Screens to play PA on (Was: iMac 27" Retina 5k screen...)

is that a working nscreen? Gimmegimmegimmegimme!!

Notice the version of the screenshots
But if you want it so bad: If you comment out the UI modifications in the current nscreen and skip setting up hack pips it actually works fine. I think.
Just your UI will be spread over all screens.

yuuuk : P

The 5k mentioned is a new "Retina iMac" with a much more superior videocard than you will find in the Macbook Pro.

The current macbook pro retina has a Intel Iris Pro + NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M . Both rather low-spec cards. Though it can do 4k @ 25hz, woow

Indeed, not something that will make you happy. The new iMac though has a much better R9. Still not super spec compared to some PC cards though.

@fuzzels then it should do fine. Remember that PA is very much an Nvidia game (no not because of contracts, it just happens to run better there)

Do you have this GPU?

Nah, no real gain...

Yes, my PUs run at 100% when Im playing (nothing to do with SSD). It is much better for your experience having a higher frame rate than 5K screen over 4K (even 4 K isn't that much better, and I have one)

And I'm not saying that you are an apple fan boy, but that is the makert share that will buy this new product.

Beautiful screen but unless it has a really powerfull GPU, its so not worth that money... not at all... and thats the problem with macs... massively over priced for the weak power you get.........

The GPU in the 5k iMac is about equivalent to the second cheapest desktop video card Nvidia sells, the GTX 750 Ti. This is a good card and can run our game, but not at 5k. Really it won't be able to run most games at 5k.

It's an M290X... which is a Desktop R9 270 which is very much *faster* than a 750ti... It has a large 4gb frame buffer over a reasonable 256 bit wide bus, the frame buffer often being the biggest stumbling block to higher resolutions.

I genuinely think that you'll be able to get PA to run at 5k on that card... the question will be at what settings? I guess that card is going to be shader limited rather than memory, so @bgolus what graphics options in PA are best to reduce load on shaders and which are more cpu related (given the i7 these can probably stay on)?

Indeed, which is why I mentioned I'd rather wait for the standalone screen and something separate to drive it. iMacs tend to get quite warm, rather have that away from the screen.

Actually, price/performance ratios are pretty good all things considered.
Especially when you consider that you won't get anything close in that same small packaging from any other vendor.
Yes, there are better components out there, but these likely will not function at all without very active cooling, which the iMac line has little of compared to the huge fan/cooling setup in most desktop/tower PCs.

There are 2 options of card for this, the M290 and the M295, which is substantially more powerful, and the other factor is that it is a much larger system than you get in the typical laptop, so thermals are a lot less constrained, especially since the shell is a giant heat sink in on its self.

Also, there is a standalone screen from dell with similar specs, but its the same cost as the entire system.

Ah that 295X is a Tonga GPU (R9 285 on desktop). That's pretty much double the M290 That can probably have a reasonable go at 5k on medium settings (remember though at such resolutions you don't need things like AA to get a good image so that will probably look better than you'd expect )

First of all R9 270 isn't "much faster", secondly AMD OpenGL drivers quality is questionable and at least before AMD drivers performance on Mac were worse than their Windows/Linux drivers for some reason.

Even high-end Nvidia/AMD card's don't always have playable framerate in 4K.

The only game I run in full retina is civ5. And it's glorious. Except the ui, which doesn't have a double res version for some stupid reason.

And minecraft, but that's really weird how that game runs... only goes retina in fullscreen, with natural AA. It does the same thing with KSP for me.

I'm really happy about having retina, it blurs things very pleasantly, making text and images very smooth and nicer to look at. Every time I look at a normal res screen, I'm like "ugh... pixels...".

PA already has arbitrary resolution support I believe (windowed mode works after all), so I'm just waiting for multiple monitor support. After that, quite frankly in ten years I'll probably be playing PA on some kind of ridiculous rig with 6 4K screens in a 3x2 array. And it will be AWESOME!

that's using two 1080p screens under linux with a ATI graphic card.

my earlier screens were from my dell super wide with a nvidia gtx 770