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Best imac to run "Ultra mode" on WoW?

A

akal575

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2010
88
0
Hey so I currently have a macbook and the only way I can play is if Im on the "low" setting for graphics and at that I get about 60 FPS max.

I am thinking about purchasing an imac so my question is, which imac would be best and be able to run "ultra" graphics mode? I am really not that computer savvy so what exactly would make a computer be able to run WoW in ultra? Better video card, graphics card, processor?

I really want to get an imac as my desktop computer, so anyone who can help me on this that would be great :)

I just don't want to go buy the wrong one, and then I load up WoW, and I'm running on "low" graphics settings again, and essentially waste my money.
 
Ultra Mode ? 27 inch iMac ? High Resolution ? gnah.. don´t buy a iMac - buy a Mac Pro with the ATI 5870 (if you can afford it)
However - if you prefer the iMac i would get the fastest video card for it apple offers.
later upgrading would be very expensive if possible.
besides you will not need the i7 cpu - the i5 will do it also.
 
iMac 27, fastes GPU, SSD is my Setup

and I DO NOT play on Ultra because FPS are too low!
Bootcamp may add 5fps but still not good enough.

I play on everything on Good and tbh im dissapointed in terms of WoW Performance...

Low => 200 fps
Good => 60 fps (drops sometimes to 30)
Ultra=> 20 fps

Cheers
Ausn
 
nasabaer said:
Ultra Mode ? 27 inch iMac ? High Resolution ? gnah.. don´t buy a iMac - buy a Mac Pro with the ATI 5870 (if you can afford it)
However - if you prefer the iMac i would get the fastest video card for it apple offers.
later upgrading would be very expensive if possible.
besides you will not need the i7 cpu - the i5 will do it also.
Click to expand...

Why would you recommend the mac pro over the iMac? I just want to make sure I get the right one, so I don't load WoW on it and then take it home and my FPS is abysmal on ultra.
 
My friend has the low end 27" model, and according to him it runs fine maxed out. But seriously, you shouldn't base a computer purchase on a game, especially WoW.
 
All he said was,

dont buy an iMac if you wanna play WoW on ultra.
 
Unless youre looking to spend a lot of money WoW will have a hard time running on most affordable Macs on ultra. Your best bet is to try running it under Boot Camp on the highest end iMac or purchase a decent PC since I assume you're mostly interested in WoW running on Ultra.
Unfortunately if you're only looking to game on your Mac its best just to buy a PC and get a Mac mini for everything else. Will run you less then trying to get the most expensive Macs just to run WoW. :D
 
you recommend wrong machine even this is mac forum. if you want to play games without problem, just buy damn PC. it's much cheaper, faster than imac, mac pro with that price. if you still try to buy even though performance you are not satisfied, you are idiot or retarded. it's not all about damn apple fanboy. I don't waste that much money for playing games. that's totally waste.

PS) WOW doesn't require high end system. mac isn't simply optimized for gaming, and doesn't support directX because your mac os ox doesn't have and never support. open GL is full of crap. plus, mac graphic card is very narrow selected to play games.
 
If you're looking at a new computer solely for WoW, you're better off with a PC. You can get a PC which beats all iMacs for less than 1000$ and it's upgradeable and will thus last for several years. You can keep using the MacBook for everything else.
 
archurban said:
you recommend wrong machine even this is mac forum. if you want to play games without problem, just buy damn PC. it's much cheaper, faster than imac, mac pro with that price. if you still try to buy even though performance you are not satisfied, you are idiot or retarded. it's not all about damn apple fanboy. I don't waste that much money for playing games. that's totally waste.

PS) WOW doesn't require high end system. mac isn't simply optimized for gaming, and doesn't support directX because your mac os ox doesn't have and never support. open GL is full of crap. plus, mac graphic card is very narrow selected to play games.
Click to expand...

Are you just on this site to troll?
 
What, you expected him to have something productive to say? That would be too easy. ;)
 
Sambo110 said:
Are you just on this site to troll?
Click to expand...

