Video Card Preformance Issues

If it is an Intel iMac then that's the problem, Intel and PowerPC are different from each other. Now most games are only for PowerPC units and there for the PowerPC emulator on the Intel Macs aren't design for gaming and will slump allot. If you buy a "Universal" game or Intel base game it will work smother, the G5 towers are more of a gamer's machine because of their two or four 64 bit chips and 512 meg video card however they are $$$$. So in future look for Intel Based Games or patch's from their developer for your machine.

Hey, although I don't even have an iMac, (yet) you can try installing windows xp, then installing WoW on PC and trying it there. You can start by finding the BOOTCAMP BETA guide on apple.com. You'll need windows xp SP2, in one disc. I'm not saying it'll work, I'm just saying it's something to try.

hope this helped

peace

Is the game you're playing a Universal Binary or a PPC one? If the game is not made to run on Intel processors, OS X has to use an emulator called Rosetta in order to get it to run. This translates all the PPC code issued by the game into code your Intel processor will understand. It's not really intended for hardware intensive games, so it's pretty impressive that your game runs at all. Have a look at the Mac support forums:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?forumName=wow-mac-tech-support

You might need to install a patch to make the game a universal application.

The only things that are likely to affect performance are changes that reduce the amount of work the game has to do. That would be resolution and number of colors. Those are both available. Try changing to 640x480, 256 colors or thousands of colors.

Its not gonna happen.

I also have an iMac, with 2 gigs of RAM, with WoW loaded on it.

A 4 year old DELL laptop runs rings around the iMac. You don't even want to try to PvP with the iMac.

WoW is very memory intensive, and so are the iMacs. My kids are big gamers and they tried tweaking everything. Nothing made the iMac into a gaming machine. It simply is not designed for that.

WoW runs smooth as silk on their PCs, while my iMac has problems similar to what you described here. Blizzard, like most MMPORG creators, designed WoW for a PC platform originally, they tried to make it iMac compatable, but it is just not as good.

My advice is don't try to pour perfume on a pig.

Use the iMac for the things it was designed for. Even if you could get it to play WoW, you will never get the peripherals like the speedpads, gamers mice, game keyboards etc.

For example the Belkin N52 advertises that it is Mac compatable, until you call up their tech support and find out "oops were sorry, we have not updated that ad yet, it won't work with an Intel chip." Good luck getting Razer mice or anything like them to work like they will on a PC.

If you are going to spend the kind of money for a G5 for a game, (and my kids have), look into an outfit in Oregon called Falcon Northwest. My oldest daughter's computer even has a water cooled radiator in the thing. Needless to say it makes an iMac, or any other similar computer look...well sick. Playing them side by side on the same cable she killed the character on the PC screen while the iMac showed his health bar 1/4 alive.

Doug

OK, this from my daughter:

1. While in-game open up the Options page (hit escape) select Video
Options.
2. Check Resolution at 1440x900 (widescreen)
3. Refresh at 60 hz
4. Multisampling 24-bitcolor, 24 bit depth 6x multisample
5. Do NOT use windows mode
6. Do NOT use UI scaling
7. check in "Level of Detail"
8. Use Desktop gamma
9. Enable all shader Effects but check only:
a. Terrain Highlights
b. Vertex Animation Shaders
c. Smooth Shading
d. Weather Shading
10. Miscellaneous
a. Trillnear Filtering
b. Vertical Sync
c. Cinematic Subtitles OFF
d. Hardware Cursor
e. Smooth Mouse OFF <may vary depending on if your game mouse has internal memory>

Go into the System Preferences screen on the iMac (the blue apple in the upper left hand corner). Click on SYSTEMS PREFERENCES, under HARDWARE select DISPLAYS, 1440x900 should be selected. Under Colors select MILLIONS.

If you have UI mods such as CT RAID, Chronos, or Titan Disable all of them on the character load in screen from the ADD ON button on the left. Make sure you have the latest updates, refer to the CurseGaming website.

After disabling all the UI add ons check to see if you have any peripherals such a Copperheads, N52s or ZBoards attached. If so reattach the Mac input devices. Yes I know the Mighty Mouse is terrible. Logitechs wireless trackball works very well if you can handle the trackball instead of the mouse. But for trouble shooting have as much all Mac stuff attached as possible.

If you have Ventrilo, Skype, or Team Speak disable it.

Reboot the game. If it works well now, then start activating the items that are most important to you, for example CT RAID. See how the game performs. If it starts to lock up right after you enable a function, disable it and move on to the next one.

Then test by zones. Start in IF or SW. If you can function there you are probably golden. To be sure enter both MC and BWL. If you are lag free this is about as good as it will get on an iMac.

Good luck and I hope this helps,

Doug 🙂

I've had my 20' Intel iMac Core Duo, 256mb video, 2 gigs of ram running Wow for 3 months now. I dont have any problems running this game under BootCamp/Windows or inside of OSX either. I run the game windowed inside of Windows most of the time because I have to use Ventrilo. I haven't disabled any settings.

