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Questions about......iMac and gaming

G

GolfZilla

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hello all, i'm registered into this nice forum from today, i've bought an iMac whose arrived three days ago: 24", Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme 2,8GHz, ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256 mb. Reading and asking into italian forums i noticed that macs are not powerful and not good for gaming. Thinking this forum is the best now on the web for mac users i have got some questions that i'd like to post:
1-Is this iMac good for gaming?
2-If is good for gaming is better using XP with bootcamp or OS X?
3-If is better OS X have i got to use Cider to convert games?
4-Is enough powerful the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256mb to play the latest games with good graphics setting(my compatriots told me that it's enough if i be able to play the first age of empires with the lowest settings!!!!! 😀 I wish you all don't confirm it!!! )?
5-Nowadays i'm using an IBM with Windows Xp, Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHZ, 1,0 GB RAM, Radeon X1900 GT. Which one is better for gaming(iMac or IBM)?

TY for listening to me, waiting for answers! :apple:
 
GolfZilla said:
Hello all, i'm registered into this nice forum from today, i've bought an iMac whose arrived three days ago: 24", Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme 2,8GHz, ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256 mb. Reading and asking into italian forums i noticed that macs are not powerful and not good for gaming. Thinking this forum is the best now on the web for mac users i have got some questions that i'd like to post:
1-Is this iMac good for gaming?
2-If is good for gaming is better using XP with bootcamp or OS X?
3-If is better OS X have i got to use Cider to convert games?
4-Is enough powerful the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256mb to play the latest games with good graphics setting(my compatriots told me that it's enough if i be able to play the first age of empires with the lowest settings!!!!! 😀 I wish you all don't confirm it!!! )?
5-Nowadays i'm using an IBM with Windows Xp, Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHZ, 1,0 GB RAM, Radeon X1900 GT. Which one is better for gaming(iMac or IBM)?

TY for listening to me, waiting for answers! :apple:
Click to expand...

Firstly I'd like to state that Macs aren't meant to be compared to PCs in gaming. They weren't made to game in the first place.

1. The iMac is never the best gaming computer. A PC/Mac Pro would be more adequate. If you don't require the highest and isn't a hardcore it's good enough, definitely.

2. Windows XP certainly has much more games, and Boot Camp can run XP at Native Speed (supposedly), but the lack of DX10 is certainly a problem. OS X doesn't offer much titles, but most of the good ones are on it.

3. No. Cider is no good in many titles.

4. Well, I can confirm that it definitely can run Age of Empires at lowest settings 😀. But it can also run Age of Empires III at Max settings. Hope that helps you. However, the HD2600 Pro is definitely not the best graphic card out there. It's a good mid-level card suitable for most people. To play the really good graphic games, again, you should get the Mac Pro (with the update -prays that it's 8800GT/X- coming soon).

EDIT: 5. The IBM Rig beats the iMac 24" 2.8Ghz hands-down, but only in gaming. Definitely not in real-life performance though (C2D>P4).
 
GolfZilla said:
deon HD 2600 PRO 256mb to play the latest games with good graphics setting(my compatriots told me that it's enough if i be able to play the first age of empires with the lowest settings!!!!! 😀 I wish you all don't confirm it!!! )?

TY for listening to me, waiting for answers! :apple:
Click to expand...

Not true. Your compatriots are exaggerating quite a bit.
 
mingyishi said:
lol it is true. The HD2600 is good enough to run AOE on lowest setting. It's just that it can also run AOEIII at Max Settings.
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hehe, you're just playing word games 😛

His friends implied that it would just be able to run AOE I on lowest settings, and not run any game more advanced than AOE I. That's just plain silly.
 
The verdict:

The iMac beats the IBM tower in everything except gaming, in which case the iMac gets pwned. Hope that helped. 🙂
 
kresh said:
hehe, you're just playing word games 😛

His friends implied that it would just be able to run AOE I on lowest settings, and not run any game more advanced than AOE I. That's just plain silly.
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My friend pc technician told me that this imac was the best choice for gaming and that pc's like falcon northwest v are for children whose want to be seen from their friends. I told him i read in this italian forum that imac was not for gaming and he told me to go to USA Forums and that there they would tell me that was the best choice for gaming.!!
 
GolfZilla said:
My friend pc technician told me that this imac was the best choice for gaming and that pc's like falcon northwest v are for children whose want to be seen from their friends. I told him i read in this italian forum that imac was not for gaming and he told me to go to USA Forums and that there they would tell me that was the best choice for gaming.!!
Click to expand...

As posted earlier, this iMac is good for the average gamer. The best gaming Mac is the Mac Pro. It's doubtless, and us Mac lover still have to face the fact that PCs are more superior and economical in gaming.
 
Hi there! I have the same machine like you, and all I can tell you is I've played Bioshock & Medal of Honor Airborne under xp with bootcamp and both run perfectly with all settings on high (except the dx10 one obviously) with the native resolution of 1920x1200.

Under OS X I play World of Warcraft and get 50-60 fps, again at 1920x1200 with almost all settings maxed.

For current games the 2,8 ghz iMac is certainly powerful enough, I don't expect it to run new titles this good one year from now, but personally I didn't buy it as a gaming machine. A Mac Pro & CS3 Design Standard would have been too expensive for me, so the iMac was my best option.
 
chaosbunny said:
Hi there! I have the same machine like you, and all I can tell you is I've played Bioshock & Medal of Honor Airborne under xp with bootcamp and both run perfectly with all settings on high (except the dx10 one obviously) with the native resolution of 1920x1200.

Under OS X I play World of Warcraft and get 50-60 fps, again at 1920x1200 with almost all settings maxed.

