Can the current 5k macs handle heavy graphics video and games at high res?

[nerdynerdynerdy]

iMacs are for looks, watching online videos and social media activities.

I'm freelancing at one of the biggest film and television companies in the world, editing a top-rating nationally-broadcast tv show. I'm sitting in front of a 5K iMac, as is every other editor and producer in the building.

We're all coping just fine.

 

[Laai]

Well, if you want to play latest AAA titles on a 5k resolution with decent framerate and image quality, you would need Titan-class GFX card, probably in SLI/Crossfire mode.

I play some games on my 5k iMac with i5, 16GB RAM and M395X. CS:GO on 2k resolution, all settings to high and I get about 150-200fps, if all settings are on low, I have 270+ fps. I played AC:Unity and Syndicate with almost all settings on high and 2k resolution without any issues. Game was smooth and responsive and I was really surprised at M395X was able to deliver.

I play all my games on a win10 partition that is solely used for games. Nothing else is installed besides win10, drivers and games.

 

[Steve121178]

iMac is a laptop on a stick. Good for general use & consuming content but that is about it.

Macs are not gaming machines. If gaming is one of your priorities then look elsewhere. I cannot stress this enough.

 

[jerwin]

The imac, and indeed, most Apple devices, are intended to be used by the set of ordinary computing users who are annoyed by jaggies and anti-aliasing artifacts. If that set does not intersect with the set of gamers, so be it.

 

[joema2]

....Apple is ridiculous. Even on their laptops, you can't even get a dedicated GPU until you get the most expensive 15 inch for 2500 bucks. And even that comes with a mid-range GPU. Their pursuit of thinness and their greediness leaves out options for more graphically intensive options.

This has less to do with thinness than you may think. It is simply impossible to run extremely high frame rate, 4K/5K resolution AAA games on a normal all-in-one computer -- no matter who makes it. The problem is not Apple making the iMac excessively thin. If they made it twice as thick it would still be impossible. It requires a high-end full-size GPU or multiple GPUs. That cannot fit in a normal all-in-one design -- whether thick or thin.

So achieving this would require more than a thicker iMac -- it would require abandoning the iMac all-in-one design (which has been the standard since it was invented), or some cobbled-together kludge, or adding another completely different Mac to the lineup. It would essentially require some Mac Pro-style form factor. So statements that Apple precluded this by foolishly making the iMac too thin are incorrect -- they betray a lack of understanding about current technology.

MSI just announced an all-in-one design that might run graphics like this -- the MSI Gaming 27XT. It is twice the weight of an iMac 27, consumes 2-3 times the power, is about four times as thick depending on how you measure it -- and looks like a monstrosity: http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/X/549609/gallery/Gaming-27XT_05_w_600.png

There is no way Apple is going to make anything like that when AMD and nVidia's new 14/16nm fabrication will double GPU horsepower this year while maintaining the same form factor. That still won't be enough to play a 5K AAA game at 60 frames per second but it will be a big improvement for most practical GPU-dependant applications.

 

[\-V-/]

This has less to do with thinness than you may think. It is simply impossible to run extremely high frame rate, 4K/5K resolution AAA games on a normal all-in-one computer -- no matter who makes it. The problem is not Apple making the iMac excessively thin. If they made it twice as thick it would still be impossible. It requires a high-end full-size GPU or multiple GPUs. That cannot fit in a normal all-in-one design -- whether thick or thin.

So achieving this would require more than a thicker iMac -- it would require abandoning the iMac all-in-one design (which has been the standard since it was invented), or some cobbled-together kludge, or adding another completely different Mac to the lineup. It would essentially require some Mac Pro-style form factor. So statements that Apple precluded this by foolishly making the iMac too thin are incorrect -- they betray a lack of understanding about current technology.

