Organized next iMac speculation

[Durious]

I think people blow the extra resolution way out of proportion. So far I've been able to get very good performance out of the mobility 4850 at the 27 inch's native resolution and high-ultra settings (starcraft2, dirt2, modern warfare 2 etc) In fact, the added resolution doesn't play that large of a role for some games (take starcraft2, where going from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 only means losing 6fps) If apple introduces mobility 5870 in the next iMac, those machines would have enough power to run all of today's most demanding games, and next year's most demanding games with high-ultra settings on native resolution. People like to downplay the recent iMac's gaming prowess for some reason.


Do your math again
1280x720 being half of 2560x1600 doesn't make sense either. 1280 is half of 2560, but 720 is not half of 1600.

Hmm really ultra on native for sc2 I was expecting 1080P ultra at most. Is that windows or Mac os your playing it on?

 

[TMRaven]

Windows. On mac I'd get roughly half the fps. Also do note that it's without anti-aliasing, but starcraft2 (and most modern games in general) don't require heavy amounts of anti-aliasing.

 

[iMacmatician]

Also, 1280x720 is a quarter of 2560x1600 (3 686 400 vs 921 600). LCDs look horrible when at non-native res

He's right (you are too), because he said it's 1/2 resolution per dimension, not total area.

Do your math again
1280x720 being half of 2560x1600 doesn't make sense either. 1280 is half of 2560, but 720 is not half of 1600.

I think the 1600 is a typo of 1440 as 2560x1440 is the resolution of the 27" iMac.

 

[aliensporebomb]

OK here we go...

I could run GLView benchmarks on my i7 27" this afternoon and see where it fares compared to my nVidia 7800gs in my G5 2.5 dual (the fastest video card I've ever owned).

Stay tuned.

Let's go back five years to a ATI Radeon 9600XT card just to see what type
of framerates 128 meg cards were getting:

Under 300 fps in most OpenGL applications.

Let's move to a more recent card. This one is the nVidia 7800GS I have in my PowerMac G5 that replaced the 9600. This 7800 card never shipped with a G5 and was indeed flashed from PC ROMs:

At 1920 x 1080 x 32 we have framerates between 1300-1947 fps.

Let's look at the iMac Corei7 with ATI Radeon HD4850 at 1920 x 1080:

Notice with the 7800 the FPS dropped as you progressed thru different OpenGL versions. Here we stay close to 1300 fps all the way thru the range except for 2.1 where it drops to just under 200 fps.

But the 27" panel of the iMac demands 2560x1440. Here's how that benches:

OK now for fun I benched the 7800 and the 4850 at the LOWEST resolution just for fun:

Here's the 7800GS (AGP) in a G5 2.5 dual.

Here's the HD4850 in the iMac:

So I'm sure there are other comparisons that could be done and I'd need to install windows to bench this there but it would be interesting to see what results would happen.

 

[luffytubby]

I think another thing is that we cant take gaming seriously on mac yet.

the valve and steam games often run much worse, and now even starcraft 2 gives half the frames? blizzard games usually run great under native mac



i wish there was a place were we could communicate, report bugs and such to developers, for those of us who are passionate about mac gaming.

 

[aliensporebomb]

I'm not sure...

My big app I like to run is X-Plane and it runs great on the Corei7 iMac.

The fastest I got it to run is on the 7800 on the G5 but I think the faster CPU in the i7 actually makes it seem faster and the more memory in the card in the i7 makes it seem a big zippier.

And the big screen really makes it seem like it's a airplane window...

I wouldn't mind a faster card but for the average joe it will work. The issues with Steam however is another problem entirely.

 

[peakchua]

For the 27" iMac why not

this http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480M-SLI.32129.0.html

or

this http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5870-Crossfire.29486.0.html

Power consumption is not an issue and the 27" should be big enough since they are notebook GPU...

For the high-end 21.5" single versions of one of the above should also fit...

it wont. first of all nvidias m series gpus are overpriced... second of all, ati 5870 fits apple tdp range at 50 watts while nvidia has 100 watt with only a 20% performance increase.. not worth it. comnsidering ati came out first with the 5000 series and nvidia only made a 20% increase with gpus that burns homes is really dissapointing. TDP IS IMPORTANT. i think the 5850 is possible and apple will overclock it since the 5870 and 5850 have the same specs except different clocks.. if apple uses the 5850s gddr5 version. ati radeon is the sheer choice for the imac.

 

[iMacmatician]

Of course we don't know that before there are more specs available (clocks, TDPs, prices, real world benches).

New report on clocks:

Reference chart for LGA 1155 desktop CPUs

 

[Hellhammer]

New report on clocks:

Reference chart for LGA 1155 desktop CPUs

Thanks! Looks great, the quads look very tempting assuming they have reasonable price tag. Finally the naming system could make sense if duals are i3, quads with no HT are i5 and quads with HT are i7.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE
- BBC Micro processors, now they're old they should be cheap
- The latest 3.5" floppy drive
- Blazing fast USB 1.0; possibly even TWO ports!!!!!!
- 16mb VooDoo graphics card. Guys... these things are OFF... THE... HOOK!!!!
- 32mb RAM
- Cassette 'Data Deck' for back-up and storage; backwards compatibility an option for my ZX Spectrum games

I would happily pay an extra £200 for these features

 

[leftywamumonkey]

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE
- BBC Micro processors, now they're old they should be cheap
- The latest 3.5" floppy drive
- Blazing fast USB 1.0; possibly even TWO ports!!!!!!
- 16mb VooDoo graphics card. Guys... these things are OFF... THE... HOOK!!!!
- 32mb RAM
- Cassette 'Data Deck' for back-up and storage; backwards compatibility an option for my ZX Spectrum games

I would happily pay an extra £200 for these features

OH BOY! I'm so excited now, Don't forget the one button mouse! Yay its the 90's

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

OH BOY! I'm so excited now, Don't forget the one button mouse! Yay its the 90's

Don't be REVOLTING! What on EARTH are you thinking?????

...

 

[ugru]

...cut...

But why not the SLI version on the 27"?

Damn they are notebook chip, if they can put it in a laptop why not in a desktop with a 27" form factor?

I wouldn't care if they have to make it 1 or 2 cm thicker for cooling needs...