iMac 27" 5750 FPS SC2

[MyRumors]

Hi,

i wonder if someone with iMac 27" 5750 can post some fps in starcraft2 under mac os with settings, and cpu specs

i know this has been done before but a lot has changed in mac os and sc2 since those older posts.

 

[KrrSplat]

The performance is less than stellar. Using the optimal settings for my machine in OS X, i get about 35 FPS in windowed fullscreen mode without any action going on, like in the very beginning of the game when i am building my first probe. In fullscreen mode, using optimal settings, i get about 50 FPS during the same scenario. The problem comes in when you start doing stuff. I play as protoss and whenever you select a building, say a pylon for instance, you get a massive drop in FPS. Note, nothing else is happening, no battles or anything, this is in the beginning of the game when you just have probes. Just select the pylon and when the pylons area shows up on screen you lose about 10 FPS! At first the drop in fps doesnt seem like that big of a deal, but when you have 4-5 pylons and a try to warp in units to a location, the overlapping warp in areas kills the performance. I have no idea how SC2 will perform in the windows environment using the same system but in OS X, the game doesnt do so well if you play protoss. On the other hand though, the campaign seemed to work ok. Here is a link the graphics settings i used.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/224842575

 

[Ubuntu]

The performance is less than stellar. Using the optimal settings for my machine in OS X, i get about 35 FPS in windowed fullscreen mode without any action going on, like in the very beginning of the game when i am building my first probe. In fullscreen mode, using optimal settings, i get about 50 FPS during the same scenario. The problem comes in when you start doing stuff. I play as protoss and whenever you select a building, say a pylon for instance, you get a massive drop in FPS. Note, nothing else is happening, no battles or anything, this is in the beginning of the game when you just have probes. Just select the pylon and when the pylons area shows up on screen you lose about 10 FPS! At first the drop in fps doesnt seem like that big of a deal, but when you have 4-5 pylons and a try to warp in units to a location, the overlapping warp in areas kills the performance. I have no idea how SC2 will perform in the windows environment using the same system but in OS X, the game doesnt do so well if you play protoss. On the other hand though, the campaign seemed to work ok. Here is a link the graphics settings i used.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/224842575

My friend is using the same iMac (but with 8GB RAM) and gets pretty much the same performance. He then installed both SC2 and Wow on Windows 7 Bootcamp and for WoW he gets 70fps and SC2 about 50-60fps. Bit of a shame to have to boot Windows to get that performance and it seems that the mac versions are in need of some good optimization.

 

[digitised]

I dont have the i7 imac, but my experience with a macbook pro and the latest snow leopard drivers (which included the graphics fix) vs windows 7 with latest nvidia drivers, gave about 80% of the speed in comparison.

They really did fix it a hell of a lot under OSX since the summer, and the game was perfectly playable with a few adjustments (i was able to hit 40fps with some tweaking). But under windows i could get 50 with the same setup, therefore i would recommend bootcamp.

You can use a windows 7 upgrade disc (about 1/3rd price of the full package) to run a full install win7 64, and i would really recommend it if you want to play games.


Other than that the game can be tweaked considerably down with hardly any loss in overall visual quality. I took about 20 screenshots of various settings (all of my base - camera in same position) and if you run textures on ultra, you would struggle to see any difference between shaders on medium and shaders on ultra. The only thing than stands out is missing lighting from the minerals and gas on your workers.

Water is reduced to basic, but there really is not much water in multiplayer maps, its generally shrouded all game too. I would advise you test the settings (taking screenshots) and see for yourself.