Boot Camp on iMac Retina 5K?

I received a 5k retina iMac today and immediately setup Windows 8.1 using the built in Bootcamp process. NO snags installing, NO driver/exclamation marks, NO lockups. Audio, Bluetooth (kb/mouse) and Network (wired/wireless) works in Win 8.1.

BOTH operating systems have the same HUGE (for me!) issue. **No 5k resolution option, so I cannot maximize the real estate**

OSX:

Windows: Allows for a native resolution setting of 4k 3840x2160.

Updating the ATI catalyst software pack from the version shipped to the latest October beta had no effect.

milleron wrote:

So, the Boot Camp partition contains video drivers other than those that the Windows installation contains??

Yes. Available here - Apple - Support - Downloads.

As you say, if AMD would release a specific "IMac Retina 5K" driver, I'd not be worried, but, with neither an announcement nor an assurance of such a driver, I posted my still-answered question. And I'd still like to know if display drivers have to interact with the Timing Controller. I'm guessing they don't, at least on Windows.PCs, as the drivers released by the manufacturers, both nVidia and AMD, are hardware-independent other than in their "bitness." I'm therefore not very concerned about the TCon, but the other question is important as I don't think there are any video cards currently claiming to be capable of driving a 5120 x 2880 display, and before I spend $3,100, I'd love to know the answers to ALL these questions.

This http://www.anandtech.com/show/8623/hands-on-apples-imac-with-retina-display does not answer your question about a Windows driver

Much more interesting is how Apple is driving it. Since no one has a 5K timing controller (TCON) yet, Apple went and built their own.

This http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx driver will support up to

Feature Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 14.6 RC Driver for Windows

Plants vs. Zombies (Direct3D performance improvements):

• AMD Radeon R9 290X - 1920x1080 Ultra – improves up to 11%
• AMD Radeon R9 290X - 2560x1600 Ultra – improves up to 15%
• AMD Radeon R9 290X CrossFire configuration (3840x2160 Ultra) - 92% scaling

Loner T wrote:

Can I ask you to look at More boot camp problems new 5k imac 3 tera fusion drive?

I did not have to use any partition utilities. I just opened Boot Camp assistant in finder/launcher (upper right corner of OSX), and that did everything for me. It defauled to a 10GB parition size for Bootcamp/Windows which was obviously not enough. I then clicked the "Split Partition in half" option which on my 1TB fusion drive gave me about 500gb for Windows and 500gb for OSX. It launched Windows setup from my ISO, and when setup was nearly complete, Windows invoked bootcamp setup.

I have never touched a mac system before today, so I was happy the bootcamp setup was so seamless. It took less than an hour start to finish.

Loner T wrote:

This contradicts what AnandTech link says

"At 5120x2880 pixels, the new Retina 5K Display is precisely 4x the pixels of the 2560x1440 panel in last year’s model."

While I agree that the monitor itself physically contains 5120x2880 (14.7 Million) pixels, neither OS gives let me use true 1:1 pixel map scaling.

The maximum resolution slider shows 3840x2160 in Windows . 75% of what I feel each horizontal/vertical setting "should be" (5120x2880)

The maximum resolution scaling is even less!! 3200x1800 in OSX .... 62.5% of what I feel it "should be" (5120x2880)

This is the first time I've bought into a display that I could not use the full resolution. 😮

With VGA monitors you could always set the resolution to 640x480

With 720P HDTVs you could always set the resolution to 1280x720 (or 1280x768)

With 1080P HDTV/Monitors I could always set the resolution to 1920x1080

With the 4K TVs/Monitors I used (Seiki, Dell P2815), I could always set the resolution to 3840x2160

With the Retina 5K apple product I am missing the 5120x2880 resolution that I had wanted.

On the plus side, one other test I did was power consumption. Using my Kill-a-watt meter, the all-in-one 27" Retina 5K iMac with Fusion drive uses:

34 watts in Windows 8.1 at minimum brightness,

48 watts at maximum brightness at idle/web browsing.

