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OS X Retina iMac gaming experiences megathread
- Thread starter ErikGrim
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I know it's ancient but I've been having great fun this morning playing half life 2 under os x at 5k resolution and everything on full except the antialiasing and the anisotropic filtering which I've backed off to x2 on each. There was some slow down when I set them to full.
I've not tried any off the setting in-between.
I've also got Rome Toal war 2 and bf4 downloading in boot camp now. Rtw2 was running well at 1440p in os x but I'm interested to see if it will play better in windows.
I'll post back in with my experience.
(This is with the iMac in my signature. M290x)
I've not tried any off the setting in-between.
I've also got Rome Toal war 2 and bf4 downloading in boot camp now. Rtw2 was running well at 1440p in os x but I'm interested to see if it will play better in windows.
I'll post back in with my experience.
(This is with the iMac in my signature. M290x)
Has anyone had any luck with getting the Cinematic Mod running on the Mac Steam Orange Box version?
Or is the only way to run it with the Cider version?
My iMac is here!
First games I've tried: Civ V (So far not impressed with built in HiDPI options), and Age of Empires III.
AoE 3 actually reports resolutions up to 6K (!), which turned out to be a problem once I went above the native res. Got it reset, and off we go with native 5K resolution!
…sad trombone. The UI rendered with minimal glitch. Text looks super smooth and retina. But the playing field was just black.
Fortunately the resolution down 4K worked beautifully. The game is amazingly crisp and looks fantastic for what's essentially a decade old game. Everything is super smooth including loading (which I remember took forever back in the day). Scrolling around the battlefield is pure butter. And the water rendering still amazes me to this day.
First games I've tried: Civ V (So far not impressed with built in HiDPI options), and Age of Empires III.
AoE 3 actually reports resolutions up to 6K (!), which turned out to be a problem once I went above the native res. Got it reset, and off we go with native 5K resolution!
…sad trombone. The UI rendered with minimal glitch. Text looks super smooth and retina. But the playing field was just black.
Fortunately the resolution down 4K worked beautifully. The game is amazingly crisp and looks fantastic for what's essentially a decade old game. Everything is super smooth including loading (which I remember took forever back in the day). Scrolling around the battlefield is pure butter. And the water rendering still amazes me to this day.
Batman Arkham City looks absolutely amazing in native 5K res. 22-26FPS with everything maxed, AA off.
Its crucial for me to know if the 5k iMac gets hot after long term gaming. In 5k it might be a heater but how about 1440p ?
@ErikGrim or anybody else having the 295x , could you tell about iMacs gaming temperature.
The 2011 or 12 iMac became horribly hot contrary to iMac 2013, at least the 780m one.
This was/is a cooling machine
thanks a lot
EDIT: PS: How about Arkham City FPS in 1440p?
@ErikGrim or anybody else having the 295x , could you tell about iMacs gaming temperature.
The 2011 or 12 iMac became horribly hot contrary to iMac 2013, at least the 780m one.
This was/is a cooling machine
thanks a lot
EDIT: PS: How about Arkham City FPS in 1440p?
Its crucial for me to know if the 5k iMac gets hot after long term gaming. In 5k it might be a heater but how about 1440p ?
@ErikGrim or anybody else having the 295x , could you tell about iMacs gaming temperature.
The 2011 or 12 iMac became horribly hot contrary to iMac 2013, at least the 780m one.
This was/is a cooling machine
thanks a lot
EDIT: PS: How about Arkham City FPS in 1440p?
Same settings, 1440p res.
Min: 28
Max: 60
Average: 50
FXAA, Vsync, 8X AA, Particles Max, 1440p:
Min: 28
Max: 60
Average: 55 (?)
Not sure what happened in the first test. I did quit some open programs before running the second test. But it looks like you can comfortably max out everything if you are running in 1440p.
Haven't tested long term gaming, but iMac has so far never gotten hot running any of my tests.
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SimCity continues to be a disappointment, maxing out at 1080p resolution with no manual overrides. Ugh.
