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Considering Buying an iMac
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Zirse
Risktech Analytics
#1 - 2012-01-24 02:04:14 UTC
Just wondering if you Mac guys felt like chiming in on your experiences with playing EVE on a mac.

First of all, I have briefly educated myself on your recent woes with the mac client. I realize this might be the wrong time to ask my question but I'm more concerned with the ability to enjoy EVE on an iMac rather than the performance of the Mac client itself.

Essentially, how comparable is the Mac experience to the PC whether using Boot Camp, Parallels, or the trans port?

I would be purchasing an i5 3.1 GHz 27'' iMac with 8gb of ram the Radeon 6970M 2GB. I play primarily in null and partake in lots of larger scale battles; I also would like to run EVE on high settings both now and until a reasonable date in the future (~2 yrs). Is this an unrealistic expectation?
WaterTempleFiend en Marland
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#2 - 2012-01-24 02:20:11 UTC
I recently bought a imac:

2.7 GHz i5
4gb ram
AMD Radeon HD 6770 512mb

It's a apple refurbished so i got it a little cheaper. ive been playing eve for about a week now on mid to high settings and have had no trouble what-so-ever.. ive had a few crashes due to internet cutting out and i was worried about heat so i posted THIS as a little faq to help heat issues.

I downloaded the client through steam and run it off the mac os NOT bootcamp. from reading a good majority of the posts on here it seems that many mac uses play on laptops so i don't know if the crashes are because of that i dunno

like i said no problems, no crashes (apart from internets) no lag, textures and shading up high. i haven't ventured into null yet just because i would like to know my ins and outs before i take the big leap over there (i don't really wanna be known as a stupid eve player really :P) but my advice buy the mac, get steam, get playing.

I hope my opinion counts ^.^

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=59576&find=unread - Dat mac heat up thread
Fairhand
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2012-01-24 11:26:27 UTC
I would say that the Mac client is the most convenient but suffers from the performance issues you have read about. Turn off AA and tone down the shadows and you should be fine.

You do have the option of buying a copy of Win7 and using Bootcamp/VMWare to run the native Windows Eve Client if you wish but you may just want the convenience of the Mac Client. Booting into Win7 only takes a couple of minutes and providing you discipline yourself to not using things like Internet Explorer and so on, you do not really need anti-virus tools. Running the native windows Eve client will get you the best performance (and you can access EFT too).

I used to have a 2007 iMac with the ATI HD2600pro 256Mb card and it could run Eve for Mac perfectly happily in medium settings (shadows off I think) so you should have no trouble at all with the newer machine. I did not have any particular heat issues but I think it was really the 2008-2009 iMacs that had the worst issues (I remember all the yellow/burned screen posts on MacRumours).

I can't comment on the current Eve client because I have a 2010 Mac Pro now and I am using Bootcamp and get a perfect 60fps with everything on because of the 5870 1Gb desktop card.
Fairhand
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#4 - 2012-01-24 12:06:03 UTC
I should just add that I also have my Steam library and Skyrim on the Boot Camp drive. I consider the Windows drive as the "games" drive and the OS X drive for email, browsing and work.

Maintain that discipline and I think the irritation of having to reboot each time is manageable considering the payoff.
Nekopyat
Nee-Co
#5 - 2012-01-24 20:43:54 UTC
Well, I am running on a 5 year old MacBookPro, so I am at the lower end of the hardware scale.

I have found that the client is playable (I run 2 clients at once) for the most part, but graphics are not as nice and freezes when switching between windows are a little too common. It does not seem to play nice with Expose.

I was running it with Parallels for a while but found that to be less stable and had much more of a memory footprint.

Never tried bootcamp.
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#6 - 2012-01-25 06:44:33 UTC
How do you run Eve on such an old MacBook Pro?
I tried running it on my MacBook Pro Spring 2007. It fails. It seems like the graphics hardware is too old for the game.
Esmilis99
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#7 - 2012-01-26 02:08:26 UTC
Honestly, if you plan to play eve more than 10% of your time spent by the computer, and your job doesn't require for you to own a mac - don't switch.

With all due respect to CCP for even keeping the mac client supported, performance is crap. I own a high end machine spec'ed out pretty much to the max, and yet pretty much any crappy notebook with windows would easily outperform it.

Even while being hardcore apple fan, and considering the beauty and usability of os x and how pleasant it is to use it, playing eve on a mac is mediocre at best.

