Just curious, got one from my dads office that the company was going to throw away. Great machine. Just curious how WoW may run on it before putting it on.
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How will WoW run on a 2.1ghz iMac G5?
- Thread starter PowerGamerX
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It will run beautifully. I was running AION on my crappy old MBP (see specs in sig). WoW is 5 or 6 years old, why would you even consider whether a new Mac was powerful enough to run it?
I think you misread sir. 2.1ghz iMac G5 That is a bit older than 4 years old.
Anyway, I played it recently on a PC with a Radeon 9600 and it seemed decently playable. So considering the x600 happens to be a step up I think I should be okay. Im more worried about it pushing a full 1680x1050 resolution over the other settings.
I already have a subscription. I'm just not very keen on wasting a huge amount of time downloading the game and patches only to find out that it doesn't work well by any means.
Hardware requirements tell nothing of how a game will run on a specific system. In fact the "minimum" is often not the minimum.
This was my experience with a 1.8 GHz dual G5 PowerMac with 9600: If you are just going to play casually and stick to 5 man dungeons, it will be fine. PvP should be OK. For large raids, marginal at best. For Dalaran, painful. Lowest settings, of course.
WoW ran very nice on the iMac when it was released, but at that time WoW was optimized for PPC, nowadays WoW on mac is optimized for intel and PPC macs do run WoW a lot slower than they used to!
I did hardcore raiding on a G4 when WoW came out and it ran decent, nowadays a G4 really struggles in BWL, doing less than 10 FPS in the suppression rooms (with only a handful of players), and back in the days it did 20-30 FPS with 40 man raids.
You can do leveling and 5 man on my iMac G5, and your will be slightly faster, don't worry about the res though, mine is just as slow in 1680x1050 as in 1024x768, there is hardly a difference.
Hehe, stay away for the WoW-drug tho, it's time consuming, I've been 28 days "clean" now
I did hardcore raiding on a G4 when WoW came out and it ran decent, nowadays a G4 really struggles in BWL, doing less than 10 FPS in the suppression rooms (with only a handful of players), and back in the days it did 20-30 FPS with 40 man raids.
You can do leveling and 5 man on my iMac G5, and your will be slightly faster, don't worry about the res though, mine is just as slow in 1680x1050 as in 1024x768, there is hardly a difference.
Hehe, stay away for the WoW-drug tho, it's time consuming, I've been 28 days "clean" now
WoW ran very nice on the iMac when it was released, but at that time WoW was optimized for PPC, nowadays WoW on mac is optimized for intel and PPC macs do run WoW a lot slower than they used to!
I did hardcore raiding on a G4 when WoW came out and it ran decent, nowadays a G4 really struggles in BWL, doing less than 10 FPS in the suppression rooms (with only a handful of players), and back in the days it did 20-30 FPS with 40 man raids.
You can do leveling and 5 man on my iMac G5, and your will be slightly faster, don't worry about the res though, mine is just as slow in 1680x1050 as in 1024x768, there is hardly a difference.
Hehe, stay away for the WoW-drug tho, it's time consuming, I've been 28 days "clean" now
I play it maybe once every 2 days if I'm in the mood. It's hardly a drug.
That's what i told others too
(I'm just pulling ur leg)
I used to play it every day till I hit level fifty, now I very rarely play it for extended periods of time.
So from your previous post I gather you have an iMac G5 with a 9600. What's your average framerate in lets say Arathi Basin, Stormwind, and Auberdine?
I dont exactly see myself doing much with the expansions on this machine but hey you never know. My iBook G4 managed to run me through Dalaran relatively easy (14-20fps)
edit: just saw you stopped playing, maybe if you can recall some of the numbers?
edit1: I also remembered I have 1gb of ram, I know WoW is very ram intensive so I gather going to 2gb would help quite a bit am I right? I know on the iBook, going from 1gb to 1.5gb increased my framerate by about 15fps in most cases and there was far less slowdown in heavily populated areas.
I decided to install it and here are the results. It runs decent at native res. however I now remember how reliant on ram WoW is and it quickly eats away at the 1gb in it. Bringing my MBP down to the same amount of ram yielded a remarkable similarity in framerates, even though the 9400m and obviously the c2d are more powerful than the iMac. Reading more on the subject revealed that this is often the case, and that by increasing ram to 2gb (which I had planned to anyway) resaults in fps boosts up to 120% and averages around 50-70%.
I ran both computers in the Blasted Lands and got the following average framerate scores for both machines. All settings kept the same.
MBP 2gb ram: 33fps
MBP 1gb ram: 25fps
iMac G5 1gb: 22fps
I will post the results of 2gb of ram on the iMac when I get the ram module in the mail in the next week or so.
I ran both computers in the Blasted Lands and got the following average framerate scores for both machines. All settings kept the same.
MBP 2gb ram: 33fps
MBP 1gb ram: 25fps
iMac G5 1gb: 22fps
I will post the results of 2gb of ram on the iMac when I get the ram module in the mail in the next week or so.
I'm fussed about your results on the MBP, mine gets 100fps+ in blasted lands on an external 22" inch screen.. I do have 4GB RAM tho.
Sure u have both on same settings and not some multisampling and full screen glow?
33 fps is just playable in my opinion.
I have both on same settings (highest on everything but texture filtering, 1680x1050). No multisampling.
However looking I noticed WoW on my iMac will not use shadows on highest, its always at minimum. Turning them to minimum on my MBP gave it about a 20fps boost with 2gb and about 5 with 1gb.
The higher level shadows aren't available on PPC machines - not that you should turn them on anyway, they hurt performance a LOT and they don't look any better.
The impact of bloom lighting is massive on the PPC systems as well. Luckily WoW isn't a great looking game to begin with so having some settings set lower doesnt really detract from the experience much. It's all about the art style.