[irnchriz]

Hi, I just got my new iMac last week and I wondered what games you guys were playing and how they performed on the intel iMacs.

My iMac has 1gb Ram and 256mb gfx mem.

So far i have World of warcraft, Cal of Duty 2 and Unreal tournament 2004.

The performance in World of Warcraft is superb, I am getting smoth gameplay at 35-60+ fps even in busy areas (ironforge etc)

Call of Duty 2 is gorgeous and plays unbelievably smooth with all settings maxed out.

Unreal tournament is fantastic. I had this installed on my iMac G5 2.1ghz and it chugged along at 20-30fps but now this baby is flying (with the universal patch) at up to 85 fps.

I have yet to try Warcraft 3 and C & C Generals but will get those on later this week. I also have F.E.A.R for the PC which I will probably install on the windoze partition at the weekend as I have been told that this looks ace on the 20" display.

Also has anyone tried out the updated drivers on the ATI website for the Mac Pro ATI x1900 card. Apparently ATI have just posted them up on the site and they supposedly work fine with the iMac x1600.

[Enki]

C& C Generals doesn't work unless there is a very recent patch that fixes it.

[almost2mac]

I installed Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 on the XP partition (17" iMac with 1.5 ram) and it works superbly on relatively high settings. I'm curious if F.E.A.R. will work well...I had to buy a monster graphics card to play that acceptably on my 3ghz P4 PC. When I say "acceptably" for FEAR, that means with the lighting effects and shadows and physics effects that make the game *not* at all impressive without them.

Someone write that WoW looked better in Windows than OSX ... something about openGL I think? Better water textures or something. I only allocated 25 gig to the XP partition; I'm still a little leery about loading every single game I have on it since windows likes having the free hd space.

[irnchriz]

I installed WoW on the xp partition also. It looked good but the Mac version appeared to have brighter coloursand the audio is much better on the Mac. (I have always noticed that the audio is much clearer on the Mac version than on the PC, even on high end pc systems)

The PC did have slightly better framerates and suffered less from the "white character" bug.

I play WoW on the Mac as there is little difference to make me want to boot into xp.

[jcampa]

Nobody has installed MS Flight Simulator? I would like to hear how it runs on an intel Mac.

[rasmits]

Originally Posted by jcampa Nobody has installed MS Flight Simulator? I would like to hear how it runs on an intel Mac.

Screw Flight Sim, how about xPlane?

[Kraetos]

Originally Posted by almost2mac I installed Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 on the XP partition (17" iMac with 1.5 ram) and it works superbly on relatively high settings. I'm curious if F.E.A.R. will work well...I had to buy a monster graphics card to play that acceptably on my 3ghz P4 PC. When I say "acceptably" for FEAR, that means with the lighting effects and shadows and physics effects that make the game *not* at all impressive without them.

F.E.A.R. would be a stretch for the iMac. A long one.

F.E.A.R. and Oblivion are the only games that my Athlon 64 X2 4400+, w/ 2 GB RAM and an nVidia 7900 GTX can't run maxed out. That should give you a sense of how demanding this game is.

Not even the Mac Pro could handle it until you go to the X1900 XT.

[almost2mac]

Originally Posted by Kraetos F.E.A.R. would be a stretch for the iMac. A long one. F.E.A.R. and Oblivion are the only games that my Athlon 64 X2 4400+, w/ 2 GB RAM and an nVidia 7900 GTX can't run maxed out. That should give you a sense of how demanding this game is. Not even the Mac Pro could handle it until you go to the X1900 XT.

My 3.0 gig P4 with a midrange ati card would *run* FEAR...they did a very good job of making the graphics scalable with all sorts of sliders to tweak. Thing is, it ran without lighting effects, and without debris, and severely reduced physics objects...

I got an ATI x1600 and *now* the game rocks and actually is scary with the shadows and haze and lighting effects. A firefight is a ballet of sparks, smoke, destruction and swinging lights. I was thinking of trying it on the iMac for fun, but I'm thinking it's a waste of time. Oblivion is great on my PC, just wish I had more time to play with it.

But I'm thrilled that RCT3 works. It almost seems to run a bit better...dunno if the dual core has anything to do with that.

[Kraetos]

Wow. Thats impressive.

What resolution are you running at? 1024 x 768?

[almost2mac]

Originally Posted by Kraetos Wow. Thats impressive. What resolution are you running at? 1024 x 768?