On the other hand, there are benefits. You will eventually develop extreme patience, and so on. Its someways similiar to being a hostage somewhere in a prison - after few months you'll think that getting beaten 3 times a day is completely normal, and youll think your takers are awesome when you get beaten up only 2 times that day.

Bootcamp performance is similiar to windows machines, but then why buy a mac if youre using windows on it
Nekopyat
Nee-Co
#8 - 2012-01-26 14:58:12 UTC
Amanda Fuller wrote:
How do you run Eve on such an old MacBook Pro?
I tried running it on my MacBook Pro Spring 2007. It fails. It seems like the graphics hardware is too old for the game.


It gives me a warning when I start up saying the video card is not supported, but other then that it runs fine.. or at minimal it runs about as well as the cider client ever ran.
matarkhan
ConHugeCo
Rusty Stargazers
#9 - 2012-01-26 22:26:46 UTC
I don't care about graphics quality, so I just turn it down anyway. I'll take performance and good content over shininess any day of the week.

Seriously, if there was a command-line Eve client, I'd be the first in line to use it.

I run a MBP with a GeForce 320m in it, and I run 2 clients at all times, one on space #2, one on space #3. I just swipe back and forth between them.

I use this setup 7 days a week, in fleets, in stations (I have always turned off CQ), and have almost no complaints.

The *only* thing I truly wish for is Lion's fullscreen mode, but apparently that's a Cider limitation and outside of CCP's control. Hopefully Transgaming can work this out soon, it would really make a HUGE difference for me.

In the meantime I use a SIMBL plugin that auto-hides the top menu bar. Not very Mac, but whatever, I like it, system-wide, not just for Eve. It gives you back a few pixels at the bottom of the screen, but not *quite* enough to read the clock or un-minimize windows.

Apparently CCP deletes threads where the OP is "Eve works fine on my Mac," so what you're going to see here will pretty much always be people bitching. Personally, I'm very happy.
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#10 - 2012-02-02 07:13:10 UTC
Nekopyat wrote:
It gives me a warning when I start up saying the video card is not supported, but other then that it runs fine.. or at minimal it runs about as well as the cider client ever ran.

You are right. In fact, there is only a warning about unsupported graphics hardware.
I have no idea why I thought the game wouldn't start on my MacBook Pro.
Feyd Rautha Harkonnen
Doomheim
#11 - 2012-02-02 17:13:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Feyd Rautha Harkonnen
Go iMac w/ Parallels (or VMWare), best of both worlds -- best overall experience (IMHO on a mac), and when you want pew pew you dont have to reboot into Bootcamp, just launch the win Eve client within the Mac OS and let Parallels make it happen behind the scenes. Performance is excellent, with all settings on high on a late 2011+ iMac (except shaders on medium), which looks amazing.

You can also get the 1GB vid card for the iMac. I assigned 512mb vid card RAM to the Parallels VM and 512mb to OS X, and can full screen flip between both immediately/seamlessly with a two-finger left/right swipe on my mouse...sexy

Tried bootcamp for a while but the rebooting is a pain, and performance under Parallels is just as good (60FPS consistently). The mac client is fail in high population areas (Jita, fleet battles, etc) -- and don't even think of opening the captains quarters...which you will want once they open the inner station door, to let you flirt with other toons in the future in a 'second life' style bar on the space stations :)

Would you like to know more?
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#12 - 2012-02-02 17:31:16 UTC
Feyd Rautha Harkonnen wrote:

Tried bootcamp for a while but the rebooting is a pain, and performance under Parallels is just as good (60FPS consistently). The mac client is fail in high population areas (Jita, fleet battles, etc) -- and don't even think of opening the captains quarters...which you will want once they open the inner station door, to let you flirt with other toons in the future in a 'second life' style bar on the space stations :)

Are you sure that Eve runs really well inside Parallels?
Currently I am running the Mac client on my iMac (June 2011). I am thinking of using Bootcamp for Eve. But playing Eve without leaving OSX would be much better.
What do you use - Parallels or VMware?
matarkhan
ConHugeCo
Rusty Stargazers
#13 - 2012-02-02 22:09:23 UTC
I've run it very successfully in VMWare, but you'll want a machine with 6 or 8 gigs of RAM.
Ngaio
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#14 - 2012-02-03 01:27:10 UTC
Fairhand wrote:
I would say that the Mac client is the most convenient but suffers from the performance issues you have read about. Turn off AA and tone down the shadows and you should be fine.