In OSX, just make sure you download the universal patch before running the game. In Windows it runs like it does on any other pc. No lag, no video issues etc... Anyway just thought I'd share my experience with you as well.

If you'd like me check any of my settings, I'd be happy to do that as well. Best of luck to you 🙂

I repeat LadyInRed's advice: make sure you have the universal patch installed. It sounds like a lot of people above are trying to run the PPC version using Rosetta. Running the game natively will give a bigger performance increase than any amount of tweaking.

There is absolutely no way a 4 year old Dell would be able to run a game faster than a brand new iMac with 2 Gb of RAM. The CPU, GPU, RAM and hard disk will all be faster in the Mac. OS X sure loves RAM, but it doesn't soak it up quite enough to put the performance of the system back several years.

Either you're running a PPC version of the game, in which case your iMac is basically rewriting the game code as it uses it, or else there is something wrong with your iMac.

Or else you're just hard to please. 🙂

Well I am most certainly hard to please, (Ask my children). However I am not the gamer in the family, my kids are so you would really need to discuss all that with them. I just passed on what my kids told me.

As far as a 4 year old DELL playing the game better, well seeing is believing, I believe the difference in our experiences is that I got to see. The DELL is an Inspiron 8200 that was the best available at the time with max RAM, the hard drive was purchased seperately and spins at 7200 rpm, you can get them from Apricorn. I believe this is a faster spin rate than the Apple's but I am not sure. It has a 2.19 ghz processor and 1 gig of RAM according to the System Properties. The Hard Drive is 60gigs and is 45% full.

My daughter's machine is custom made for her, and it is really unfair to compare any iMac to what she has, or to her ability to tweak computers.

iMacs are RAM hogs, and the performance difference between this computer with 512 RAM and 2 gigs is very substantial. Once again you would have had to see the difference.

I am still a neophyte where computers are concerned, and really have no idea if my iMac has this "universal patch" you are referring to, but I will call Apple and see if I have it, and if not if they can talk me through the download.

Because my daughter is rather expert in Linux I am fiddeling around with it, not Windows so I really don't know much about Boot Camp, et.al. or how a game would operate on it, It seems to me that it defeats the purpose of having an Apple.

If you want a Windows machine running Windows programs, with all the Windows vulnerabilities why not just buy a Window's PC? They are cheap enough that when you cost out the expense of buying an operating system, plus all the other things you need that come standard on most PCS it is just about as cheap (Given the value of your time as well as money.) to buy a PC as it is to go through all the rigamarole of installing a seperate Windows OS on an iMac.

I believe the jury is still out on the security threat to the Mac from virus installation on the PC side. However, the last time I talked to a Mac tech he did say that if the virus had the capability to take down the whole hard drive, then the Mac side might very well go down with it.

Once again I am not an expert in virus behavior, but those that are won't tell me that an iMac with a Windows OS is as safe as an iMac without the Windows.

Finally, staying on topic, there is the matter of all the peripherals that gamers use. These simply are not available for iMacs.

If you want to play games get a gaming machine. Don't use a pipe wrench to hammer a nail. You can do it, but the results won't be as good as if you used a hammer.

Doug

Hey Doug, there's nothing wrong with being hard to please! 🙂

The patch I'm talking about is for the game, not OS X. Macs used to use Power PC processors, but have recently switched to Intels. Applications written for Power PC processors do not run on an Intel processor, so Apple have included an application called Rosetta with Intel based Macs. Whenever you open a Power PC application, Rosetta starts in the background and translates the Power PC code into Intel code that your Intel processor can understand. This takes up lots of RAM and really slows things down. If you switch from the Power PC build of WoW to the Intel one (called a "Universal binary"), you will see a huge performance boost, as Rosetta will no longer be using up lots of RAM.

OK, my curiosity is tweaked. Where do you get this universal version of the game? Do you have to buy it seperately or is it a download of some sort?

Is there someway I can check to see if it has been installed?

Thanks,

Doug 🙂

I agree with Doug: the very same games (WoW, Unreal T., Halo) run better and faster on cheaper Windows machines (less RAM, older processors and worse video cards) than on iMacs.

So--this is my humble opinion--if you want to play games buy a gaming consolle (Xbox, Playstation, GameCube); if you want to collect viruses buy a Windows PC...; for all the rest of you digital life (Internet, movies, websites, photos, music and much more) your iMac will be the best choice.

Ciao,
Antonio

If you want to check if an application is a Universal or PowerPC app, go to your applications folder, and ctrl-click its icon and select "Get Info" (or just select it and press command-i). Under the general tab, it will say "Kind" followed by "Application (Universal)" or "Application (PowerPC)". Any version of WoW higher than 1.9.3 should be a Universal Binary.

If its a PowerPC application, downloading the latest update for the game should make it into a Universal Binary.

Marty do you know anyway to get a N52 Gamepad to work with an iMac? Or if not an N52 then something else as good?

Thanks

Doug