.

2. I have played probably more games in my life than you have; in the worst case we are even. I have played them both at very fast machines and very slow machines (try to play through Stalker:Clear Sky on a 9400M - that's no fun). I can very well judge the difference between good and bad performance in a game.

3. If you have the same iMac I have (27", i7 2600) and your BF3 does not perform well in single player with high settings (AA off, native resolution) then I suggest you update your drivers. Or take your iMac in for repairs...


And come on, people, get a grip. I am not advertising the iMac as a gaming machine, its clearly not one and obviously won't perform as well as machines built for gaming. If you want to do competitive gaming, get a PC, so much should be obvious. My only point is that top-end iMac is entirely sufficient for some casual gaming at decent (medium-high) quality and native resolution. And that's not an opinion, thats a fact based on my gaming experience on my iMac with some latest demanding titles.
 
Hey guys im planning on getting an iMac 27 inch and i am also planning on playing some bf3 on it. Do i need the 2GB VRAM or is the 1GB VRAM enough on an otherwise standard iMac, the high-end one. :)

Thanks in advance!
 
And that's not an opinion, thats a fact based on my gaming experience on my iMac with some latest demanding titles.

A fact is not based on your personal experience by definition.
Sorry lost myself there. Gotta get back to the bridge.
 
1. I was not talking about multiplayer, only about single-player. Learn to read the posts before raging. Anyhow, if you are a hardcore gamer, why did you get an iMac in the first place? A decent PC would have been much cheaper and better suited for your needs.

2. I have played probably more games in my life than you have; in the worst case we are even. I have played them both at very fast machines and very slow machines (try to play through Stalker:Clear Sky on a 9400M - that's no fun). I can very well judge the difference between good and bad performance in a game.

3. If you have the same iMac I have (27", i7 2600) and your BF3 does not perform well in single player with high settings (AA off, native resolution) then I suggest you update your drivers. Or take your iMac in for repairs...

1. It's a multiplayer game. They may have tacked on a short little campaign to make it seem more like CoD, but this is still Battlefield. Hell, on the 360 version the campaign is disc 2 while multiplayer is disc 1. :p And I bought the iMac because it's easy. I don't regret the decision either, the non-gaming experience is more important than gaming to me these days. I just take issue with posting BS on the Internet that could mislead people.

2. Clearly you can't, you seem to think that 20fps frame rates are acceptable in a first-person shooter.

3. Yours doesn't perform well either.

I posted what I play at earlier in the thread, that's what I recommend anyone with an ounce of taste play at.
 
Hey guys im planning on getting an iMac 27 inch and i am also planning on playing some bf3 on it. Do i need the 2GB VRAM or is the 1GB VRAM enough on an otherwise standard iMac, the high-end one. :)

Thanks in advance!

Its getting late here in Sweden and im gonna roll down to the store tomorrow! Can some one give me some input please? :)

Sorry to be rushing this! :(
 
Would you enlighten me what a higher expectation than "well playable, smooth animations, responsive controls" might be? Somehow I get the feeling that you are trolling.

I think "Mr. miles" there got the point, rather than saying the game is "playable, smooth, responsive) .. it's much better for you to post the FPS numbers along with it.

Hey .. I believe you if you think it's just smooth and playable, but FPS is just the standard measure for all of us. I'm satisfied with 40+ FPS, anything more than that should feel good enough to me.

But for another people, who demands more .. smooth and playable can be different. So yes, just post some FPS numbers (preferably on busy scene) and you can tell people just how smooth it is to you.


Its getting late here in Sweden and im gonna roll down to the store tomorrow! Can some one give me some input please? :)

Sorry to be rushing this! :(

No!! You DON'T need 2GB VRAM, for gaming, that doesn't mean anything since 6970M is not really that good to utilize all the video RAM. Save yourself the extra money and get system RAM instead. See that with Battlefield 3 only get 40 - 50FPS on 1080p High? It's not really that great .. and you can't even pass 50FPS due to doubled memory. A desktop 6970 might be a different case.

But if you don't mind to spend extra for VRAM, suit yourself. I'm just telling you it's not worth the extra money since it actually give you virtually anything.

SO yes ... roll down to the store now!! Happy hunting :)
 
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No!! You DON'T need 2GB VRAM, for gaming, that doesn't mean anything since 6970M is not really that good to utilize all the video RAM. Save yourself the extra money and get system RAM instead. See that with Battlefield 3 only get 40 - 50FPS on 1080p High? It's not really that great .. and you can't even pass 50FPS due to doubled memory. A desktop 6970 might be a different case.