MSI just announced an all-in-one design that might run graphics like this -- the MSI Gaming 27XT. It is twice the weight of an iMac 27, consumes 2-3 times the power, is about four times as thick depending on how you measure it -- and looks like a monstrosity: http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/X/549609/gallery/Gaming-27XT_05_w_600.png

There is no way Apple is going to make anything like that when AMD and nVidia's new 14/16nm fabrication will double GPU horsepower this year while maintaining the same form factor. That still won't be enough to play a 5K AAA game at 60 frames per second but it will be a big improvement for most practical GPU-dependant applications.

You quoted my comment on their laptops ... and then said nothing about their laptops. You can't get a dedicated GPU on a Mac laptop until you spend 2500 bucks. Think about that. And even at that price ... it's a mid-range mobile GPU. That is a SEVERE problem with Apple.

 

[cynics]

You quoted my comment on their laptops ... and then said nothing about their laptops. You can't get a dedicated GPU on a Mac laptop until you spend 2500 bucks. Think about that. And even at that price ... it's a mid-range mobile GPU. That is a SEVERE problem with Apple.

What is the use case that you would classify the MBP as having a severe problem without a dedicated GPU?

 

[Seed101]

Even with the base model?
That's good, while I am not an expert with components tech specs, I have heard a lot of complaints that the current gpu on the iMacs "can't push all those pixels in the screen" or something in that vain.

Why not get the top end iMac if you're looking to edit 4k video and photo's?
[doublepost=1461058215][/doublepost]

I would not buy an iMac for anything demanding. When under load it will overheat and throttle down. Happens in games or longer cpu/gpu heavy operations, like rendering longer 4k videos for example. The problem with iMacs is that they are a laptop on a stick. They don't offer the advantage of a laptop: mobility. And they don't offer the advantages of a desktop: upgradeability and speed. And their mirror screen is awful for anything where accurate colors are important.

iMacs are for looks, watching online videos and social media activities.

IMO The top end iMac is a pretty good all rounder for the money actually.

I've just rendered out a heavy job from After Effects comprising 10 3 minute HD video's (hours of rendering) and while the fans flare up at the start of each render whilst pre-loading the ram the actually renders were quiet and efficient...I was pleasantly surprised...

They're are always going to be compromises between form, cost and efficiency...but this is good compromise IMO.

 

[DrDoug]

The bickering on this forum is pathetic.

 

[varian55zx]

I'd like to move the discussion over to Apple is embarrassing themselves, because that is what they're doing.

Instead of complaining as the victim, I'd much rather bring light to various things Apple does that are simply disgusting.

The way Apple penny pinches is simply disgusting. I have no choice to buy Apple because OS X is drastically better than Windows, always has been always will be. It's still the same OS X today more or less as it was 10 years ago. It functions the same (once you turn all the old options back on) but Apple has a pension for yes ripping off their customers, but also putting out products one after the other that are disgusting, or have disgusting aspects.

I won't mention the obvious but the aspects of the 5K machine mentioned in this thread fit the bill, I still happen to love my computer but I don't use it for much else than web browsing. For that it works fine.

But the performance vs price numbers simply don't add up. They don't. What exactly is their return on these things? It's hard to fathom why they choose to make them as low performance for the price as they do.

I suppose people who pay attention to specs are really that low of a percentage of their overall customer base.

 

[cynics]

I'd like to move the discussion over to Apple is embarrassing themselves, because that is what they're doing.

Instead of complaining as the victim, I'd much rather bring light to various things Apple does that are simply disgusting.

The way Apple penny pinches is simply disgusting. I have no choice to buy Apple because OS X is drastically better than Windows, always has been always will be. It's still the same OS X today more or less as it was 10 years ago. It functions the same (once you turn all the old options back on) but Apple has a pension for yes ripping off their customers, but also putting out products one after the other that are disgusting, or have disgusting aspects.

I won't mention the obvious but the aspects of the 5K machine mentioned in this thread fit the bill, I still happen to love my computer but I don't use it for much else than web browsing. For that it works fine.

But the performance vs price numbers simply don't add up. They don't. What exactly is their return on these things? It's hard to fathom why they choose to make them as low performance for the price as they do.