The AMD Drivers last versions (15.7.1 and 15.8 beta) for iMac 5k on Windows 10 64 bits still does not work, tested today. Also bootcamp 6 AMD drivers are not working. Anyone have this working fine?. How to solve this issue? Who is in charge to fix this problem?. Many people are affected with this problem. Please help!. Attached an Image about it.

Yes, OS X supports "real" 5K. But everything is too tiny that it becomes unuseful...

Just ALT+CLICK on "scaled" in Display preferences. I will shoe you all supported resolutions. Pick up your glasses!!

Saludos desde España!

im getting a similar error alexm4d1. really wish this would get fixed, only because it is also causing my computer to crash either when idle too long or when in sleep/hibernate/display is turned off for too long.

Hey guys,

It seems that the last update for the Bootcamp added support for 5k resolution in Windows.

All you have to do is accept Apple Software Update to install the new version of Bootcamp, I'm using Windows 10 in a iMac 5k and it worked smoothly.

Cheers!

May I know what version is your iMac 5K?

I am using iMac 5K late 2014, El Capitan (10.11.1) with AMD R9 290X but the latest Bootcamp 6 driver still does not work on Windows 10. Anyone else is having the same issue?

y2kpc wrote:

I received a 5k retina iMac today and immediately setup Windows 8.1 using the built in Bootcamp process. NO snags installing, NO driver/exclamation marks, NO lockups. Audio, Bluetooth (kb/mouse) and Network (wired/wireless) works in Win 8.1.

Can I ask you to look at More boot camp problems new 5k imac 3 tera fusion drive?

y2kpc wrote:

BOTH operating systems have the same HUGE (for me!) issue. **No 5k resolution option, so I cannot maximize the real estate**

OSX:

Windows: Allows for a native resolution setting of 4k 3840x2160.

This contradicts what AnandTech link says

"At 5120x2880 pixels, the new Retina 5K Display is precisely 4x the pixels of the 2560x1440 panel in last year’s model."

Loner T -- I am posting the output of those two commands into the other threadMore boot camp problems new 5k imac 3 tera fusion drive

millerron-

My OS X scaling options show from larger to smaller text)

1600 x 900 (larger text)

2048 x 1052

2560 x 1440 (optimal, Retina)

2880 x 1620

3200 x 1800 (smaller text)

When deselect scaling options and let it run in Retina mode, icons on the desktop and browser windows become the same size as if I pick the middle selection (2560x1440) in scaling. If I remember correctly, this is how the iPads work as well. The Retina iPads show exactly the same real estate / text size as the non-retina iPads. Retina makes the displays clearer without adding higher resolution options to the operating system.

I laughed when I saw the larger text option. A certain % of the population will end up buying this Retina 5K iMac and running it at this super low resolution of 1600x900.

It seems that although the Retina 5K iMac will run Bootcamp, it will not run Windows at 5K resolution..... A few online searches reveal that Windows 10 (previously referred to as Windows 9) will support 5k and 8k resolutions.

https://www.facebook.com/ChetansharmaComputingWorld/posts/297678303759281

"Windows 9 will reportedly support devices with double the resolution of than Windows 8.1 can support.It has emerged through a leak that Microsoft's upcoming Windows 9 OS will support high resolution displays up to 8K (7680x4320)."

From the language above, that seems to imply that Windows 8.x can only handle 3840x2160.

Apple-if this is the case, please add an asterisk and footnote to "If you want to run Windows on your Mac, you can do that with Boot Camp." https://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/osx/

I will stay hopeful that someone will overcome and post a guide to 5K in Windows 8.1, or install/upgrade to Windows 10 beta with Bootcamp.

Just curious — does Windows look better at 2560 x 1440? I'd have thought that would display sharper.

I have a Retina MacBook Pro, and I had the same confusion as you at first regarding the resolution. When it was brand new, only a few programs supported it, so I often used it in the native 2880 x 1800 using Set Res. But as more and more programs added support, that gradually stopped, and I haven't put it in that resolution for over a year now.

