Guild Wars 2

Time to put my old 2009 iMac on ice. Actually given its specks I’m surprised I can even play the game in a mildy crowded area (2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB Ram, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256 MB). I am not going back to PC because as my work computer is my number 1 priority and my high mileage iMac has been great. You know what they say about once you go mac. So I’m going to buy a late 2012 with these specks:

-Third-generation quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with 3.2GHz processing speed
-8GB DDR3 SoDIMM memory (which I will upgrade to 32)
-1TB hard drive (7200 rpm) (I wish they offered SSD)
-NVIDIA GTX 675MX graphics with 1GB GDDR5 memory

I did some looking around, primarily about the NVIDIA card and got mixed messages. Some say it won’t work at GW2 max settings and some do. Oddly none of them seemed to be mac people

Obviously it will be an improvement. I am wondering if anyone has an iMac with similar specs and if it will be a significant improvement over what I have now as far as workable graphics settings and FPS. Can you run close to max settings with specs similar to this? I don’t necessarily need the absolute best graphics. FPS is more important to me, but I’d like to be able to use significantly better than the lowest possible settings which I have to use now.

Best regards,
JustTrogdor

I am currently playing on a late 2012 27" iMac
3.4GHz i7 – 8GB – GTX 680MX – 1TB Fusion Drive

using the following settings:

Full Screen 2560×1440 (of course)

Advanced Settings:

Anti Aliasing: FXAA
Environment: Medium
LOD Distance: Low
Reflections: Terrain & Sky
Textures: Medium
Render Sampling: Native
Shadows: Medium
Shaders: High
Post Processing: High
WvW Character Limit: High
WvW Character Quality: Medium

Depth Blur activated

That does around 30 – 60 FpS even in the middle of WvW action as a warrior.

I tried playing with everything on maximum but got dstbits chrashes. Most likely I could have higher settings but I am to lazy right know to tweak and the game doesn’t look and performs to bad with the current settings.

The only bugs I still experience are the falcon bug and the game crashes when I am zooming in the world map very fast in and out. (But this could also be a problem with SteerMouse I suppose.)

I don’t think your iMac setup should perform serious worse then mine.

Please excuse mistakes in grammar/word order, I am not a native english speaker.

Thank you for the very detailed response. It seems I will be able to enjoy GW2 much better once I get my upgrade. I’m running lowest settings and about 20FPS in uncrowded areas on average. I am a settings fiddler so when I get it I will tinker around and make a post/pm to let you and other know what works best for me.

Thanks again that was very helpful. I can’t wait to get my new iMac. I’ll keep my 2009 because I’m a bit of a computer collector.

I recently bought a new Mac. My old iMac (Dec 2009) is fine but tended to slow down at the big events. The new one is 3.4 ghz Intel i7 with the Nvidia GeForce GTX680MX. Performance is very sweet and no more lag at Shatterer or Maw. I don’t do WvW so can’t comment about that. I haven’t played with the graphics settings so far so am using whatever the computer chose for me.

The nice thing I found about changing Macs was that I had everything up and running in under two hours – all my games, programs, thousands of ebooks, Itunes etc. All I needed was the backup from my old computer on Time Capsule. I didn’t have to reinstall anything. Gotta love the sheer elegance of Macs.

Okay I caved in and went ahead and got my new iMac. I was going to order one with custom upgrades but decided that some of those upgrades were not worth the extra money and I could still do the work I needed the new one fro and as the game comes secondary at best I didn’t feel the need to drop an extra $400. Based on hylien’s response to my question I felt the difference between my original build I mentioned and what I ended up buying were not that significant.

So I ended up getting a 2012:

2.9 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M

I do a lot of video rendering, editing, and photoshop work. I often have three high demand applications running at the same time. So when I did my first test run I noticed a huge improvement over my ’09 and feel it well work perfectly for my work needs.

Now the game. The first thing I noticed was the amazing art work and detail. It was like an entirely different game. Beautiful detail and things i didn’t even know were there, like the yellow outlines around characters/mobs when you look at them. Just the the amazing 27" screen itself is a big change and all of these together actually allowed me to play better.

This is what I’m running on and I’m getting about 40-45fps in moderate areas 30-40fps in some more crowded areas. I have not done a WvW test but I did do a group champion event and it stayed within the 30 fps range.

Advanced Settings:
Animation: Medium
Anti Aliasing: FXAA
Environment: High
LOD Distance: Medium
Reflections: Terrain & Sky
Textures: Medium
Render Sampling: Native
Shadows: Low
Shaders: Medium
Post Processing: High

Yes, Figlilly, one of the things I love about Mac is they don’t make it a 45 hour process of setting up a new computer with your old files, applications, user settings and so forth. Simply plug in new computer to power, plugin USB backup drive, open migration assistant. Click two buttons. Go for a short walk. Come home, new computer has all your files on it and is set up. Done.

I just replaced my old 2008 24" iMac with a 27" late 2012 iMac and guildwars2 is much nicer (Aside from the lockbits/dstbits crash in when you have a large population in direct line of sight of each other ..eg. wvw zerg on zerg fight or some large pve boss fight ie. dragon) to avoid the bug for now keep your graphics settings low.. it won’t prevent the bug but it should make it a lot harder for it to be triggered.

Feydiir.2609:

I just replaced my old 2008 24" iMac with a 27" late 2012 iMac and guildwars2 is much nicer (Aside from the lockbits/dstbits crash in when you have a large population in direct line of sight of each other ..eg. wvw zerg on zerg fight or some large pve boss fight ie. dragon) to avoid the bug for now keep your graphics settings low.. it won’t prevent the bug but it should make it a lot harder for it to be triggered.

Thank you for the heads up. I was planning to dial down the setting when getting into heavy WvW if I ever even do it. I’m old, grew up on atari with one joystick and one button. I can’t keep up with the younger generation of gamers. I do pretty well in PvE though.

“I’m old, grew up on atari with one joystick and one button. "

ditto..!