I suppose people who pay attention to specs are really that low of a percentage of their overall customer base.

Do you consider the plethora of software including the OS you covent a spec?

Last PC I built I was around 500 dollars into software and still no where near what my Mac came with in quantity or quality.

 

[AlexGraphicD]

I'd like to move the discussion over to Apple is embarrassing themselves, because that is what they're doing.

Instead of complaining as the victim, I'd much rather bring light to various things Apple does that are simply disgusting.

The way Apple penny pinches is simply disgusting. I have no choice to buy Apple because OS X is drastically better than Windows, always has been always will be. It's still the same OS X today more or less as it was 10 years ago. It functions the same (once you turn all the old options back on) but Apple has a pension for yes ripping off their customers, but also putting out products one after the other that are disgusting, or have disgusting aspects.

I won't mention the obvious but the aspects of the 5K machine mentioned in this thread fit the bill, I still happen to love my computer but I don't use it for much else than web browsing. For that it works fine.

But the performance vs price numbers simply don't add up. They don't. What exactly is their return on these things? It's hard to fathom why they choose to make them as low performance for the price as they do.

I suppose people who pay attention to specs are really that low of a percentage of their overall customer base.

Ha, so true the bold part.
But isn't Linux better and more advanced than OS X and windows?

And to be fair I can understand the high price of an imac, aside hardware. You get both a computer and screen inside an extremely thin aluminum body with a beautiful design to look at. So yeah, design wise it is worth the money.

 

[varian55zx]

Do you consider the plethora of software including the OS you covent a spec?

Last PC I built I was around 500 dollars into software and still no where near what my Mac came with.

Eh, I don't really know, certain aspects of using a Mac are so good they're hard to put a price on.

For example, I think OS X is so much better than Windows, that that alone is arguably worth hundreds or even up to $1000+. It's not an exaggeration. To me, it's that big of a difference.

The form factor and overall design is so good and appealing the value of that is even hard to pinpoint. I'm not sure why but it seems like merely using an Apple product (laptop, iMac, etc) produces some sort of pleasure response, because they just look so good, and also always feel very nice to use. Keyboard feels really nice, screen, with its glossy finish just looks really good.

Simply using a Mac is, in my opinion, a highly pleasurable sensory experience (to multiple senses).

Add in an extremely beautiful (and not to mention large) 5K display and you have a computer that is easily addictive.

Compare that to Windows PC. Sorry, they're an eyesore. Windows is just awful to me, I don't like it.

I use PCs for work and I can't even begin to explain the differences between the two, if your senses are acute to the point that you actually care or want to notice.

The difference in basic user experience is easily worth the price difference.

You have brought up a point too, which is that it does come preloaded with software, and many things. That's yet another thing I've always loved about Macs. I have always loved all the software.

Buying a Mac is still worth it, always has been. But I just don't know what's with the low spec thing. Why not put in better specs? Make it a little more of a performance machine. Of course as the consumer, of course I want that.

But isn't Linux better and more advanced than OS X and windows?

I don't know, that sounds like something that is highly subjective.

I certainly have no interest in it. Maybe for a select subset of users it ends up being better? Who knows

 

[AlexGraphicD]

Buying a Mac is still worth it, always has been. But I just don't know what's with the low spec thing. Why not put in better specs? Make it a little more of a performance machine. Of course as the consumer, of course I want that.

Yeah exactly. It's a shame such a nice looking machine gets a low spec hardware. It's like apple, a multi billion company wants to be cheap and rest on the notion that the pretty design will be sufficient for the masses to buy an iMac.

 

[varian55zx]

Yeah exactly. It's a shame such a nice looking machine gets a low spec hardware. It's like apple, a multi billion company wants to be cheap and rest on the notion that the pretty design will be sufficient for the masses to buy an iMac.

That's pretty much what I think.

They really make the competition look bad, in every aspect, besides specs. It's like, with specs they're awful.

But they're not just awful. Honestly, they're terrible.

