To those of you who game on your iMac...

[weezin]

I'd love to do a little light gaming on my 2011 27" base, but the performance isn't the best (obviously).

Any tips for getting the most out of the machine when you game with it?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What games and what GPU do you have?

 

[TEG]

Upgrade the RAM. Otherwise you should be fine.

TEG

 

[0983275]

What games and what GPU do you have?

6770m most likely (if I remember right, that's the base GPU choice for 2011 27" iMacs, with the option to upgrade to 6970m.)

While not the best GPU, it should be able to handle most games fine if you turn down the settings.

If I'm not wrong, 6770m is based on desktop 6670, which is a rebrand of 5670. (6970m is based on desktop 6870.)

I had a desktop 5670 and it ran Crysis at medium settings reasonably decent (say 30fps ish at 1080p), to give you an idea of its performance, but with 27" iMac's native resolution of 2560x1440 you'll have to turn down the settings a bit further, depending on the game.

 

[weezin]

Thanks guys. Yes, it's the 6770m I believe.

Another option would be to run the game in a smaller window, thus reducing the resolution, yes?

I guess what I was wondering also is if things like turning Time Machine off would help a lot, disabling Dropbox, etc. Not sure that those would result in bigger gains.

I've run Battlefield 3 via Bootcamp and it works OKAY...on greatly reduced settings.

 

[0983275]

Disabling Time Machine and Dropbox won't do much (though it's probably a good idea to stop syncing stuff with Dropbox if you're playing online)

You can lower the resolution and play games in full screen but it won't look as good, if you don't mind smaller space, windowed mode isn't a bad idea.

 

[Siderz]

What kind of games are you going to be playing?

 

[mrmarts]

This is going sound crazy is 512mb of graphics still enough to play lastest games like sim city and bio shock infinity or is it time I buy a new iMac with 2gb of video ram.

 

[Siderz]

This is going sound crazy is 512mb of graphics still enough to play lastest games like sim city and bio shock infinity or is it time I buy a new iMac with 2gb of video ram.

It's bound to be able to play anything, just not on the highest of the highest settings.

If you want to get a computer mainly for gaming, a Mac is not the kind of computer you need. You want to look at getting a Windows PC.