But if you don't mind to spend extra for VRAM, suit yourself. I'm just telling you it's not worth the extra money since it actually give you virtually anything.

SO yes ... roll down to the store now!! Happy hunting :)

I saw that you were looking for info earlier in this thread, do you play bf3 on your iMac? If so could you post some info? :)

I think ill do that, i just need to be running bf3 smoothly i don't need everything on high settings, ill spend some on ram from macsales instead. :)
 
I think "Mr. miles" there got the point, rather than saying the game is "playable, smooth, responsive) .. it's much better for you to post the FPS numbers along with it.

Hey .. I believe you if you think it's just smooth and playable, but FPS is just the standard measure for all of us. I'm satisfied with 40+ FPS, anything more than that should feel good enough to me.

I understand your point. If BF3 has an option to show FPS I can report my values during the week when I will be playing again (if I don't forget).

However, I must again point out that FPS is far from holy grail benchmark everyone is so obsessed about. Its a subjective measure insofar that the relation of FPS to gameplay quality largely depends on the quality of game's code. Strictly speaking, human vision cannot discriminate more than 20 frames per second. The reason why you usually want to keep FPS high is because the key property is the quality (smoothness) of animation. A movie usually has 25 FPS, but the individual frames are blended together and thus contain a degree of motion blur, which is interpreted by our brain as smooth animation. Now, imagine a game at about 25 fps (with occasional drops) where the animation calculation and rendering are not in sync. This will result in visible "jumpy" animation and other mismatches, which are painfully registered in our brain. Than take another game, at same 25 fps, but using synchronized animation/rendering (important thing here is to animate based on the real-time clock!) and motion blur; that game will look much more believable here. The point is, that there are games which may still look jumpy at 60 fps (because to horribly coded animations) and another one which look very smooth at ~30 fps. This is why I stopped looking at FPS counter long time ago and instead just look if the game has this smooth "movie" feeling to me. If it does, I am happy; if not, I reduce quality settings until it does. Similar by the way is also true for multiplayer games: what you want is actually not high FPS, but a low visual latency. Now, the traditional way to reduce this latency is indeed to increase the FPS and let the brain average away the noise introduced by the (sucky) game engine; anyway, a well synchronized game should keep the visual latency at minimum when above a minimal fps boundary.
 
anyone experiencing random freezes or shutdown while playing bf3 with the catalyst mobility 11.10 finals driver?

it happens pretty randomly sometimes I can go on many games without it, not sure if it's the graphics card or the game itself needing a patch

also if you have tweaked your graphic settings to average a nice FPS please let me know as I'm still testing around
 
I understand your point. If BF3 has an option to show FPS I can report my values during the week when I will be playing again (if I don't forget).

However, I must again point out that FPS is far from holy grail benchmark everyone is so obsessed about. Its a subjective measure insofar that the relation of FPS to gameplay quality largely depends on the quality of game's code. Strictly speaking, human vision cannot discriminate more than 20 frames per second. The reason why you usually want to keep FPS high is because the key property is the quality (smoothness) of animation. A movie usually has 25 FPS, but the individual frames are blended together and thus contain a degree of motion blur, which is interpreted by our brain as smooth animation. Now, imagine a game at about 25 fps (with occasional drops) where the animation calculation and rendering are not in sync. This will result in visible "jumpy" animation and other mismatches, which are painfully registered in our brain. Than take another game, at same 25 fps, but using synchronized animation/rendering (important thing here is to animate based on the real-time clock!) and motion blur; that game will look much more believable here. The point is, that there are games which may still look jumpy at 60 fps (because to horribly coded animations) and another one which look very smooth at ~30 fps. This is why I stopped looking at FPS counter long time ago and instead just look if the game has this smooth "movie" feeling to me. If it does, I am happy; if not, I reduce quality settings until it does. Similar by the way is also true for multiplayer games: what you want is actually not high FPS, but a low visual latency. Now, the traditional way to reduce this latency is indeed to increase the FPS and let the brain average away the noise introduced by the (sucky) game engine; anyway, a well synchronized game should keep the visual latency at minimum when above a minimal fps boundary.

Wow. Um... meh, never mind. I guess I should know better than to argue game performance on a Mac forum.

Everything you said is wrong though, by the way. Please educate yourself a bit and stop making stuff up.
 
help please

Can anyone help me setup battlefield 3 on my iMac? I mean literally from the beggining from installing windows on bootcamp to getting AMD drivers and whatnot so i can be able to run the game. I just bought my iMac(first time using a mac), i got the 27" intel i7 quadcore 3.4ghz, 12 gigs of 1333mhz DDR3 RAM, and the AMD radeon 6970M 1024mb, so i should be able to run BF3 without a problem. If anyone could take the time to answer this I would really apreciate it

Thanks
 
I understand your point. If BF3 has an option to show FPS I can report my values during the week when I will be playing again (if I don't forget).

