Question Assassins Creed 4; Black flag running terribly on high performance iMac

[alexbotn]

Hey everybody!

This is my iMac specs;
Prosessor: 3,2 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB

I am trying to run Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag on the LOWest graphics possibility, but it still lags and looks terrible (ofc, since its on low).

Any help?

 

[Ry-Guy]

I am sorry man but Macs aren't made for gaming. You need a high end graphics card to enjoy that game on higher settings and you can't replace them in a Mac. Also how are you playing this on an iMac? Bootcamp?

 

[Benevolence]

Your hardware is definitely good enough to run this, but OSX isn't the best operating system for gaming.
It's a cooling issue. Your iMac is basically a laptop with a really big screen. I'm guessing that things get kinda hot after a little bit of gameplay, and clock down to prevent damage. Try running a temperature monitoring software while gaming. If it goes about 65c, then it's a heating issue.
And Ry-Guy is right, OSx isn't the greatest platform for gaming. I have a few friends who dual-boot into Windows for gaming, as it seems to offer some performance gains on that operating system.

Try running this for monitoring your temps.
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/16609/hardware-monitor

 

[ojoj]

It actually has nothing to do with OSX, per se, although heat *could* be an issue.

You basically have 2 choices when running the game: 1) virtualization (Parallels, VMWare, etc), or 2) dual boot (Bootcamp, etc).

When you boot using virtualization, you have a huge overhead required to run the additional OS and the shabby graphics ports to make the virtualization play nice. When you dual boot (probably the better option of the two), you are still using loosely optimized windows system level drivers, so you're not really getting all the performance out of your otherwise reasonably powerful machine. So, either way, you are not really running the hardware in an optimized state.

Unfortunately, there are really no good options on the Mac yet for AC4, other than waiting for a native port from Ubisoft. Sorry mate!