It just ends up being ridiculous. Sorry, but I'm of the opinion that Apple doesn't pay much for any components they buy, you know, given the whole most valuable company in the world thing and everything.

I'm not questioning that they don't know what they're doing, but, it doesn't send a good message.

I understand Macs are supposed to be more expensive and rightfully so. However you can buy a PC that outperforms a 5K iMac for probably $1000 or more less. It's too big of a drop off, seems completely ridiculous. Specs wise they just drop the ball. But like I said, I am still a customer for life.

 

[Malus120]

Wow. This thread has really gone down the toilet fast...

I'm all for giving Apple constructive criticism but this descended into petulant whining a long time ago.

People have explained in this thread and many others why its PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to fit a desktop GPU in an iMac, but apparently that's just Apple penny pinching... Oh and high end i5/i7 CPU's are total bottom of the barrel garage apparently.

A word of advice. If you truly find a company's products disgusting, don't buy them. You're perpetuating that which disgusts you. You DO have a choice.

If you hate Windows, love OS X, and for some reason hate Apple, just go build a hackintosh. You'll be a whole lot happier that way as you obviously don't appreciate Apple's hardware design choices, and I doubt that's going to change going forward.

Oh, and please show me your $1000 PC that includes a licensed copy of Windows 10, a high DPI monitor (I'll even let you down spec to 4K), and better specs than an iMac. I'm waiting.

 

[DontGetTheCheese]

I've said variations of this before but I like the Mac ecosystem. I still work in tech and I'd rather have as much done for me as I can. I also like the way they are handling security and encryption these days. Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare out of the box. So, I have no problems with Mac's in general.

The iMac is different. It just doesn't work for me given the price/performance issue and the video card is a big part of the problem along with, frankly, very little need for 5K that I can see. Also, how much chip do you really need? I get specific use cases but most of us are in a different boat where the processor won't be the main bottleneck, the card is.

I've decided to give up on the iMac for awhile. I'm going to get a wireless keyboard, trackpad, a couple of cables and clamshell my Mac for the home. I'll likely sit the PC, it's only really used for gaming, and if I jones for games I can get a console.

But, overall, I don't think the iMac is very good value for the price, because at least for me, I don't have any need for what it's giving me, and what I do need/want, it's not good enough. I'm not even certain the 395x is better than my existing GPU which I purchased more than a year ago.

 

[jonen560ti]

Wow. This thread has really gone down the toilet fast...

Oh, and please show me your $1000 PC that includes a licensed copy of Windows 10, a high DPI monitor (I'll even let you down spec to 4K), and better specs than an iMac. I'm waiting.

Thats honestly not too unrealistic. i tried to spec out something quickly which ended at $1135.17. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rFp8RB a little higher, but in its defense, it has slightly better specs for the RAM and GPU. penny pinching might get that below $1000.

 

[Laai]

Thats honestly not too unrealistic. i tried to spec out something quickly which ended at $1135.17. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rFp8RB a little higher, but in its defense, it has slightly better specs for the RAM and GPU. penny pinching might get that below $1000.

Your SSD needs to be a PCIe model, not the much cheaper eSATA (I believe you would need a better motherboard as a consequence as well). And you would need to get a 27" monitor... Those two things would bump the price up by quite a penny.

 

[MacStu09]

I'm freelancing at one of the biggest film and television companies in the world, editing a top-rating nationally-broadcast tv show. I'm sitting in front of a 5K iMac, as is every other editor and producer in the building.

We're all coping just fine.

I wouldn't make it seem as though all of the major studios use 5k iMac's, seeing as 6-9 months ago Sony and Universal in CA both had Avid bays running on some Dells, as well as a few old gen Mac Pro's...

Granted, I've been to a few major studios that have had a few iMacs for quick editing; but that doesn't say much, as anyone in the professional media industry knows, you can even use a 7 year old 'Dell 7100' to edit a 1080p video for TV with no problem at all. And you can pick that up for $150-200.

