Mac and wow advice

[Bullvinne]

Ok so I have a 5 year old gaming pc, but I have a brand new iMac with a 2.8ghz i7, 24 gigs of ram, and a AMD 6770 512mb graphics card that I use for Graphic Design.

Does anyone else use an iMac for playing wow on these forums? how is the performance? the specs of my iMac beat out my pc in every way so I am seriously thinking of coming back to wow on my mac

Also, is the mac client just as stable as the pc one? I realize that the mac might have the specs to play wow but if the client is all buggy, then whats the use?

[squid]

I play on mac. There hasn't been really any major differences between the two in a couple expansions now, except maybe that mac has built in video capture.

A brand new computer will always beat out a five year old one anyways, regardless of OS.

[Mammoon]

The Mac client is 100% fine. If your new Mac is more powerful than your old PC, then use your new Mac... regardless of what PC lovers might tell you.

[Deleted]

well, the cpu is a bit on the slow side and the 512 mb buffer on the gpu is hurting the system, you can do 10 mans ok, but i wouldnt put the resolution above 720, 1080 might be pushing it, even for 10 mans, also not like you can do anything to improve the system

[BicycleMafioso]

Playing it on your iMac would be the best approach.

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

I've also got a mac (last year's imac/macbook pro, 2 years old macbook air, the current mac pro 12-core).

The mac client i as stable as the PC version I also find that on average the frame-rate is more consisitent (ie: it'll average say 50 FPS±5 where as my gaming PC will average 80±20 in the same circumstances). There are some things that are nice about the mac client: it handles windowed/fullscreen transitions much better, the built in music controls, built-in recording seems much less demanding than Fraps or DXTory and can even be done to the built in disk without hurting performance -- you can also opt not to capture the interface)

I've noticed is that rebooting into Windows via bootcamp to play Warcraft results in a noticeably better experience: I'd guess I see about 5-10 FPS more at low end -- that makes the experience much nicer in an intense situation (raiding at 25-30 FPS feels way better than raiding at 20). One thing to keep in mind is that the iMac has a pretty high resolutions screen (1440p) but doesn't really have the video card to drive it (the 6770 is a pretty old entry level card). The imac is nearly twice the resolution of a single 1080p display -- it takes nicer hardware to keep those resolutions running smoothly with all the options turned up.

I've opted to play on a PC because it allows you to throw more hardware at games than a Mac does - not because the Warcraft client is inferior. If your mac has better hardware then play on that. Ideally with bootcamp, but I'd guess even the Mac OS X client would be an improvement.