Yes he is.

He claims owning a mac gives him the right to spew **** in every ****ing thread but frankly I think he is due a banhammer attack to the cranium, he adds nothing productive at all to any discussion and calling people "idiots and retards" is a sure sign of him being both.
 
I have an i5 with 4850. 8gb Ram.

I do fine on max settings in WOW at full resolution, however I cannot run "ultra" because of Blizzard bugs with water and sunbeam rendering. Does fine in 25 mans regardless. (never pulled a power point presentation if you know what I mean)
 
Would someone be so kind to post how the game performs on a Mac Pro with ATI 5870 or link to a benchmark ? Thanks.
 
i have the 21.5 inch Imac with the ati 5670 graphics card, 4 gb of ram and i3 processor. I have all settings on ultra except shadows (medium) and multisampling on 4x ... I get 50-60 fps in open areas and between 38-50 fps in Dalaran.
 
OS X is terrible at graphics and Open GL:

Let me give you some hard empirical data:

First, I actually teach computer science at a university. It doesn't make me an expert or a god or anything like that, but I really know what I'm doing when it comes to programming, compiling, optimizing, and look at an OS's subsystem.

I have a MBP (see my sig). If I try to compile the same graphic app under Windows (via BC) and also under OS X, OS X will consistently be 15 fps (or more) SLOWER than Windows.

I'm not talking DirectX vs OpenGL, I'm talking straight OpenGL apps.

You want to know how bad it is? For two weeks I thought I was doing something wrong with my compiles. I checked everything (gcc, my makefile, my headers, etc...) and even went back to Apple Dev to see why there was such a huge gap on the same hardware between OS X and Windows.

I finally went to some forums to investigate and have found many people in the same situation. It eventually led me to a thread with some of the programmers of Dolphin (GC emulator).

Dolphin is not perfect but its mature enough that I think you could use it for some useable benchmarks on graphics when you compile a version of Windows and one for OS X.

I could not get the same performance out of Dolphin under OpenGL that I could get under Windows maxed out. In the beginning I felt that the performance gap was too wide and I could find some optimizations and compile changes to bring it much closer. I could not.

Far from being perfect, I emailed others who were compiling for both Windows and OS X and asked about their experiences. They too were getting the same results.

I was shocked to say the least.

If we broaden our experiments to other games for both PC and Mac its also easy to see which is faster (even if you eliminate Direct X) but you also introduce variables that make any concrete benchmarks worthless. Cider for example is just WINE which obviously throws any results.

So lets ask a simple question: Why? Why is it so much slower?

I can only make educated guesses but the most common 'guess' I've heard is that OS X video drivers are at fault for a number of reasons:

-Apple doesn't care about optimizing and its better to have a basic driver that covers many families of the video chip. You could (maybe) argue this buys you stability over performance but that is iffy.

-ATi/nVidia are pushing for Windows so Unix/Linux suffer and Apple does not (cannot?) do anything to improve them.

-NextStep was incredibly slow with graphics (being PostScript based) and perhaps that handling of the graphics by the OS is still in place. Again, you are thinking stable OS, sharp graphics (not game graphics), portable code, etc..maybe.

I would love to talk with the OS X group about this because 10.6.x isn't exactly new and they have had the time to mature the graphics driver and subsystem so I don't know what the deal here is.

I can only post empirical based evidence and I can say in my testing, OS X is just slow when it comes to games and fast graphic manipulation.

I really do love OS X so I wish this would change under 10.7 but I doubt it will.


Cheers!
P
 
Pentad said:
OS X is terrible at graphics and Open GL:

Let me give you some hard empirical data:

First, I actually teach computer science at a university. It doesn't make me an expert or a god or anything like that, but I really know what I'm doing when it comes to programming, compiling, optimizing, and look at an OS's subsystem.

I have a MBP (see my sig). If I try to compile the same graphic app under Windows (via BC) and also under OS X, OS X will consistently be 15 fps (or more) SLOWER than Windows.

