Issues with gaming for Mac, how to solve?

[Deleted]

Hey guys and girls.

Here is the situation. In 2007 I started doing a lot of designwork for people and I started to save up for an iMac, at that moment the iMac 24 inch. When I
bought it I was very happy with it and in comparison to my previous computer, a HP Pavillion, it ran excellent. I could do everything I wanted on it, and in
that time I also started playing WoW. I wasn't really a dedicated player but never had issues with playing as a macuser. I played the whole expansion Wotlk
on this iMac and that is including 25 man raiding, on a very solid network and with various addons used as well. After 6 weeks of ICC I stopped playing Wow.

In the mean time I have been doing more and more with videoediting and I have bought another Mac, this time a Macbook Pro which Im mainly using for
Final Cut Pro and After Effects. These programs run like a charm. I bought the Macbook Pro in februari. At that same time, I wanted to pick up Wow again. Therefore, I tried to reinstall it on my iMac, but my smooth Wow has turned into a loading screen of 1 minute, and my smooth dungeons became a slideshow. This was scary, but I assumed it was the expansion Cataclysm that caused this. Therefore I also installed Wow on my Macbook Pro, and on this it worked very good, leaving me playing in good settings. I however, was already surprised I couldn't run it in higher settings I was running the game in. Ofcourse, while leveling I didn't notice a lot, but while doing dungeons, some settings needed to be lowered to prevent minor lag. Since then I raided, also doing 25 mans and I never had a problem with this, still on settings that were usually on good with some adjustments.

However, since the last period, my performance of my Wow has gone down. I am laggy while tanking Vortex Pinnacle, my mouse can't even make it from left to right without lagging at some points and that while my MS was around 120 ish. I am, unfortunately not a wizkid, altho I am aware that Mac might not be the best thing to raid with.

I also did a speedtest, which had a very poor result. My mbs download used to be around 20ish, but when I did it last time it was about 11 max. I also play with wireless internet, because the last time I tested it with a cable it made 0 difference.

Pretty much summed up, I am looking for a solution to get quicker Wow, and would love some advice from people who are playing wow before taking actions. My questions:

- Would it help to cable my internet that much that I would be lagfree? How much does it usually matter cabling or going wireless?
- Is my Macbook Pro at all suited for running Wow, I find it weird it can run heavy editing programs but not Wow?
- Is there a decent way to clean up my mac and would that be a good thing to do for improving performance?
- How much downloadspeed do I need for Wow to at least run good? I have seen streamers on twitch who have like 70 mbps, I feel like Im lacking too much for that?

I would really love the help, I am aware it is a long story but I am trying to be complete as possible. I have even considered selling my Macbook or iMac and going for a solid PC build with 2 monitors and Premiere instead of FCP.

Specs:

Macbook Pro:
-2.53GHZ i5
-4GB 1067 Mhz DD3

iMac 24 inch:
-2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
-3GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Any feedback is welcome and I would be very gratefull.

Thanks in advance.

[llDemonll]

You can't squeeze anything more out of your computer unless you want to turn the graphics settings down. The Mac is old and underpowered at best; it just can't handle today's games (WoW is considered "today's" games as even though it's old, it will be taxing on most all systems)

Internet speed has almost nothing to do with gameplay unless you have a horrendous ping. There is a giant difference between your computer "lagging" and your computer "chunking". "Lagging" is a side-product of your internet connection being bad and you will not notice any gameplay or FPS difference aside from all actions taking longer to complete and not responding immediately. "Chunking" is when your FPS stutters or locks up but your actions still respond instantly.

Best bet, unless you need the laptop to travel, is to sell both and build yourself a nice new PC if you're looking for gaming performance. If you just want to be able to game and don't care what graphical settings you game on, consider a new Mac instead of a PC

[Deleted]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply.

At the moment I am playing at lower settings indeed. I did a ping at pingtest.com, and came out on 370 MS, altho it has been a lot lower. On Wow im 60+ MS. The lagging you describe sounds familiar, sometimes I do a cast and Im just stuck and then everything fastforwards. But I should probably go for a better computer then, I'd love to sell both. Not a clue what the price is to aim for though. Thanks for the advice.

[llDemonll]

if it's the fastfoward you speak of then that's generally lag and will have nothing to do with the actual computer itself, just your connection to the game server

[ZeroWashu]

Check your graphics settings on both and insure that sunshafts (or whatever they are called) are dialed down, same goes for water. Certain chipsets have a rotten time with those.

[Deleted]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply.

At the moment I am playing at lower settings indeed. I did a ping at pingtest.com, and came out on 370 MS, altho it has been a lot lower. On Wow im 60+ MS. The lagging you describe sounds familiar, sometimes I do a cast and Im just stuck and then everything fastforwards. But I should probably go for a better computer then, I'd love to sell both. Not a clue what the price is to aim for though. Thanks for the advice.

How come pingtest gives you 370 ms and the internet is fine in world of warcraft? Strange.

If I have 200+ ms I can't play at all because it just feels so awkward doing anything. You'll experience delay no matter how good your computer is. How much FPS do you have while playing World of Warcraft? If it's okay and the lag you are experienced is caused by your internet then I'd get a cable instead of being wireless. Although the wireless I have doesn't give me 370 ms so there could be something else that's wrong.

If you're dropping below 30 FPS while raiding or in a dungeon I'd still get a new computer, you'll enjoy the game a lot more if you can run it on Ultra and still have 60+ FPS.

[mafao]

Well, your iMac is old and the MacBookPro probably has the 330M GPU, which isn't very fast either (although it should keep up with WoW on medium settings). One thing you can do is to play WoW in Bootcamp, running Windows (Windows side of graphics drivers is better optimized than the Mac side).

BTW, the recent generation of MacBook Pros (15" and up) include a decent GPU, which is about two times faster than what you have. You can try selling you MBP (you should be able to sell it well, Apple products have very high resale value, especially when you find a slightly "clueless" buyer) and ask your college friend to order you a new 15" one using the Apple On Campus programme (15% off for students).