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Gaming on the 27" iMac with the 4850

willcodejavafor said:
The best thing with an Apple Update is that you can start looking forward to the next one. I predict a new iMac update in March 2010 where we will see some juicy ATI 5XXX mobility GPUs :)
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I hope for you that this is how it going to be (I think it is) I myself have chosen to buy a cheap gamer pc, and an iMac and use the iMac as a screen when gaming.
Best of both worlds, and it's cheaper than buying a Mac Pro
 
Spanky Deluxe said:
To be honest, a 4850 won't be that much slower at 2560x1440 in most OS X apps than a single 4870 will do at 2560x1600, which is what OS X can only use in my system. Gaming in OS X is pretty bad anyway - even Cyder ports run much slower than they do in Windows, I've tested as much with games like Red Alert 3 and the Sims 3. If you want to game you're far better off rebooting into Windows. This is why buying a seperate machine for gaming would make more sense.

If you're serious about wanting to use OS X and also to be able to play the latest games at the 27" iMac's res then your best bet would be to get a separate machine as well as the iMac. You could either get a Quad Core Mac Pro with a 4870 512MB graphics card for $2699 (with a card that's been modified by Apple to stop the possibility of cross firing it with another 4870) + $899 for the closest (although still inferior) display to the 27" iMac (i.e. 24" ACD) spending $3598 or you could get a Core i5 iMac ($1999) + Dell XPS 8000 ($699) + 1GB 5870 ($389.99) costing $3087.99 total. The latter would be vastly superior in terms of gaming. You could even get two 1GB 5870s and still spend less than the Mac Pro route yet end up with pretty much the best gaming setup on the planet right now.
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What do you mean by "even Cider ports0"? Cider ports are the ones which perform the worst anyway.

Try World Of Warcraft. Has slightly better performance on OS X than it does on Windows. (Yes I tested on the same machine with Windows 7 x64 vs Snow Leopard).

But yes in general gaming on OS X sucks. Developers need to really put in effort and money like Blizzard to make their games run decently on OS X.
 
Does anybody have some intel on the HD 4760? I really want to be able to play a recent game @ decent quality/resolution on a new imac so i was wondering if the HD 4760 would cut it?
 
Apple has a habit of doing what no one expects. They will be the best gaming platforms too at some point. But I'm not that big into gaming and don't care.

It always comes down to gamers? No.
 
Neither am I, though mostly because many of the big games are FPS games.

I'm not sure they will ever be the best though they will offer a great alternative.
 
MathijsDelva said:
Does anybody have some intel on the HD 4760? I really want to be able to play a recent game @ decent quality/resolution on a new imac so i was wondering if the HD 4760 would cut it?
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I play WoW, CnC3, CnC:Generals, and RA3 on my 2006 iMac with a 128MB 7300GT @ a decent quality/resolution. perfectly playable, 30+ FPS. Of course, If I slide all sliders to ULTRA MAX, it's unplayable.

Back on topic: If you want absolutely maximum performance, max resolution, max AA, max shadows, etc, you're never going to be happy on an iMac, and might not even be happy on a decked out MacPro. As someone above said, you can get a TOP TOP gfx card in a beige-box PC and be happier than Robert Downey Jr in Scarface's mansion.

EDIT: For cold, hard numbers, barefeats.com is the place to go.
 
thomanjones said:
I play WoW, CnC3, CnC:Generals, and RA3 on my 2006 iMac with a 128MB 7300GT @ a decent quality/resolution. perfectly playable, 30+ FPS. Of course, If I slide all sliders to ULTRA MAX, it's unplayable.

Back on topic: If you want absolutely maximum performance, max resolution, max AA, max shadows, etc, you're never going to be happy on an iMac, and might not even be happy on a decked out MacPro. As someone above said, you can get a TOP TOP gfx card in a beige-box PC and be happier than Robert Downey Jr in Scarface's mansion.

EDIT: For cold, hard numbers, barefeats.com is the place to go.
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And how does that 7300GT compare with the 4760?
 
Realizing iMac isn't a "gaming computer," it's still what I want if it can do what I need it to do, gaming-wise. Which is: keep up with WoW graphics for the next 2-3 years, and not suck completely for Starcraft II when it comes out.

I'll probably go windowed -- maxing the screen on a 27" on my desk would be too much anyway.

Think the 4850 can handle that?
 
At thomanjones - Wow... dual SSDs, holy cow! *adds barefeats to favorites*

Getting back on topic, I think SC2 will run at max on the high end iMac or close to it. More importantly it will more run smoothly when compared to games that run on dual boot.
 
