2017 iMac w/Radeon Pro 580 Performance in R53

I'm planning on buying my wife a new iMac. It will be the top model with i5, 8 GB + 16 GB (Crucial additional memory), Radeon Pro 580 8 GB, and 512 GB SSD.

I want her to be able to play SoTA in macOS native at 1440p resolution. Does anyone have any experience with SoTA in this or similar configurations?

 

Disclaimer: Mac's are too expensive as gaming pcs. You get much more for your bucks if you grab a Windows gaming pc. Plus Mac os just inst good at gaming (or the games just aren't good at Mac os ^^).

That being said your set up should easily handle sota in 1440p.

 

I've got the late 2014 retina imac (i7; 16GB Ram, 3TB Fusion Drive, R9 M295X 4GB) and can run SotA in most adventure scenes at ~20FPS. Loading time is noticeable but not multiple minutes. So you should be fine with your setup.
However, Earl Atogrim is correct that you get better gaming performance with a windows machine for the same money.

 

If you are willing to get a windows PC i would recommend the AMD combat crates.
https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Combat-graphics-Tomahawk-Motherboard/dp/B07CG63CS7

AMD is selling off their "old" stock (trololol).
"Old" like in Ryzen 5 1600, MSI Radeon Armor RX580 8gb OC and MSI B350 TOMAHAWK .
549,00 USD is the Amazon price point. I guess you can get a better price. But as a german that won't be able to get hands on that offer because it is US exclusive i am too lazy too go and compare prices on US webpages ^^
Well, IF you are from the US ;-) If you aren't, it isn't going to help you much i guess ^^

 

I have that iMac.

Yes, you can play SoTA at that resolution. However, there are some places that have poor performance regarless of the settings or resolution you use, or at least they don't make a super significant difference.

Ardoris is probably the worst offender here where I try to avoid the city when at all possible because of how pokey it gets. Central Britanny is also not so great. Blood River Outskirts another bad one.

You can step down one or two notches, but really, the best graphical fidelity is at 1440p in terms of texture sharpness.

Until recently there was a bug that would force it into 5k mode because of the way Retina macs handle resolution (it's double 1440p) but I think they just fixed it.

If it's not fixed for you everytime you log in you'll have to set it to 1440p.

The other thing is that the when the map up performance takes a hit, unfortunately.

I have noticed that performance has been improving over last few releases, but you should not be expecting 60fps type of performance from this game.

I'm not sure exactly what my frames are since they took away /fps but most of the time it feels and plays pretty fluid so I would guess mid 40s or something.

It's true that macs are not gaming pcs and that pcs with the same identical hardware are probably a bit faster, but this is one of the only worthwhile games on the mac I can play, other than older games from GoG or Battlefield 1, which I play on my PS4 instead.

 

You can use /debug instead

 

Cool. So yeah, in bloodriver it is about 30 FPS at fantastic settings, 1440p, everything turned up. I leave antialiasing off.

If you get that iMac and add memory to it, you need to make sure you add the memory in matched pairs in each memory bank, which is not at intuitive as it sounds, or you will lose dual channel memory which will hurt your macs performance.

You will most likely need to reseat the original ram and stagger it so that it works properly, don't just throw those sticks in the empty slots. Should look like this: (matched pair in each bank)



Enjoy, it's a fantastic machine and especially the Monitor part of it

 

Awesome information! Thanks everyone!