Realistic Benchmarks and Performance - WOW, etc.

[pilot1226]

So, I'm looking at the 27" iMac i7 with the ATI 4850 graphics card. The price is still a little too high for my liking, but I'm hoping when new ones get launched (according to the MR Buyer's Guide it's about every 7 months or so) that there's a trickle effect and the i5/i7's are available in the lower-end 27" iMacs.

Does anyone run World of Warcraft or other heavy resource games on a Core i7 or i5 iMac?

I'm looking for realistic performance. Right now on my old, 8 year old Windows desktop, on low settings, I'm barely breaking 15 fps in a crowded environment. In smaller group or solo play I'm around 30 fps. My iBook G4 (PPC, mid 2005) has been unplayable in group environments since the last expansion pack launched (1 fps, I've even seen it say 0 fps) but if I'm able to log into a solo area I usually can pull around 10-15 fps.

That being said, what can I reasonably expect? I priced out and contemplated the idea of building another Windows-based PC but since I bought my iBook I've really enjoyed OSX even over Vista and 7.

The biggest thing that concerns me is the fact that you can't upgrade a video card after purchase in an iMac and I'm a little worried about the ATI Radeon HD 4850 just not being STRONG enough to handle the good stuff. I'm hoping that Apple bumps this up to an optional 5000 series card so we can have DX11 support.

 

[NGL]

I don't play WoW any more, but I can give you some Call of Duty 4 settings.
I can play CoD4 multiplayer on my i7 with everything maxed (anti aliasing, filtering, textures, shadows, etc) at 1900 x 1200 and I still get anywhere from 40-80 frames per second. I can even bump it up to to 2560 x 1440 on some maps, but if there's lots of smoke it can drop down below 30 so I keep it at 1900 to be safe.
Have to turn the settings down a little more for single player, but not too much.
I can assure you it'll run WoW without any issues.

-Nick

 

[Yakivegas]

Performance Benchmarks

barefeats.com runs a lot of game related tests, so you can see how the different models perform.

 

[pilot1226]

Neat, thanks. Nick, I noticed in your signature you're running 7 Ultimate with Boot Camp. Any reason you chose Ultimate over Home Premium? Just curious, want to make sure I don't miss out on any key driver or feature before I buy it.

I remember that Vista Ultimate had Texas Hold'em Poker and that was about it. lol.

 

[deadwulfe]

I run 7 Home Premium 32-bit via Boot Camp and haven't found any issues. However, only thing I have installed on Win 7 are steam and steam games.

 

[PowerGamerX]

WoW is not resource heavy by any means. a MBP 13" with 4gb can run it on highest settings with very little trouble.

You won't have any trouble running it on that machine.

 

[NGL]

Neat, thanks. Nick, I noticed in your signature you're running 7 Ultimate with Boot Camp. Any reason you chose Ultimate over Home Premium? Just curious, want to make sure I don't miss out on any key driver or feature before I buy it.

I remember that Vista Ultimate had Texas Hold'em Poker and that was about it. lol.

I got Windows 7 Ultimate free through work, so I didn't end up having much of a choice =P
The gaming settings I mentioned before are all in OS X, by the way. You might get slightly better frame rates on most games in Windows (but probably not so much on WoW, Blizzard does a good job of their Mac releases)

-Nick

 

[Shivetya]

I have an i5 backed up with 8gb of RAM. It runs WOW just fine at maximum resolution with everything on. I think I can get it into the teens for FPS if I go to Dalaran on busy days and play spin city - but that is a bogus means of dropping fps.

Even full shadows work now without a hitch, though the last patch introduced some kind of bug where I get stutter loads... as in I think drawing distance/los has been screwed up again. They've done it before

 

[pilot1226]

Any chance you could load the game up and use the built-in recording function to record a, say, 30 second clip of the game in hi-res so I could see, or take a couple screenshots?

 

[Sambo110]

Any chance you could load the game up and use the built-in recording function to record a, say, 30 second clip of the game in hi-res so I could see, or take a couple screenshots?

Just go to Youtube and search "iMac 27 game" or something like that, there are a lot of WoW videos, a few Call of Duty, a Dirt 2 one, Crysis etc.

 

[NiuFengLe]

WoW is running beautifully on my i7 with 4 gigs of RAM. Not a stutter or hitch and all settings are maxed out. At first I thought the mouse look was a little bit skittish but it is actually registering the roughness on my mousing surface. So far I am pretty impressed, a HUGE improvement over my old 24" aluminum iMac and Macbook Pro.

I have also put a little time in on COD4 and that also runs pretty good at max settings. I have encountered a little stuttering on the first level where it is raining and al that stuff.

Not really that concerned about the stats so I have not bothered to check FPS, all I know is that it is playing games pretty damn good. I am sure that this thing is going to eat a native HL2 / TF2 for breakfast.

 

[cluthz]

I don't have a i5/i7 iMac, but I can assure you can run things very smooth at high settings.

My MBP can run wintergrasp, ICC25 pretty decent, with "some" graphics on (most pretty low thought, except particles, projective textures, 25% view etc).
and still keep 20-30 FPS at all times.

The iMac is also in a totally different league that my machine, so expect very good results.