You're correct. Bumped the AF up to full and the AA to 0 and it runs and looks lush.
It amazes me just how little games have come on in 10 years. The only thing that gives away it's age is the lack of overused particle effects from more modern games.
Well, PC/Mac games have always - out of necessity - been scalable. If you take most 10 year old games and play them at 5K resolution then (bugs aside) they're going to look a lot more impressive. Play them at the original resolution from 10 years ago on a 27" iMac and they'd be less so.
I would expect the textures to look a bit blurry on high resolution screens - changing the game resolution can't make low-res textures look any better. That would mostly be an issue in FPSs and simulators.
That's slightly a misnomer based on what you remember to what it's actually like (i've done it myself), I find if you find a great game from 10 years ago and one now you start to notice pretty quickly the differences.
Here's cutting edge 10 years ago compared to close to cutting edge now.
Half Life 2 - 2004
Shadow Of Mordor 2014
Evolve 2014
Or we could compare GTA now and then:
GTA San Andreas (2004)
GTA 5 (2014)
Fair enough that does look pretty different.
I guess I've been out of gaming longer than I thought.
Some outside areas of half life 2 look a lot better than that screenshot through. I'm thinking of areas with lots of water and reflections.
Saved me the effort, Edddeduck!
You could easily argue that gameplay hasn't changed all that much in 10 years, but graphically, they've come a long, long way.
I think the thing that might throw some people off, especially those of us who grew up during the infant stages of 3D, is that the changes over the last decade have been more a series of small refinements that have added up over time, with the changes between generations being more iterative, more small steps compared to the giant leaps we saw in the past.
For example, Quake 1 came out in 1996, and blew us all away. The environments were actually 3 dimensional, and...whoa...it was amazing! Real 3D environments! And look at the way the light follows the rockets! It doesn't get much better than this! Then Unreal came not even 2 years later, and it was a MASSIVE improvement on top of what was already a massive improvement. After playing it, you'd never look at Quake quite the same way again.
Now compare Unreal Engine 3 games to Unreal Engine 4. There's a difference, certainly. But those differences are more about smoothing over the rough edges, and making things just a little bit better, a little more realistic. It's not a huge change.
You could easily argue that gameplay hasn't changed all that much in 10 years, but graphically, they've come a long, long way.
I think the thing that might throw some people off, especially those of us who grew up during the infant stages of 3D, is that the changes over the last decade have been more a series of small refinements that have added up over time, with the changes between generations being more iterative, more small steps compared to the giant leaps we saw in the past.
For example, Quake 1 came out in 1996, and blew us all away. The environments were actually 3 dimensional, and...whoa...it was amazing! Real 3D environments! And look at the way the light follows the rockets! It doesn't get much better than this! Then Unreal came not even 2 years later, and it was a MASSIVE improvement on top of what was already a massive improvement. After playing it, you'd never look at Quake quite the same way again.
Now compare Unreal Engine 3 games to Unreal Engine 4. There's a difference, certainly. But those differences are more about smoothing over the rough edges, and making things just a little bit better, a little more realistic. It's not a huge change.
Are you running OS X in any resolution setting other than "Best for display"? If you're running in a scaled resolution, then OS X actually renders the screen at double the resolution of your chosen "effective" resolution, then scales it down to native resolution. My guess is that you chose the highest effective resolution, where it acts like a HiDPI 3200x1800 display, which means it renders at 6400x3600! (That's the resolution I bet you're seeing in AoE.)
You'll likely get best performance by running in "stock" resolution: HiDPI 2560x1440.
That makes a lot of sense. The OS probably reports the virtual resolution to the game. Good catch.
I've had the retina two days now and I managed to download Steam and with it my Tombraider which i bought for the PC. I thought I'd have to buy it again so that was a bonus.
Only downside is that the iMac does not see the PC saved games so I have to start again
That said it plays beautifully and the screen is superb. I've tried it at 2889 x 1620 and it was smooth, and then i dropped it back to 2560 x 1440 which I will play it at.
I have the base RiMac but with 16 gig RAM.