Obviously, no one is using iMac's for intensive tasks, like grading and CG, etc. Those 5k's fall flat on their face due to the graphics limitations. But they are perfectly fine for editing video; as is just about any modern computer. Editing does not require a fancy setup. If you simply edit 4k video and nothing else, the iMac will be great for you. If you want a computer that can handle everything, obviously go the PC or old MacPro route.

 

[joema2]

...Obviously, no one is using iMac's for intensive tasks, like grading and CG, etc.

I assure you there are many people doing color grading on top-spec iMacs using things like Color Finale or DaVinci Resolve. You can check on Reduser.net and see this. DaVinci's own Resolve 12 configuration advice says a top-spec iMac 27 is OK for this: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct..._qZyflFtup9o-7utMj41_A&bvm=bv.119745492,d.cWw

You can see that professional editors and colorists have a balanced view. They do not say "no one is using iMacs for grading". Rather they say an upper-end iMac can work for this but a well-equipped Mac Pro is more optimal: http://noamkroll.com/is-apples-new-...-why-i-might-consider-it-over-the-new-macpro/

I color grade 4k documentary material on a top-spec 2015 imac 27 using Color Finale and it works fine.

There definitely is a difference between performance of different editing and color grading software. If you are only experienced with a limited range of products this can skew your perspective into thinking it's a hardware performance issue, when in fact the software is simply inefficient. Here is an example of varying render performance of different software running on the same hardware:

 

[jonen560ti]

Your SSD needs to be a PCIe model, not the much cheaper eSATA (I believe you would need a better motherboard as a consequence as well). And you would need to get a 27" monitor... Those two things would bump the price up by quite a penny.

why? from what i can see, no iMac 5K currently on sale comes with a pcie ssd. Apple themselves list it with either a 1tb HDD or a 1-2TB SSHD http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac exactly what model are we comparing with?

abot 27 inch, fair point. it turns out i can actually get a 28 inch even larger screen for cheaper, i guess there is a larger demand for 28 inches for 4K monitors. The samsung-u28e590d seems like a good contender. there are cjeaper monitors of the same price, but they are probably not that high quality. the samsung monitor raises the price by about $30. if i replaced the SSD with a 1TB drive it would just about break even

 

[Laai]

why? from what i can see, no iMac 5K currently on sale comes with a pcie ssd. Apple themselves list it with either a 1tb HDD or a 1-2TB SSHD http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac exactly what model are we comparing with?

abot 27 inch, fair point. it turns out i can actually get a 28 inch even larger screen for cheaper, i guess there is a larger demand for 28 inches for 4K monitors. The samsung-u28e590d seems like a good contender. there are cjeaper monitors of the same price, but they are probably not that high quality. the samsung monitor raises the price by about $30. if i replaced the SSD with a 1TB drive it would just about break even

My 5k iMac is ssd only and it has about 1.6GB Read/Write speed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is faster than current standard eSATA? If not PCIe then it must be connected through a PCI connector, since eSATA caps out at about 600MB... right?

 

[jonen560ti]

My 5k iMac is ssd only and it has about 1.6GB Read/Write speed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is faster than current standard eSATA? If not PCIe then it must be connected through a PCI connector, since eSATA caps out at about 600MB... right?

Do you perhaps have an earlier model? if i were to build it with a pcie SSD, id use the Samsung 950 which is $180. and id have to use a motherboard with an m.2 slot. cheapest i know is $114

 

[bent christian]

Thats honestly not too unrealistic. i tried to spec out something quickly which ended at $1135.17. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rFp8RB a little higher, but in its defense, it has slightly better specs for the RAM and GPU. penny pinching might get that below $1000.

Your SSD needs to be a PCIe model, not the much cheaper eSATA (I believe you would need a better motherboard as a consequence as well). And you would need to get a 27" monitor... Those two things would bump the price up by quite a penny.

There isn't any iMac model that uses an SSD that can be bought new for $1000 USD. Similarly, no 27" model, either.

Actually, you can't buy any new iMac for $1000 USD. The cheapest new model Apple sells costs $1100 USD. That model is 21.5" with an HDD.