In my experience, "Best for Display" means that the screen is at full resolution, but with text and graphical elements scaled to look the same physical size as they would at half that resolution. You can verify this by checking web pages that have Retina support and comparing them with those with no such support. In fact often some elements within a web page will have support, while others don't. For example, put your monitor in "Best for Display" mode and look closely at this page. The Apple web site menu at the very top looks sharp, but all the other icons on this page are pixelated, right? This is because you need quadruple the pixels to display each icon at double size on a Retina display.

Here are two links to verify this with:

http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/

http://www.apple.com/support/country/

Even though these are effectively the same thing, it seems that Apple has added Retina support to its main web site, but not to the support section. Do you see how the icons in the first link are pixel perfect, while the others are all blocky? Try viewing one of the flags from each page, and you'll see that the sharp-looking one is double the size of the other: 60 x 60 compared to 30 x 30.

The simple truth is that relatively few web sites have this kind of Retina support at this point. You can choose whether to put up with this pixelation, or put up with smaller text and graphical elements in your UI. But for now you can't have the best of both without putting up with pixelated web icons on a great many pages.

That's the bad part. The good part is that a lot of programs now support Retina scaling. This includes things like Photoshop and Lightroom. Sure, they will work fine at full resolution, but they also work fine at "Best for Display" resolution. All that's happening there is that the UI elements are doubled (meaning that their art has all been drawn at double the resolution — verifiable if you take a screenshot), while the photograph/art you are working on is not.

Desktop wallpaper is the same, shown at its full resolution. Again, you can verify this with screenshots.

I'm surprised to hear your comment about screensavers. Which screensaver were did you find a difference with? It may be that they have not been updated to be Retina-compatible yet. Personally I use Apple's Floating screensaver, and it is definitely showing full resolution for me.

Retina is a new technology and it's not supported everywhere yet. Things have really come a long way since 2012, when the first Retina Mac came out, but there's still a long way to go before we get full support. The amazing clarity of the screens makes it all worthwhile, though. My advice is to keep going back and forth between "Best for Display" and full resolution, and see which is best for each activity. You'll soon work it out.

I hope this is some help to you.

Thorf.

Hey guys, i have problems downloading the "windows support software" via the bootcamp assistent.

It always stops after a quarter. (IMac Retina Windows Support Software)

Could someone maybe upload the package to dropbox or another platform?

Would be very awesome because apple does not offer the download for the latest Imac retina.

Had maybe someone the same issues?

sorry for my english, im not a native speaker 😉

Erikson

New update. Please also see - Boot Camp Update 6.0 for iMac 5K .

<ProductManufacturer>Apple Inc.</ProductManufacturer>

<ProductVersion>6.0.6133</ProductVersion>

<ProductCode>{FCFFE6B6-BAE8-490E-88D0-097A9DA1C43D}</ProductCode>

Old version, but new packages.

I have the exact same question. I have found several posts by people stating they could install AMD drivers on bootcamp, but I am not able to do it. I have tried both the latest 14.9 and beta 14.11 packages, and it only wants to install the Install Manager and the HDMI drivers. I keep seeing the following.

1. Using either the Express or Custom setup
2. It says "detecting hardware"
3. It appears to Install the Install Manager and HDMI drivers
4. Goes to "Finish Screen"
5. Click "Finish"
6. No errors, and the error log does not indicate any issues
7. No new CCC and no new drivers

BTW - the bootcamp drivers are 14.20.xxxx - NOT 14.200.xxxx. When I select "Check for Updates" through CCC, it tells me:

• Current Version: 14.20.1002.1002-1407xxx
• Available Version: 14.201.1008-1408xxx

Selecting "Download now" does the download, then executes the driver install with the exact same result as above.

I even tried removing the AMD drivers, then installing, but it refuses to install or load newer drivers. If you remove the AMD drivers, you wind up with the Windows Generic Display driver. I had to go back to the thumb drive and go into the bootcamp folder and re-install the AMD drivers to get any real support.

It doesn't look like Mantle is supported by this driver either.

I'd like to know if these guys are saying "it just works" when they install, OR if they are doing something "extra" to install later AMD drivers.