I'm not talking DirectX vs OpenGL, I'm talking straight OpenGL apps.

You want to know how bad it is? For two weeks I thought I was doing something wrong with my compiles. I checked everything (gcc, my makefile, my headers, etc...) and even went back to Apple Dev to see why there was such a huge gap on the same hardware between OS X and Windows.

I finally went to some forums to investigate and have found many people in the same situation. It eventually led me to a thread with some of the programmers of Dolphin (GC emulator).

Dolphin is not perfect but its mature enough that I think you could use it for some useable benchmarks on graphics when you compile a version of Windows and one for OS X.

I could not get the same performance out of Dolphin under OpenGL that I could get under Windows maxed out. In the beginning I felt that the performance gap was too wide and I could find some optimizations and compile changes to bring it much closer. I could not.

Far from being perfect, I emailed others who were compiling for both Windows and OS X and asked about their experiences. They too were getting the same results.

I was shocked to say the least.

If we broaden our experiments to other games for both PC and Mac its also easy to see which is faster (even if you eliminate Direct X) but you also introduce variables that make any concrete benchmarks worthless. Cider for example is just WINE which obviously throws any results.

So lets ask a simple question: Why? Why is it so much slower?

I can only make educated guesses but the most common 'guess' I've heard is that OS X video drivers are at fault for a number of reasons:

-Apple doesn't care about optimizing and its better to have a basic driver that covers many families of the video chip. You could (maybe) argue this buys you stability over performance but that is iffy.

-ATi/nVidia are pushing for Windows so Unix/Linux suffer and Apple does not (cannot?) do anything to improve them.

-NextStep was incredibly slow with graphics (being PostScript based) and perhaps that handling of the graphics by the OS is still in place. Again, you are thinking stable OS, sharp graphics (not game graphics), portable code, etc..maybe.

I would love to talk with the OS X group about this because 10.6.x isn't exactly new and they have had the time to mature the graphics driver and subsystem so I don't know what the deal here is.

I can only post empirical based evidence and I can say in my testing, OS X is just slow when it comes to games and fast graphic manipulation.

I really do love OS X so I wish this would change under 10.7 but I doubt it will.


Cheers!
P
Click to expand...
You're right... except for one part (IMO). "Apple doesn't care". That used to be the case, but apple is (slowly) starting to see gaming and realtime graphics are important.

Lately it seems apple is trying to make openGL better..... Or at least more bearable. There has already been one update dedicated to graphic drivers. It helped a bit.. I expect more to come.. Especially with the mac appstore, indie developers are really going to be using the appstore to push their games (cheap simple way to get their game to the masses).
Eventually apple will see macs have the potential to be more gaming platforms than they currently are.
Steam really pushed apple in this direction, and I think the mac appstore will help the mac platform mature even more... As a gaming platform at least :)

Of course, this is just my opinion and theory. :D
 
Not a bad theory. The nice thing about steam is that it offers an easy parallel benchmark for which to compare Open GL/CL vs. Direct X. They can also be areas where programmers can tweak, not just for the occasional blizzard game. That is the hope. Or we may have to wait for a major update only after something like Diablo 3 comes out.
 
My MBP (15" late 2009) starts to catch on fire when playing on the recommended settings. It runs like WoW BC ran on my first generation macbook. Any ideas besides that integrated graphics suck?
 
I play WoW on my 2006 MBP. Core 2 Duo 2.33, 2 GB of RAM, and ATI X1600.

I play on low settings and frame rate is very nice and smooth. If I put to Medium settings, it is still mostly smooth, but gets jerky in a few spots. This is on a MBP from 2006. Oh-Six! It is 4+ years old now. I have a hard time believing that a modern Mac wouldn't handle the ultra settings.

Although screen resolution will make a big difference. I'm playing at 1440x900, which is my MBP's screen size. If you're playing at 1920x1080 or something huge like that, then yeah, you'll want the beefiest graphics card you can find.
 
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