Ive got an brand new 27" IMac with quad core i5 and nevidea geforce 660 512MB. I have already got Paralles 8 and run other games on it like Arma2 and DayZ and i want to buy battlefield 3 for my mac. I've looked on forums around the net and none have told me what i need to know which is can i run Battlefield 3 on my IMac nice and smoothly through paralles and if not what i need to do so i can play it?
iMac
Hi Leura,
Never played it, but on my 2007 iMac in Parallels, I get benchmarks about 1/3rd the speed of real Windows on the same Hardware.
Bootcamp & a native install of Windows7 will be faster.
Welcome to the forums Leura!
Have you checked the game developers's website for hardware specs needed to run this game?
Chance are, if you are trying to play Windows games through translation software, things are going to run quite a bit slower in a virtual environment.
What CPU speed is your i5 chip? Is it the low end i5?
There are two other factors running Windows games like these on a Mac.
You are going to need more RAM than the base 4 or 8 GBs of RAM. You may have to consider upgrading to 12 or 16 GBs of RAM.
Graphics processing power with these games is usually a lot. Most of the Windows only games are very high resolution and GPU intense games usually requiring, as I have found, at least, 1 GB VRAM graphics engine.
And Mac video cards are not optimized nor have all of the GPU feature set needed that PC graphics engine usually do.
I would not use Parallels. It emulates a Windows box, and that's always slower. You could try BootCamp and Windows 7/8, but you leave behind your Mac OSX until you reboot, but don't expect performance that you would get from a similarly spec'ed out Windows box, because the iMac hardware is optimized to work with Mac OSX (for better or worse, depending on where you stand).
IMHO, the Mac isn't really a gaming machine, although there are some pretty good games available for it. I wouldn't buy any more games, until you try out BootCamp and Windows. Don't waste your time on Parallels, because you'll get miserable frame rates even at the lowest possible settings.
Leura,
I found the minimum and maximum hardware specs to run Battlefield3
Your iMac meets the minimum hardware specs and most of the maximum hardware specs.
However, this is for a real Windows PC.
Plus, the recommended Graphics engine is as I suspected, a 1GB VRAM GPU.
Plus, New Macs, as far as I am aware, have no Direct X sound support.
Here is a link to the hardware specs for Battlefield 3
http://www.geforce.com/games-applications/pc-games/battlefield-3/system-requirem ents
hi im looking to see if anyone can help me with a similar thing, i want to bootcamp my imac late 2013 to windows 7 because i want to play games like dayz or gmod im wanting to know if my graphics card will be able to run dayz mainly. thxs
graphics card:intel iris pro 1024mb
RAM:8GB
Processor:intel i5 2.7GHz
can i run Battlefield 3 on My 27" IMac through parallels smoothly ?
