Are there are any iMac users here, that run FSX + PMDG aircraft (747 or MD-11 in particular).I am curious to know what your frame rates are like with these aircraft. A lot of my development work is done on macs, and I am in the position of buying an iMac (i5 3.6ghz, Radeon HD 5750, 4GB) quite soon.FSX is probably the only reason why I am still holding back, otherwise I would have made the switch. It would be informative to know what kind of performance users are getting before I make the purchase.Kind Regards,Awais M.

DO NOT buy any Macs for running FSX, Bootcamp will slow down your performance by up to 2 times for each mobo partIts horrible, in FS9 too. With those specs in a PC, you would have great performance in FSX

DO NOT buy any Macs for running FSX, Bootcamp will slow down your performance by up to 2 times for each mobo partIts horrible, in FS9 too. With those specs in a PC, you would have great performance in FSX

That is completely false. Where did you get that information? Boot Camp is simply an application that lets you partition your hard disk, it does absolutely nothing in terms of running the Windows operating system itself. You quite literally install Windows directly onto the hard drive by booting from the installation DVD just like on a standard PC.To the original poster: I have run FSX on multiple mac machines, including a 2008 iMac, a 2010 iMac, and now a 2010 Mac Pro. They definitely can game and perform very well! Again, please be aware that boot camp, contrary to what most people think, is NOT a "layer" or emulator on top of OS X, it is simply a way to get Windows installed. After that, Windows runs natively as if it were on a standard PC.In my 2008 iMac, I had an Nvidia 8800 graphics card which gave me about 20FPS in FSX. Now, in my newer mac with an ATI Radeon graphics card, I am getting extremely smooth frames (at least 30FPS, I don't know the exact number because I have my frame rate lock set at 30) with settings turned up very high. And this is with PMDG addons, REX, GEX, and others. Trust me, you won't be disappointed! I also run other games on my Mac including CivilizationV, and I can turn all settings to high and not have any problems. I also run a racing game, Live For Speed, and all settings are turned up as high as they can go and I am getting over 100FPS. This is with 8X Anti-Aliasing turned on in the ATI control center.Robbier

That emulation affects your performance, but never mind. Trust me, get a PC, avoid iMacs, how can you possibly tell me that with the 3.2 ATI 1 GB videocard iMac you are getting more than 10 frames in FSX at EDDF with the MD11 connected on IVAO with 30 aircraft

That emulation affects your performance

Again, there is absolutely no emulating involved. Windows runs natively, directly off the hard drive and hardware, and when you boot your mac you have to select which OS to boot into. A mac is just a PC that is able to run OS X. It has the same PC parts, RAM, video card, etc., but it is simply able to run OS X. I can try and grab a screenshot later on to show some frame rates I am getting.

Thanks for the information guys.As more and more of my development involves using a mac, and the fact that I just love using OS X, it is an obvious choice for me to purchase an iMac as my next system.At the moment the highest spec iMac has an i7 CPU with an ATI 5870, which in my opinion is quite a good specification.

I have a MacBook Pro. Runs great! Although its a dual core i7 it still is good.Taylor Oldham

I also have a MacBook Pro except mine is a dual core i5. It runs FS9 great. Scenery settings are very high, 100% traffic, payware aircraft (PMDG, Level-D, iFly) and I am always locked at 30 FPS no matter where I am flying. With my system FSX takes a bit of tweaking to get to run smoothly (20-30FPS) but if I had to choose between a Mac and PC again I would go with Mac every time. It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.

That emulation affects your performance, but never mind. Trust me, get a PC, avoid iMacs, how can you possibly tell me that with the 3.2 ATI 1 GB videocard iMac you are getting more than 10 frames in FSX at EDDF with the MD11 connected on IVAO with 30 aircraft

You're confusing BootCamp with Parallels or VMWare - BootCamp is not emulation, you're natively running Windows exactly like you do on a normal PC. BootCamp simply allows you to add an NTFS or FAT32 partition to your HD and it acts as a standard BIOS during boot since Macs use EFI.My recommendation against getting a Mac soley for FSX would hinge on the fact that you can't overclock the CPU, not anything to do with BootCamp or anything else.

Avoid iMac for FSX, you will be disappointedP.S How does iMac 27", Core i5 quad-core 2.8 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD, Super Drive, video card Radeon HD 5750 sound for Aerosoft EDDF, sitting on the runway in the NGX, with clouds, connected on IVAO/VATSIM with 20 aircraft around you?

For $200 more you can get the i7 processor. and you have a video card with 1gb memory. How is that so bad? Yes you aren't going to be able to go full sliders with tons of AI. The poster was going to buy an imac anyway for work related things, I think using FSX on it will be fine as long as you don't expect a supercomputer.

Out of curiousty how would FSX and a PMDG aircraft run on a 27 inch iMac:The latest specification of one is:2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAMATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 SDRAM1TB Serial ATA DriveThis is quite a good configuration, but I wonder how will the screen resolution of 2560-by-1440 pixels effect the performance. These are a lot more pixels than your average display

Overclocking will be impossible, so I imagine FSX will run a lot worse than on similar hw on pc, except that its overclocked. You basically *need* to oc if you want to run FSX with the details cranked up.

I don't think overclocking is necessary at all, I am running FSX right now on a 2.8GHz Xeon processor. I did a flight yesterday in the PMDG MD-11 and I was getting between 25 and 30 FPS. This was with sliders up very high, good details, REX, GEX, and in San Francisco.Regarding the iMac, I have personally run FSX on that exact machine. It actually runs very well, just don't turn the clouds up too high.

Hi Awais,I have an iMac 27" with the i5 processor and run 16GB of ram, I use it for web design. I can run Windows 7 using either bootcamp or Virtualbox. I tried installing FSX on each one of them and found that not only does the performance suffer but also the compatibility with some add-ons is terrible. I have since then wiped FSX from my iMac and use it only on my PC.My very kindest regards and season's greetings,Richard Georgiou