For current games the 2,8 ghz iMac is certainly powerful enough, I don't expect it to run new titles this good one year from now, but personally I didn't buy it as a gaming machine. A Mac Pro & CS3 Design Standard would have been too expensive for me, so the iMac was my best option.
Click to expand...

Ibm or iMac? 😀
 
chaosbunny said:
lol, ok you got me! 😀

Obviously I meant the iMac, I wouldn't need bootcamp on an Ibm. 😉
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I meant: what i choose? Ibm or iMac for gaming(lol). Nobody got nobody 😀 I remember i played all the mission of Medal Of Honor Airborne with my Ibm and with my X1900 gt at medium settings because at high ones it had a lot of lags, mostly when there where a lot of enemies to fight!!!!
 
The imac is actually very good for gaming, so long as you don't insist on playing the very latest games at max resolution and max settings. To get a decent experience though, you'll need to install xp (or possibly vista) and install the latest ati drivers. Some games are available for mac, too.

A couple I've tried lately: half life 2 (ran perfectly (~70fps) at 1900x1200, all settings on max, AA turned off) and the crysis demo (ran perfectly and very smoothly at 1024x600 with all settings on high, AA off)

The imac will probably be better for some games and worse for others compared to your ibm. The cpu should be much faster, and I guess the video card will be slower but have more and newer features than your old one.
 
Reading and asking into italian forums i noticed that macs are not powerful and not good for gaming.
Click to expand...

iMacs are very powerful. They've got a seriously fast processor and up to date architecture.

The graphics chip (Radeon HD2600) is a decent enough performer. Not spectacular by any means, but not the crap card a lot of people think it is and like to say.

A lot of the people on PC forums spend big bucks on very expensive cards and tend to look down on the lower midrange GPUs.

You're best off running games through Bootcamp and Windows XP or Vista.

The only Macs that I wouldn't like to play games on are the Mini and MacBook.
 
AlexisV said:
The graphics chip (Radeon HD2600) is a decent enough performer. Not spectacular by any means, but not the crap card a lot of people think it is and like to say.
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http://www.barefeats.com/imacal.html
The ATI HD2600 in the new iMac doesn't perform too well against a white iMac with a nVidia 7600.

On a sidenote: As the bottleneck is the graphics card you can save yourself some money if you go for the 2.4 Ghz C2D CPU. When it comes to game performance it doesn't matter which CPU you have.
 
pechspilz said:
http://www.barefeats.com/imacal.html
The ATI HD2600 in the new iMac doesn't perform too well against a white iMac with a nVidia 7600.

On a sidenote: As the bottleneck is the graphics card you can save yourself some money if you go for the 2.4 Ghz C2D CPU. When it comes to game performance it doesn't matter which CPU you have.
Click to expand...

The HD2600 is more superior to the GeForce 7600 in many ways, however its gaming is just not up to standard with it.

I mean, it can run CS3 so much faster. Same goes for Video Editing/Encoding.
 
ImperialX said:
The HD2600 is more superior to the GeForce 7600 in many ways, however its gaming is just not up to standard with it.

I mean, it can run CS3 so much faster. Same goes for Video Editing/Encoding.
Click to expand...

Isn't gaming standard to HD2600? Is more adapt x1900? With all these affirmations i'm a bit confused!
 
pechspilz said:
http://www.barefeats.com/imacal.html
The ATI HD2600 in the new iMac doesn't perform too well against a white iMac with a nVidia 7600.

On a sidenote: As the bottleneck is the graphics card you can save yourself some money if you go for the 2.4 Ghz C2D CPU. When it comes to game performance it doesn't matter which CPU you have.
Click to expand...

The barefeats tests aren't really that useful. On the OS X side, the drivers for the 2600 aren't really up to scratch yet, while the 7600 ones are pretty mature. With a few updates (and I recall somebody saying that ATI are working on new drivers that are optimised for performance) the 2600 should improve a lot under OSX. I think that in a few months the picture will look very different.

From what I remember, they benchmarked games under windows using the beta bootcamp drivers. Installing ATI's latest drivers speeds things up a lot.
 
Google some benchmarks for games under Windows, not OS X. Tom's Hardware have got some good ones.

It also depends on what games you're looking at. Need For Speed Carbon flies on the HD2600 for example, and other games fly on the nVidia.
 
GolfZilla said:
Hey guys the HD 2600 PRO for iMac drivers seems to be out http://www.driverheaven.net/ati-radeon-drivers/147188-catalyst-7-10-out-now.html
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Huh? That's just the normal Windows ATI drivers. A quick look at ATI's page confirms that there's nothing specifically for the mac 2600 card, and there's nothing for bootcamp either. So there are no 'imac drivers' to download.

You can of course use the ATI drivers for the 2600 card in windows - download the current catalyst drivers from the ATI site, and either use mobility modder to install them or install them from windows device manager. I've been using 7.10 for a while, they're not what I'd call bug free but probably great for just gaming. And miles better than the standard bootcamp drivers. Get them here:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp
 
psonice said:
Huh? That's just the normal Windows ATI drivers. A quick look at ATI's page confirms that there's nothing specifically for the mac 2600 card, and there's nothing for bootcamp either. So there are no 'imac drivers' to download.

You can of course use the ATI drivers for the 2600 card in windows - download the current catalyst drivers from the ATI site, and either use mobility modder to install them or install them from windows device manager. I've been using 7.10 for a while, they're not what I'd call bug free but probably great for just gaming. And miles better than the standard bootcamp drivers. Get them here:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp
Click to expand...

ATI Display Driver
Setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware or operating system. Setup will now exit. 😕
 
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