Biggest problem for me is something to do with Steam, it kept disappearing from my system or not launching from Launchpad. I'm putting this down to user error at the moment as this is my first Mac and I'm not sure what i'm doing yet!
Only downside is that the iMac does not see the PC saved games so I have to start again
That said it plays beautifully and the screen is superb. I've tried it at 2889 x 1620 and it was smooth, and then i dropped it back to 2560 x 1440 which I will play it at.
I have the base RiMac but with 16 gig RAM.
Biggest problem for me is something to do with Steam, it kept disappearing from my system or not launching from Launchpad. I'm putting this down to user error at the moment as this is my first Mac and I'm not sure what i'm doing yet!
XCOM is absolutely gorgeous and runs native 5K at full clip. The pre-rendered cutscenes look blurry and terrible in comparison to the real game. Wish they'd redo them in the game engine instead (as that's what they are meant to look like, because they didn't render them with any special higher res textures or poly s it looks like, only depth of field).
Of course Enemy Within still doesn't run on Yosemite.
Of course Enemy Within still doesn't run on Yosemite.
I've had the retina two days now and I managed to download Steam and with it my Tombraider which i bought for the PC. I thought I'd have to buy it again so that was a bonus.
Only downside is that the iMac does not see the PC saved games so I have to start again
The game fully supports Steam Cloud, it sounds like perhaps you have an issue with your Steam client. As long as your save games are synced on the PC using the latest version of Tomb Raider then they will also work on the Mac.
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Of course Enemy Within still doesn't run on Yosemite.
Sorry to hear that, just so everyone knows Enemy Within plays fine on Yosemite unless you own the Mac AppStore version. Apple changed how some of the OS works with the Mac App Store that breaks multi binary exe's.
We're working on a fix that meets the AppStore rules which should be submitted shortly. The Feral DVD/Download and Steam versions are completely unaffected by this.
Update
So I received my new Imac 5K and finally got windows 7 installed. Long frustrating story but I'll save it for another thread.
So I ran a few games last night and checked fps on my most played game TF2.
Old 2007 iMac with 256mb card = 15-18 fps
New 5k iMac with 295x (4gb) card = 288 fps and dropped to 150-180 fps on a full 32 person server with lots of action/players in view.
WOW...amazing difference.
Settings were all high and screen resolution was "native" at 3840 x 2160
Also tried The Walking Dead storyboard game which ran slowly at minimum settings on my old Imac. Ran flawlessly at "native" settings with graphics all set to max. Looked like a totally different game. Cartoony still but visually beautfiful.
No blurring on either game and all movement was crisp and clear. I'll try some more intensive games over the coming days.
So I received my new Imac 5K and finally got windows 7 installed. Long frustrating story but I'll save it for another thread.
So I ran a few games last night and checked fps on my most played game TF2.
Old 2007 iMac with 256mb card = 15-18 fps
New 5k iMac with 295x (4gb) card = 288 fps and dropped to 150-180 fps on a full 32 person server with lots of action/players in view.
WOW...amazing difference.
Settings were all high and screen resolution was "native" at 3840 x 2160
Also tried The Walking Dead storyboard game which ran slowly at minimum settings on my old Imac. Ran flawlessly at "native" settings with graphics all set to max. Looked like a totally different game. Cartoony still but visually beautfiful.
No blurring on either game and all movement was crisp and clear. I'll try some more intensive games over the coming days.
Just tried some minutes to play COD Advance warfare @ 2560x1440 max setting No AA, the game looks and play like butter on the new iMac, and it looks crisp
How short is shortly? Will it run the first time you select it, so that you can get it to run but having to delete the data file as a kludgy workaround in the meantime? (At work so cant test this right now).
We're working as quickly as possible to have a solution for Mac App Store users, there is no way of playing Enemy Within right now (Enemy Unknown is fine) due to how Apple changed their code signing rules etc.
Gah. That's extremely frustrating. Can I get a Steam version instead somehow? I was really looking forward to it and now I've wasted $40.