Mac Gaming

Since GTA IV is currently a no go, I’ve been looking around to see what other PC games might be worth picking up for the holiday. One I never gave much thought to, because of how it crushed GPUs when it came out last year, is Crysis. I came across a pretty interesting forum post over at MacRumors showing benchmark results and in-game images of Crysis on a late ’07 model aluminum 20” iMac with the following specs:

ATI Mobility Radeon 2600 XT (or the HD 2600 Pro, as Apple calls it)
ATI Catalyst 8.9 Drivers (September ’08)
4gigs ram
64-bit Vista Home Premium Edition
Crysis 1.21

That’s pretty close to my own system, so I was interested to see that the game is definitely playable on a similar machine. The poster’s conclusion is that:

it was surprising to discover that the most overboard graphics game out there is certainly playable even on a low range year old iMac. The optimal setting I’ve found for it is at 1280×800 with everything set to high. Keeps its FPS at around 30, and when there’s a lot of action, it maintains a comfortable 20.

Sounds good to me.