Will I regret buying this Mac?

Ironically, the final straw in my decision to switch from Windows to Mac was in early 2007, when I got hooked on Second Life. I was running a severely underpowered machine -- I mean, I could barely even walk with it in-world. And I'd been thinking of switching to Mac anyway. So when I decided to get a new machine so I could run SL, I got myself a nice iMac.

I say this is ironic because this machine has been buggy with SL from the day I got it. I'm told the main, recent problem has been with the graphics card.

So I finally decided to get a new iMac, and rather than dive in blindly, I want to run it by everyone I know who knows a lot about SL and the Mac, to make sure I don't get another machine that turns out to be a lemon when paired with SL.

Here are the specs I'm looking at - are there any boobytraps here:

24-inch iMac

4 GM memory

ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB. The standard, for $50 less, is the NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 512 MB,

Is the ATI worth the $50 over the NVIDIA? is there some reason the less expensive NVIDIA might even be better than the ATI?

My credit card is at the ready as soon as the Second Life groupmind has had a chance to weigh in on the decision.

Thanks!

Under Windows, nVidia support on SL is better than ATI support. On OS X it makes little difference. If you plan on booting to Windows under Boot Camp it might make sense to get the nVidia, otherwise either should be fine.

What are you doing with your current machine? Can I have it?

I myself run a dual G4. I'll never see beyond 5 FPS but one thing you should be aware of is that the Mac version of the SL client will never run as well as a comparable equipped PC. The Mac SL client is a port more than anything else.

Booting into Windows from the Mac via bootcamp, I'm not too certain of, as it is not possible for me personally but if SL is your primary program that you'll be running alongside standard desktop software, that might be a good route to go.

People keep saying that, but SL is written for OpenGL... which is best supported on the Mac... not DirectX as it would be if it was really a native Windows app. There are games for Windows ported to OS X, and they run under an emulation of DirectX.

I figure it's because they're trying to avoid coming to the conclusion that OS X is not a gamer operating system. The fact is, OS X has more layers of graphics overhead than Windows or even Mac OS 9. This overhead has advantages as well as disadvantages, but for gaming those are more disadvantageous than advantageous, and it's not going away.

In the past it was my experience that the mac client was slower in terms of frame rates than either the windows or linux clients. That said, the newest clients are much faster than previous clients. I am now getting frame rates between 25 & 45 on a two year old MBP (pretty close to windows on the same computer) with a GForce 8600m & 128M vram, & somewhat better on a late 2008 macbook with the GForce 9400M w/ 256 M (I believe shared.) That is stock display as well now on the least expensive imac & the imac has considerably more juice all the way around. With the recent improvements in the mac client, I no longer see any need to install windows (or better yet, Ubuntu) to run Second Life.

Yes!

My new Mac arrives tomorrow - thanks everyone for the suggestions.

Which graphics adapter did you get? Please let us know how it works out.

Thanks, Milla - will do. I went with the ATI, benchmarks were better. If I'd gone with the NVIDIA I would have been able to pick it up at the store, which was tempting.