MAC SLOW WHEN PLAYING GAMES

Hello, see how many of these you can answer...

See if the Disk is issuing any S.M.A.R.T errors in Disk Utility...

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH7029

Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?

How much RAM & free Disk space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.

Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

In the Memory tab of Activity Monitor, are there a lot of Pageouts?

Your RAM maxed out?

Maybe too much of your ram or CPU is used up by the game?

COCO68 wrote:

Hello I have followed your instructions and there are no pages out. This is the information I have.

System Memory

Free: 5.98 GB In Green

Wired: 939.2 MB In Red

Active:1.04 GB In Blue

Used: 2.09GB

VM Size: 218.16 GB

Pages in: 217.7 MB

Pages Out: o bytes

Swap used: o bytes

DISK Usage

Space Utilized: 94.67 GB 94,674,366,464 bytes (in blue)

Space Free: 904.67 904,670, 478,672 (in green)

I am not computer savvy but I am pretty sure I have more than enough Ram. I have been reading recent threads on the update of Thunderbolt and there are many people who are suffering poor graphics on games recently due to the Thunderbolt update. I am thinking maybe this is the problem.

To check the RAM amount.....Go to Apple>About This Mac>More Info>Overview

Please post the amount that you have.

For HD amount, click on Storage

Post your HD amt & the amt you have left (free).

Strongly suggest that you either increase your RAM or max it out.

Your model iMac is using the minimal amount of RAM. Reason why I suggested you either max it out or increase it.

To little RAM is just one reason why "games" play slow on a Mac. If you do a forum search you will see thousands of recommendations to max out the RAM. I like recommending both - increase or max out.

I think we need to know a few more facts to get beyond this impass:

1) What processor/speed do you have in the iMac? (from "About this Mac" in your Apple menu)

2) What video chipset is it using and how much VRAM ? (Applications > Utilities > System information. In the left-hand "Contents" pane click "Graphics/Displays")

3) Run the computer a while normally--brwse, type something, run you emails. Then close all apps you have started. In Activity Monitor (also in your Utilities folder), set the "Show" window to "All Processes" and highlight the "#CPU" column to sort by usage. Are any of the processes using more than about 10 percent of the CPU resources when the computer is idling? (This checks for "runaway background processes" which can drag performance to a crawl)

And last, if you tell us the name of the game I, for one, am will to help research it to see if any red flags show up.

My 2010 iMac 2.93gHz quad-core i7 with 12GB RAM, an ATI Radeon 5750 chipset and 1TB VRAM runs games quite well, including the flight sim X-Plane which will grab every resource possible. I could run the X-Plane demo smoothly at high settings before I upgraded the RAM from the original 4GB to the current 12GB.

I'm thinking you have runaway background process

OK, how about...

Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

Thanks, give me some time to research. Today got busy so I may not get back to it until this evening.

I take it that Second Life is an online game? If so, your way of connecting to the internet may be part of the picture. How are you connected (dialup, DSL. cable, sattelite, etc) and what does this site show for your connection speeds:

http://www.speedtest.net/

All the games I've tried have been run from my hard drive, not online.