new imac for WoW?

[FullCollapse]

hey guys i'm thinking about upgrading my current core 2 duo 2.16ghz imac with a shiny new aluminum one (maybe today ). mine has been having problems running it for a while, random system lock ups and all sorts of stuff.

thinking about springing for the higher end 21.5" model. can anyone with this model tell me what kind of performance i can expect? what graphic settings can you run? WoW is the most taxing program i'll run on the computer, and i do play quite a bit so its important to me to be able to run it well... i'm not interested in running everything at ultra, but right now it's killing me running the lowest settings and still having huge performance problems.

i also posted this in the main imac forum, not sure which would be more appropriate.

 

[QuantumLo0p]

Lockups may not be caused by your computer.

Assuming you have the new patch installed, WoW locking up may not be caused by your computer. Since patch 4.0.1 many players are experiencing lockups. At first it seemed to mainly be in Oculus but now it is happening all over the place. At any rate a shiny new iMac would be nice!

I would base your computer's WoW performance based on pre-patch 4.0.1 behavior. Also, sometimes WoW can get garbage in some of its directories. You can delete the folders called cache and wtf, also your addons folder. Save them just in case, though. After you delete them WoW will recreate them with new files but you have to reinstall your addons. since I don't use Curse I always keep a directory with copies of all my addons for just such a case as this.

I hope this helps.

 

[Hastings101]

With the high end 21.5" you should be able to run everything at high and maybe ultra, except for the water detail level. WoW has become a bit harder to run lately thanks to the graphics upgrades but the new iMac should still be more than be enough.

 

[FullCollapse]

hey guys thank you for the quick responses.

quantumlo0p- i think i would cry if i deleted the wtf folder! i would have to redo all my ui's . the performance was terrible pre-patch also. i'd be in the middle of raiding or whatever, and the screen freezes or just goes black. had to do a hard restart to fix the issue, then it would just happen again later in the night. i thought it was an overheating issue so i bumped the fans up, but it seemed to just make the issue occur a little less frequently.

hastings101- thanks for the input, definitely nice to hear. i was worried that another imac may not be the best choice since they aren't built with gaming specifically in mind, but i just can't bring myself to spend money building my own computer and running windows!

 

[Stitchxx]

Well i just made the move from a pc to a imac...bought the imac I5 this past sunday...No problems what so ever ....love it .....nothing like running around dal it being packed and getting +85 fps lol

 

[borcanm]

All the new imacs can handle WoW. Whats most important is the video card the imac you want will have. Also WoW can only use 2 cores, so a quad core processor is totally useless for WoW. What you should focus on is a 2 core processor with the highest Ghz.

 

[davelanger]

There is an issue with macs and the 5000 serires graphic cards.
It should be fixed once os 10 is updated to 10.6.5

Also doing this has fixed a number of mac users problems.


Q u o t e:
A. Close World of Warcraft app if it's open.
B. Open TextEdit
C. Drag your Config.wtf file (located in wow/wtf folder) over the TextEdit icon in dock to make textedit open it.
D. Add SET gxApi "OpenGL" on a new line then save and close file.

From http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27292694115&sid=1

Just remove instead of add. Though I think the fix is player made, so I'm not sure it would even be there unless someone else edited the file. Feel free to check though.

As for the picking Ultra settings from the drop downs, this actually confuses me. The settings disabled by this fix are...
Ground Clutter - Good or better
Shadow Quality - Good or better
Liquid Detail - Fair or better
Sunshafts - Enabled Low or better

 

[FullCollapse]

well i did get my imac yesterday! i got the upgraded 21.5" model. finally got some time to sit down and play WoW for a bit. it runs great with the "recommended" settings. it really feels like a whole new game.

i'm going to play with it a bit and see what it can handle. couple of hiccups running around dal but nothing too serious, especially considering the new patch is not running well on macs across the board. been doing some bg's on a couple characters, seems to run great so far!

 

[Epsilon88]

congrats! I envy you.