Smirkey_of_Nektulos
08-07-2008, 09:22 AM
Thanks to one of my closest friends, who owed my wife and I big time, we have just acquired an iMac to use as our second computer for playing EQ2 together. I chose an iMac because I've already read in numerous places that one can run any Windows XP program on an iMac with the Boot Camp utility, but I went into this not at all sure how well it would work. For the record, my confiruration is the new Intel-based 3.06 GHz model, 24" screen, 500GB hard drive, 2GB ram and NVidia 8800 series graphics with 512MB graphics memory.The process of updating Mac OSX and related software and installing Windows XP took about 4 hours. Mostly it was very simple and painless but a bit boring at times to watch. When I was ready to call it a night I went onto the Station Launcher and set it to download all the EQ2 files, using a temporary trial account until I knew how it would work (as our regular accounts were both temporarily closed due to moving and other concerns). Not related to EQ, but possibly of interest, is one issue I am having. Namely, after downloading and installing XP SP3 I am no longer able to get any updates to Windows to actually install after they download. I worked around that by navigating to individual pages on the Microsoft site for such things as WMP 11 and IE 7, the newest Windows Installer and the .NET Framework, but some critical updates will download but not install. Apparently, this may actually be an issue with SP3 rather than the iMac because other people are reporting similar problems. This is really a very minor issue and should not dissuade anybody who is considering buying their own iMac to use as a gaming machine.So, yesterday morning I woke up to find that the downloads were done and EQ2 was fully installed! I created a toon on our temporary trial account, aptly named Mactest, and ran him around Neriak (aka the City of Lag). This model has a 24" wide screen capable of 1900 x 1200 resolution, so that's what I run it at both in Mac OSX and Win XP. The display is sharp and crisp and gives a beautiful, panoramic view at a distance of 18 inches. While in Neriak I played with the performance settings and am very happy to report that the game runs in high quality at an average of 50-70 fps even in Neriak! I immediately reopened both mine and my wife's accounts, downloaded the Profit UI and EQ2 Maps, and set the UI up the way I like it. I have since run around all the other starting cities, as well as Kylong Plains and the Fens of Nasthar and the performance has been breathtaking. If SLI were supported and this machine could have 1GB of video ram I'm willing to wager it would probably run decently at max settings, but as it stands there's no way to do that at 1900 x 1200. To me this is no big loss because on our old HP system with an AMD 4600+ and a crappy GeForce 6600 it would pretty much chug along on balanced at 1280 x 1024. Looking at the two side-by-side it's kinda comical, really. I am embarrassed to say that I don't know how to post a screenshot here or I would. If anyone can help downthread I'll still do it. I took a nice one in Taren's Grasp that I can show everyone.So there you have it! If your love of Windows games like EQ2 has been keeping you from considering an iMac, I'm here to tell you that the game will run very satisfactorily on one.