...

Well if BF3 don't provide an option to display FPS, you can use a software called FRAPS to register your FPS, make it into a TXT logfile and pull the max/min/average FPS as long as you play the game.

And works with every Windows game too ... That will make your statement become credible, you can counterattack people's doubt and they won't complain anymore.

But if you don't have time/intention to do that, it's okay, no harm done :) . At least we know BF3 on 1080p is playable on iMac with 6970M.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BUqklJVvJk

Looks pretty good with almost all settings maxed even on 1080p. It should run even better if he turns down the shadow although he claims 40-50 fps most of the gameplay!

Now that's exactly what I'm looking for. Well as the uploader said, it was locked at 30FPS for recording purpose, so yeah next week I'm going to grab one and play it on my BootCamp. Here I come Frostbite!! :D

Looking from the FPS count, I think it's similar to Crysis1 or Warhead on my iMac, which totally great enough.
 
Wow. Um... meh, never mind. I guess I should know better than to argue game performance on a Mac forum.

Everything you said is wrong though, by the way. Please educate yourself a bit and stop making stuff up.

Buddy, I am a researcher in field of cognitive psychology and I have also coded quite a few 3d demos and hobbyist game engines in the past. Unlike yourself (as it seems), my education does not come from internet forums.

You do have a point though that some of what I said may be interpreted in a wrong way. Especially the "human vision cannot discriminate more than 20 frames per second" part. Obviously, this is meant in a context of continuous smooth animation like in movies or computer games. Let me rephrase it: "for continuous animation, like movies and games, around 20 frames per second are already enough to provide enjoyable viewing experience". There is a reason why cinema industry works with 24 frames per second, you know; or do modern movies look as having too low "fps" to you?
 
Buddy, I am a researcher in field of cognitive psychology and I have also coded quite a few 3d demos and hobbyist game engines in the past. Unlike yourself (as it seems), my education does not come from internet forums.

You do have a point though that some of what I said may be interpreted in a wrong way. Especially the "human vision cannot discriminate more than 20 frames per second" part. Obviously, this is meant in a context of continuous smooth animation like in movies or computer games. Let me rephrase it: "for continuous animation, like movies and games, around 20 frames per second are already enough to provide enjoyable viewing experience". There is a reason why cinema industry works with 24 frames per second, you know; or do modern movies look as having too low "fps" to you?


Without taking sides in this slightly heated exchange this article may be of interest to both parties:

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/04/12/the-hobbit-48-frames-peter-jackson/
 
Buddy, I am a researcher in field of cognitive psychology and I have also coded quite a few 3d demos and hobbyist game engines in the past. Unlike yourself (as it seems), my education does not come from internet forums.

You do have a point though that some of what I said may be interpreted in a wrong way. Especially the "human vision cannot discriminate more than 20 frames per second" part. Obviously, this is meant in a context of continuous smooth animation like in movies or computer games. Let me rephrase it: "for continuous animation, like movies and games, around 20 frames per second are already enough to provide enjoyable viewing experience". There is a reason why cinema industry works with 24 frames per second, you know; or do modern movies look as having too low "fps" to you?

FPS in movies at 23.97 is a bit different than trying to lock FPS with your monitors refresh rate. 24fps in movies was to mimic film not because of the human eye limitations. Regardless of coding ability, as you yourself are a self professed unemployed master of. No gamers will ever be OK with 20fps. No developers are happy with 20fps. Why argue the fact? You are happy. That is super cool. No one will believe your opinion as fact. You should not expect them to. Nor is there a reason to continue arguing. As stated you are fine with your results in game. Move on.
 
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FPS in movies at 23.97 is a bit different than trying to lock FPS with your monitors refresh rate. 24fps in movies was to mimic film not because of the human eye limitations ....

Maybe this is a bit off topic, but I can't help myself:

Exactly agreed with the quoted statement .. and I love movies on 24FPS since it looks more artistic and all. But I don't know, some manufacturers start to boast fast motion interpolation. Suddenly all motions on a movie being awkwardly smooth .. key word is awkward BTW :rolleyes: ..

And how do you put it? start to look like a cheap soap opera or documentary show. Hell all modern TV (even with no so called motion smoothing) can display smooth motion if the show recorded in say 30 or 60FPS, why ruins the 24FPS experience with some expensive garbage interpolation?
 
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