Realized my post was unclear. F.E.A.R. is great on my Pentium 4 PC, not the xp partition of the mac. RCT3 is just great on the iMac 17"

Fear is at 1024x768

[Luca]

Are you using Mac or Windows versions of these games? Since it seems you have Boot Camp, I can't think of any reason not to get the Windows versions of the games except for convenience. I know the Mac versions of many games cost significantly more than the Windows versions, since they sell fewer copies and they're released later (and thus sell for the full launch price long after the Windows version has already dropped to $30 or less).

In the case of C&C Generals, online play is only Mac to Mac or PC to PC. It uses DirectPlay, a Windows-only online service, so if you get the Mac version you'll have considerably fewer people to play against.

[torifile]

Oblivion works mostly ok on my iMac. It's frustrating because I don't think it's the iMac that's causing problems. I can put it up to max resolution and I get 15 fps or I can knock it way down and only get a few more. Nothing I try seems to significantly affect it one way or another.

I've also played BF2, CoD2, KOTOR2 and now Guild Wars. All run perfectly at max res.

[Keunert]

we installed fifa soccer 06 on the windows partition. it played very smooth.

[almost2mac]

Originally Posted by Luca Are you using Mac or Windows versions of these games? Since it seems you have Boot Camp, I can't think of any reason not to get the Windows versions of the games except for convenience. I know the Mac versions of many games cost significantly more than the Windows versions, since they sell fewer copies and they're released later (and thus sell for the full launch price long after the Windows version has already dropped to $30 or less).

I'm playing these on the XP partition of Boot Camp. These are games that I already owned previously.

I have a couple of "hybrid" games like Myst:Revelation that I'm betting won't run well since it came out before the intel processor and I'm guessing would be in Rosetta. Only game I have on both platforms is Second Life of which the PC version looks better since I can turn the texture size up.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 runs splendidly on BCXp with 1.5 gigs of memory!

[irnchriz]

Hi, heres a further update on gaming on the iMac.

Warcraft 3 runs fine under rosetta.

On bootcamp

F.E.A.R runs fine at mx res with HIGH settings

Farcry - very impressive at max settings (AA & anistropic off)

LOTR battle for middle earth 2 runs smoothly at native res all settings maxed

GTA san andreas runs smooth at max res & settings

[nskk]

How well would those games run on a macbook?

not so much f.e.a.r. but more like call of duty 2, and battlefield 2.

[torifile]

I don't think those games will run on a macbook. The integrated graphics would be a huge obstacle. Will they even install when there's integrated graphics?

[Luca]

They'll probably install, but many games won't even launch if you have Intel graphics. First person shooters are generally the most demanding games, so I wouldn't expect any recent ones to do very well on the MacBook. Maybe ones like Quake 3 will be okay. Other genres of games tend to be a lot less demanding so they might be okay, but I wouldn't buy a MacBook expecting any games to run well at all.

[nskk]

Originally Posted by Luca They'll probably install, but many games won't even launch if you have Intel graphics. First person shooters are generally the most demanding games, so I wouldn't expect any recent ones to do very well on the MacBook. Maybe ones like Quake 3 will be okay. Other genres of games tend to be a lot less demanding so they might be okay, but I wouldn't buy a MacBook expecting any games to run well at all.

so what might be the cutoff year for games i could expect to run well on the macbook? 2002 ish?

[Windowsrookie]

Halo most likley won't even run, it wouldn't run (90% of the time) on my 64Mb ATI 7000.

[neiltc13]

I tried Far Cry on my MacBook. It didn't even load the textures properly.

[Fahrenheit]

Ooh GTA San Andreas- Will this work fine on 1.83 iMac? Cos that would be a very good reason to get boot camp sorted out!

[DK-Lach]

Originally Posted by irnchriz Warcraft 3 runs fine under rosetta.

Warcraft 3 also screams on my MacBooks integrated graphics. All settings are maxed out and resolution at the MacBooks native 1280x800...

Nice

[neiltc13]

San Andreas runs just fine on my 17" iMac.

[Fahrenheit]

Originally Posted by neiltc13 San Andreas runs just fine on my 17" iMac.

Awesome cheers. And so it runs full res and everything to the max or just standard?

[arnoct]

Wow, how are you getting WC3 to run so well? I have to run it at 640x480 on my 1.83ghz macbook or else it runs like crap--and it still runs like crap even at the low settings. Is there some secret setting I'm missing?

[DK-Lach]

Originally Posted by arnoct Wow, how are you getting WC3 to run so well? I have to run it at 640x480 on my 1.83ghz macbook or else it runs like crap--and it still runs like crap even at the low settings. Is there some secret setting I'm missing?

Hmmm! I don't know.
I don't do anything special... But my MacBook is a 2.0 GHz with 1 GB of ram...

If you only have 512, than that migth be it... I don't think the 166 MHz speeddifference makes such a huge difference...