But surely apple should make more of effort as now steam works on mac which gives them a great opportunity to fill the gap in the market..
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When will apple use decent GPU's?
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But surely apple should make more of effort as now steam works on mac which gives them a great opportunity to fill the gap in the market..
Yes. The 27" is a little too big for the 5850m to run. It may find the next card more to it's liking.
Gpu?
Who knows when the GPU's will rock.. I have a different question, and possibly another thread.. When will they start putting on a Breathalizer? You wouldn't believe the ***** I bought off of iTunes Saturday night!!!
Who knows when the GPU's will rock.. I have a different question, and possibly another thread.. When will they start putting on a Breathalizer? You wouldn't believe the ***** I bought off of iTunes Saturday night!!!
The 48xx/57xx cards Apple sticks in some of its Macs are actually pretty good. Far better then the majority of PCs you can buy off the shelf, often even at a very similar priced. People keep going on about high end cards/X-fire/SLI but to be fair these are really the realm of high end enthusiasts and gamers, 99% of users are not going to need 5970's or GTX480's. If you want that kind of power then go and build yourself a gaming rig.
Thanks for clarifying. We'd have to wait and see the benchmarks for the later cards amd releases then.
If you're talking about Alienware in an iMac thread, let me just warn you that Alienware notebooks are whole 'nother world of hurt when it comes to reliability and heat.
If you are already a fan of OSX and Apple, I do not think you're going to like Alienware.
The smallest Alienware is fascinating how they managed to pack all that power in such a tiny package, but the battery life is completely shot to hell by having all that power in it. If you're playing those kinds of games and just want the Windows best, then Alienware is awesome...but it's a completely different direction from iMac and I'd think you'd be looking at a different kind of Apple platform (MacPro?) if you're thinking about Alienware.
Ooof! Not in my experience, mate...!
Crysis: Warhead at 1080p with settings on High is playable but choppy. If I pushed that to 1440p, it'd be a slideshow.
It runs smoothly at 1080p with settings on Medium. I could probably push a couple of the settings to High without the experience being damaged. But 1440p, I would forget about.
Yeah but an imac is not powered by a battery so it doesn't really matter about 'battery life' as it will always be powered..
I'm just saying if alienware can manage to fit decent gpu's in a small closure without problems then so can apple especially with their intelligent designs
I don't know why you would consider alienware's laptops as having better gpus/design than the iMacs. They both relatively use the same gpus, except one sli's/crossfires them as an option. (now of course the apple tax will come in to play somewhat)
The 5850m is a decent gpu.
A side by side comparison of the two:
21.5 inch iMac @1199usd: mobility 4670
M15x @1199usd: GT 240m
mobility 4670 has a slight edge in performance
27 inch lynnfield iMac @1999usd: mobility 5850
M17x @1799usd: mobility 5870
mobility 5850 and mobility 5870 are the exact same, spare for a slight 10% clock increase of the 5870. Mobility 5850 can be easily overclocked 10% under windows for same performance and tdp as 5870.
This doesn't take into consideration the desktop grade hdd or especially desktop cpus (namely lynnfield) the iMac touts.
As for thickness, the alienware laptops are about as thick as the iMac chassis itself. A friend of mine brought his M15x over.
Alienware's gpus tend to have bloated vram, in fact most vendors have gpus with bloated vram. Half of the gpus don't even have the necessary bandwidth to fully take advantage of that-- yet alone at their lower display resolutions.
Also, alienware offers sli/crossfire. I don't doubt that apple should offer that as an option over additional SSD, but often times crossfiring or SLI'ing can cause performance issues when games and drivers aren't optimized for it.
Case in point, the gpus apple already provides for their iMacs are already "decent," but I guess a lot of people only tend to think the enthusiast configurations such as crossfiring or bloated vram totals are decent.
The 27 inch iMac does have a really high resolution, and that tends to bump performance down a little, so you could argue that. I'd argue the higher resolution IPS screen gives gaming more of a justice than injustice. I'd prefer to game at slightly lower settings on this beautiful screen than have a smaller screen with smaller resolution just to go from high to ultra, or medium to high.
The 5850m is a decent gpu.
A side by side comparison of the two:
21.5 inch iMac @1199usd: mobility 4670
M15x @1199usd: GT 240m
mobility 4670 has a slight edge in performance
27 inch lynnfield iMac @1999usd: mobility 5850
M17x @1799usd: mobility 5870
mobility 5850 and mobility 5870 are the exact same, spare for a slight 10% clock increase of the 5870. Mobility 5850 can be easily overclocked 10% under windows for same performance and tdp as 5870.
This doesn't take into consideration the desktop grade hdd or especially desktop cpus (namely lynnfield) the iMac touts.
As for thickness, the alienware laptops are about as thick as the iMac chassis itself. A friend of mine brought his M15x over.
Alienware's gpus tend to have bloated vram, in fact most vendors have gpus with bloated vram. Half of the gpus don't even have the necessary bandwidth to fully take advantage of that-- yet alone at their lower display resolutions.
Also, alienware offers sli/crossfire. I don't doubt that apple should offer that as an option over additional SSD, but often times crossfiring or SLI'ing can cause performance issues when games and drivers aren't optimized for it.
Case in point, the gpus apple already provides for their iMacs are already "decent," but I guess a lot of people only tend to think the enthusiast configurations such as crossfiring or bloated vram totals are decent.
The 27 inch iMac does have a really high resolution, and that tends to bump performance down a little, so you could argue that. I'd argue the higher resolution IPS screen gives gaming more of a justice than injustice. I'd prefer to game at slightly lower settings on this beautiful screen than have a smaller screen with smaller resolution just to go from high to ultra, or medium to high.