Tips for running wow on iMac?

Community General Discussion
1

Hello,

Just before we begin, i know PC’s are way better than macs for gaming and you can get a more powerful machine for half the price.

I do a lot in Logic for my job so i need to have a mac.

I got the 27inch iMac back in 2019 when that years model was released.

I used to run BFA at around 9-10 settings in open world and somehwere between 5-8 in raids.

Since SL has released it seems it’s all got a lot slower, i can have the settings at like 5 in open world and Oribos but in dungeons and raid i need to go to about settings 3, for some reason in Spires of Ascension i need to run it on settings 1 or it just completely lags.

My iMac settings are

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)
Processor : 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
Memory : 24 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
Startup Disk : Macintosh HD
Graphics : Radeon Pro 570X 4 GB

My wow settings are here (remove all the - )
h-tt-ps://ibb.co/qCDH6BN

Does anyone know if changing something in the in game settings would make it run smoother?

Would it better to go from 24gb Ram to 32?

Would it be better if i bought an external SSD and ran wow from that?

Thanks for you time.

2

I don’t suspect that Ram is the issue here.
It also wouldn’t change the fact that your GPU has 4GBs.

You’re playing at 5k. Have you considered scaling down your resolution? Something like 2560 x 1440?
That seems like the first thing I’d do.
Maybe mess around with the anti-aliasing too.

As for the other graphics, usually I town down shadows and turn off depth effects.
Bastion has a lot of lighting effects going on. Could be a sunshaft / shadow thing.

Also double check your issues aren’t caused my third parties, such as WoW addons.

And check your drivers are up to date.

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For that GPU 5K on wow is overkill.

4

Changing the resolution to 2560 has completely sorted it out.

Thank you very much.

3 Likes
5

I was going to say, trying to play games on that in 4k+ would be a real stretch. Glad you have got it sortrd out though :slight_smile:

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Hi, if you goto the Technical Forums, there is a thread on this.

There does seem to be performance issues for both PC and Mac that Blizzard claim they are investigating.

I am also an iMac player, whose performance since SL came out dropped. But it also dropped further when 9.0.5 was released. Many many many other players have spoken up about it.

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Two things:

  1. Are you using an HDD or an SSD? If HDD you need to swap to an SSD. You can get external Thunderbolt SSD’s since you can’t replace the internal disk in an iMac unfortunately.
  2. Do things resolve themselves if you lower the resolution scale? Running 5K on a 570X is pretty ambitious ngl.
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Ah that’s good to know, i don’t ever come on the forums but i’ll check the technical sub forum out, good to know it isn’t just me and it’s happening to others. I’ll make sure i check the tech forum out more for updates on this.

Changing the resolution did help loads after following Altash’s advice.

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Yeh, I’ve been using a lower resolution since the start of SL. But it still is in no means performing well.

The biggest test was going into Spires of Ascension. It doesn’t matter how low I set my Graphic settings are, but FPS drops to 19FPS maximum when facing north.

I haven’t tried playing it from an external SSD though. I do have one, so maybe I should try it.

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I was going to make a stupid “just buy a PC” reply, but thanks to the crypto mining ************* and Covid it’s impossible to buy new gaming hardware. :frowning:

Other than resolution, view distance and shadow quality has a huge impact on FPS.

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Ain’t it just… hoping my aging 1060 doesn’t choose this year to croak because I don’t fancy being on integrated graphics for 12 months :frowning:

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