Ati X1600 128mb or 256mb

Does anyone know if there is much difference between the 128 and 256mb versions of the graphics card that comes with the intel imacs?

Yeah, about 128 MB of VRAM.

The iMac comes standard with the ATI Radeon X1600 with 128MB of video memory, providing amazing performance for most graphics tasks and games. Upgrade to the X1600 with 256MB of video memory if you need additional performance in 3D and graphics-intensive applications such as multiplayer gaming or 3D animation development.

Your iMac with ATI Radeon X1600 graphics processor also offers built-in support for attaching an external monitor using either of two modes. Extended Desktop mode allows you to work on two monitors at once for increased desktop real-estate (and increased productivity). Video mirroring is useful when presenting, so you can see the same image on a projector that you're seeing on your Apple display.

Ah right. I called apple about upgrading the graphics, I know its on a board, but I still thought the whole unit was swappable, apparently its not. I spoke with the support guy about how to improve my FPS in games he suggest I took my 1.5gb ram and make it 2gb. To be honest I have come to the conclusion imacs suck for gaming such as World of Warcraft. Yet I read a review that in Quake 4 on the 256mb you can get around 60FPS.

On world of warcraft I currently get 20-30FPS, apparently if you install windows xp on your machine using bootcamp from apple you can get around 45fps which is ok but not anything amazing.

After my motherboard on my pc decided to die on my the other night I was hoping I could just switch over to my mac and play games on that, it appears I am wrong.

It is shocking how such a powerful imac can lack in playing games, the intel 2ghz chip truely is amazing, my 1.5gb is amazing the graphics cards in the new imac, and old ones are still out dated quite abit but at least apple are putting in a little effort in the imac series to allow people to at least play games. Sometimes I wish I had bought a G5 normal mac, however there is only so much a person should spend on a apple product as my mac was £1300 anyway. So my mac sits here, rarely used. It truely is a shame.

I would chalk it up to the lack of DirectX 9 on the Mac. I would say that everygame will always run better in Windows because of DirectX. If that were not true you could take away one of Windows biggest advantages,

if you bought it for some gaming here and there you should have gone with the better video card and did some research on the cards before you purchased the machine. but that aside i would suggest running xp to game and use osx for general computing.

it is funny that you arent getting good results with WoW because there is a guy who comes into starbucks every day with his 17 inch p'book and plays it just fine every day and your imac is quite a bit faster than his p'book

have you played around with video settings and what not for the games?

-chris

I find Doom 3 quite smooth on my 20" at a resolution of 1024*768 with most features turned on including AA, and I have just 512 MB of RAM. Not sure about world of warcraft, but I'm sure that Half life 2(Windows boot camp) as well as NFS Most wanted (Windows boot camp) work fine on the Mac.

gaming and 3D work matters. if you want to game then go with 256 MB, if you are going to do normal stuff like movies, videos, photos, word, excel, and normal stuff go with the basic 128 MB because there is no reason to upgrade and waste the 70 or so dollars.

Well, I play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Rome: Total War, and I do small things in GIMP. 128 video is fine if that's your question.

Pixel_Donkey said:

Ah right. I called apple about upgrading the graphics, I know its on a board, but I still thought the whole unit was swappable, apparently its not. I spoke with the support guy about how to improve my FPS in games he suggest I took my 1.5gb ram and make it 2gb. To be honest I have come to the conclusion imacs suck for gaming such as World of Warcraft. Yet I read a review that in Quake 4 on the 256mb you can get around 60FPS.

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Ding ding ding! Give the man a medal Use Boot Camp, install XP, and play your games that way. There's not a lot of difference between 128mb and 256mb of ram in actual game play, according to PC reviews I've read. If you can afford it, buy it, since it will future-proof your machine for longer. If not, no big deal, you're not missing much of an improvement. It's more about the type of GPU than the amount of ram. I installed Boot Camp/XP on my brother's MacBook Pro and Half-Life 2 runs great on it. PCs for gaming, Macs for everything else.

I did a little research before and their wasn't much different, I didn't buy direct from apple so I never knew there was little price difference between 126 & 256 graphics.

My PC seems to fix it self if I bang it, there must be something loose on the boardboard itself (it still freezes if nothing is on the motherboard).

Anyway I am going to install bootcamp