You do have the option of buying a copy of Win7 and using Bootcamp/VMWare to run the native Windows Eve Client if you wish but you may just want the convenience of the Mac Client. Booting into Win7 only takes a couple of minutes and providing you discipline yourself to not using things like Internet Explorer and so on, you do not really need anti-virus tools. Running the native windows Eve client will get you the best performance (and you can access EFT too).

I used to have a 2007 iMac with the ATI HD2600pro 256Mb card and it could run Eve for Mac perfectly happily in medium settings (shadows off I think) so you should have no trouble at all with the newer machine. I did not have any particular heat issues but I think it was really the 2008-2009 iMacs that had the worst issues (I remember all the yellow/burned screen posts on MacRumours).

I can't comment on the current Eve client because I have a 2010 Mac Pro now and I am using Bootcamp and get a perfect 60fps with everything on because of the 5870 1Gb desktop card.


OMG, what did apple do to you - brainwashed.
M00NS
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#15 - 2012-02-03 11:40:06 UTC
My Mac rocks! But I had closed socket issues in the beginning . It might be because I'm in freakin Japan. Anyways, I took eve out of the applications folder and put it outside. It's been working fine since then. Great graphics and cheap price. You can't beat that. :)
Krilletor
D U F F
#16 - 2012-02-03 17:19:52 UTC
I run EVE with the normal Mac-Client on a 2010 Mac Mini (Server) under Lion (without Server) with 8 Gig RAM, and all graphic settings are at "medium" and it runs OK.

Was on Win 2 years ago not better.

The bugs with appear are another thing - but in the last 6 years of EVE I had so many of em - they come and go.

If you switch from a PC to a MAC, you can also think about a mac Mini, the actual version is good and you can keep your monitor(s), and it starts at 500 $/€

Just one thing: the client doesn't run proper on my 2nd Monitor, connected with HDMI, but on the first one with the DVI-Adaper its all cool.
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#17 - 2012-02-04 08:56:52 UTC
The Mac Eve client runs quite well on my iMac 27" (June 2011).
But I am curious how it runs inside a virtual machine. As soon as there is a discount again for VMWare or Parallels I'll buy a license.
SexTrader
LOst BrotherhoOd
#18 - 2012-02-04 17:39:46 UTC  |  Edited by: SexTrader
Amanda Fuller wrote:
The Mac Eve client runs quite well on my iMac 27" (June 2011).
But I am curious how it runs inside a virtual machine. As soon as there is a discount again for VMWare or Parallels I'll buy a license.


I haven't tried the Mac client in a virtual machine for a while, but as a previous poster said, make sure you have plenty of ram.
I have 2 gig and it definitely would drag the system down under Parallels. Not worth it in that situation IMHO.



Edit: I haven't tried it myself, but Virtualbox is free.
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#19 - 2012-02-04 18:46:12 UTC
SexTrader wrote:

I haven't tried the Mac client in a virtual machine for a while, but as a previous poster said, make sure you have plenty of ram.
I have 2 gig and it definitely would drag the system down under Parallels. Not worth it in that situation IMHO.
Edit: I haven't tried it myself, but Virtualbox is free.


My iMac has 12 GB of Ram and a i7 processor.
Oh, that's right. I am going to try VirtualBox.
Amanda Fuller
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#20 - 2012-02-05 10:13:53 UTC
Today I installed VirtualBox 4.1.8 on my iMac (running OS X 10.7.3).
I created a brand new virtual machine running Windows XP (the only Windows license I own from my pre Mac life). The VM received 4 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM. I have no idea why it isn't possible to give more than 128 MB video memory to the VM (my iMac has 2 GB video memory).
After installing a million patches for Windows and then the VirtualBox Guest Addons, I installed Eve. So far everything ran smooth and fast.

The performance of Eve inside the VM is very poor. It already takes a long time until the background animation at the login screen appears. It feels like a slide show.
After logging into Eve there are many graphics errors. E.g. the active ship in the hangar has only its shadows, the ship itself isn't visible.
When I loaded the station environment everything became even worse. Text appeared upside down, the 3D model of the player character became completely black (or sometimes not visible at all).
I didn't try to undock from the station. Everything inside already looked too frustrating. (I was looking for a better game experience than the Mac client offers!)

I became very happy about the performance and overall game experience of the Mac client again.
Maybe someone tested Eve inside a VMWare or Parallels VM. It would be very interesting to read how the game runs there.
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