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iMac HD4670 now or 5770 later?

Y

Yixian

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 2, 2007
1,483
135
Europe
I'm considering selling my MBP for an iMac and an Apple Tablet early next year (should it materialise), but my biggest concern is the graphics capability of the iMac.

The 9600M GT in my MBP is absolutely pathetic and couldn't run current gen games the day the laptop was released. How does the HD4670 fare in the 21" iMac? I'm looking to play Crysis high/medium and Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout 3, Assassins Creed 2 etc. high.

Will a 5770 equipped iMac appear any time soon?
 
Don't even dream about running Crysis with ATI 4670, that's mobile GPU. iMacs use mobile GPUs so performance is always worse than desktop GPUs. ATI Mobile 5xxx should be out early next year so we may see an update later on 2010, maybe June.

If you really play games, get a PC for that and use your MBP for OS X needs. You can get good one for less than 500$
 
Every hardware revision it's the same thing, "don't expect to run Crysis" - I wait another year and still Apple can't manage it - how many decades will it take before Apple releases a home computer that can?
 
Yixian said:
Every hardware revision it's the same thing, "don't expect to run Crysis" - I wait another year and still Apple can't manage it - how many decades will it take before Apple releases a home computer that can?
Click to expand...

Macs aren't for gamers. Apple doesn't care about gamers. If you want to play Crysis at high settings, Macs aren't for you
 
Looking ahead to Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2 etc. are we not expecting these to run well either?
 
Yixian, I can tell you at least for Mass Effect that it plays just fine. I have the 27" screen with the 4670 GPU and playing at 2560x1440 resolution and it seems to be working great. I have the texture settings on "high" and seems to be ok. I'm quite shocked actually as I wasn't expecting much from this GPU for gaming.

I am doing this via Bootcamp in Win7 x64 with modified ATI 9.10 drivers. Had to mod them or else they wouldn't install. Check out the following link for the tool to do this:
http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

I used the Vista instructions on the Win7 drivers and everything worked perfectly and it was really easy. Didn't even have to disable UAC so you can probably disregard that part in the instructions as well.

I'm betting the 21" model will game even better as it's a lower resolution than my 27" so it doesn't have to push as many pixels. Again, I haven't tried any other games yet but I'm certainly encouraged so far by Mass Effect. Cheers!

James
 
How does Windows 7 compare to Xp in terms of performance?

I assume Mass Effect 2 will perform similarly to ME1 so that's great!
 
The above post says nothing, the question is specific and answerable by anyone that knows about the differences between the ME1 and ME2 and BS1 and BS2 engines better than I.
 
Yixian said:
How does Windows 7 compare to Xp in terms of performance?

I assume Mass Effect 2 will perform similarly to ME1 so that's great!
Click to expand...

Sorry, can't really tell you that as I haven't gamed much on Win7 yet. I decided not to go with XP as I have 8GB ram in my new iMac and wanted to be able to use it. I had to run Mass Effect in XP compatibility mode but so far that works fine. If you Google "Radeon Mobile 4670 review" you'll probably get a lot more info than I can give. Most of the reviews indicate it's a capable game card for DX 9.0 games but DX 10 usually means you have to start turning things down to get acceptable frame rates. If you need serious gaming horsepower on an iMac then you may have to go with the new quad core iMac and the Radeon 4850 which should be pretty decent.

James
 
The 4850 would definitely do me but that 27" screen pretty much cancels out the performance gains :( Running anything at a high enough res to avoid looking fuzzy on that would seriousllllly crush fps.

If only there was an option for the 4850 in the 21"!
 
Yixian said:
The 4850 would definitely do me but that 27" screen pretty much cancels out the performance gains :( Running anything at a high enough res to avoid looking fuzzy on that would seriousllllly crush fps.

If only there was an option for the 4850 in the 21"!
Click to expand...

I wouldn't rule out the 27" that fast, the 4850 should be able to push some decent rates even at that resolution. Not as fast as some of the top end PC's but certainly no slouch. The 4850 is a pretty big upgrade from the 4670 so the bigger display won't affect it as much as you think. Like I said, I was surprised at how well the 4670 could push the pixels on the 27" screen.

I think DX10 is probably going to be more of an issue than pixel count and the 4850 should handle that better as well. I'll leave it to you to check out reviews on the 4850 to see if that's correct. Cheers!

James
 
Yixian said:
The 4850 would definitely do me but that 27" screen pretty much cancels out the performance gains :( Running anything at a high enough res to avoid looking fuzzy on that would seriousllllly crush fps.

If only there was an option for the 4850 in the 21"!
Click to expand...

In Windows you either stretch or use less pixels to display a lower resolution than the native size.

Meaning displaying a 1920 x 1200 resolution can be done by not using the excess pixels but will leave the areas around black.

I've done this several times with no problems.
 
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