Fallout 3 looks fantastic with everything maxed out on my 2.93 Imac with the 4850 card. I run all of my games at 1920x1200.
I also run the orange box, L4D and UT3, all at max settings and native resolution.
All under bootcamp XP

I haven't measured the framerate, because I didn't feel like I needed to.
 
To add a slightly different perspective to this discussion, I'm personally just hoping that the i7 iMac will run Civ 4 much better than my old iMac G5.
 
Does anybody know how the HD 4850 measure up against the 8800GT? I hear the regular 4850 is much faster, but I dunno about the mobility version? (Though it doesn't say on the Apple site that it's the mobility version?)
 
DaSal said:
Does anybody know how the HD 4850 measure up against the 8800GT? I hear the regular 4850 is much faster, but I dunno about the mobility version? (Though it doesn't say on the Apple site that it's the mobility version?)
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The desktop 4850 is slightly faster than the 8800GT. The mobile 4850 is probably about the same or slightly slower than the 8800GT.
 
Can anyone that uses the 4850 in Windows tell me if the drivers / iMac support playing at the requested res without scaling? I would be quite happy to play at 1280X1024 in box at the centre of the screen.

I know the Nvidia chips can do this, hoping ATI's can.

Thanks
 
Mahoney said:
Well, if you have a 2560x1440 native resolution it's not unreasonable not to run games at native resolution! .
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You assume Apple give a s**t about gaming.....

Apple's audience has never really been the gamer. If you want a gaming rig - then a PC is there as an option. There are tradeoffs in everything in life, and you will never find that 'holy grail' you're demanding Apple produce for you.
 
I have a Mac Pro and will be using that for a while, but if I was buying I'd look at the iMac i7 but I'm disappointed with the GPU.

I have a GTX 285 1GB for Mac, and it gets me an average of 20FPS in Crysis on max settings w/ 1920x1200 resolution.

What's going to happen with this little card trying to pull up a 2560x1440 resolution playing Crysis, it may not even handle medium settings!
 
MythicFrost said:
I have a Mac Pro and will be using that for a while, but if I was buying I'd look at the iMac i7 but I'm disappointed with the GPU.

I have a GTX 285 1GB for Mac, and it gets me an average of 20FPS in Crysis on max settings w/ 1920x1200 resolution.

What's going to happen with this little card trying to pull up a 2560x1440 resolution playing Crysis, it may not even handle medium settings!
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And i'm sure Apple are really worried about that. Steve Jobs must be unable to sleep at night with the prospect..... ;) See your other thread.
 
Apple is paying more attention then years prior, how much is hard to tell but they are pushing pod games and with a bigger marketshare they may wake up. That is if you Windblows lovers stop supporting microstink and start supporting Mac Games!
 
MacRumorUser said:
You assume Apple give a s**t about gaming.....

Apple's audience has never really been the gamer. If you want a gaming rig - then a PC is there as an option. There are tradeoffs in everything in life, and you will never find that 'holy grail' you're demanding Apple produce for you.
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Apple actually gives **** about gaming. It's the developers who don't give a **** about gaming on Mac since it's a really small market. Get this right. Games running slower on OS X is not Apple's fault for the most. It's lazy developers and nvidia/ati's.

How is this obvious? Because when developers give a **** and take the time/money, their games run as good as their windoze cousins on OS X. If they are as cheap as using Cider to port, don't expect performance.

And this is not going to change. The truth is, even if games ran as fast as windoze, without extra effort on developers part, Macs still wouldn't be considered as gaming machines. Why? Because they are simply too expensive for the average gamer, who build their gaming rig for around 1k$, including display, which also includes a top of the line GPU. For that hardware on mac, you'd have to pay 2k$+ and get top of the line iMac.

Yes it'd be a much better hardware than the 1k$ gaming rig, but for gaming purposes, they'd do the same job.
 
MacRumorUser said:
And i'm sure Apple are really worried about that. Steve Jobs must be unable to sleep at night with the prospect..... ;) See your other thread.
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Well, Apple really wouldn't give a **** about that, since he's talking about a game which is run on Bootcamp. So it's pretty much a topic about PC hardware and games. You can use almost every GPU on bootcamp unless you want to go SLI/Crossfire.
 
If you all need the Ultra settings on Crysis at that high resolution, build yourself a Windows 7 tower with Core i7/ATI Radeon 5870s, stash it under your desk, and use the iMac 27" as the monitor.
 
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