The graphics cards are awful. How many of these other "consumer" systems he is considering cost as much as the iMac and what GPU do they have in them?

I'm not sure what came over Apple - they've already got a great setup in the MacBook Pro, why not just drop an 8600 into the iMac and let people enjoy games instead of a stuttering mess?

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i read an article today about the removal of matte screens from the imac, i assume the graphics cards installed in them works to the same effect. it is to deter pro users from buying the machine--forcing their hand and wallets to buy a mac pro.

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No DX10 though, correct?

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0 to 5.9?

What the hell kind of scale is that? ...only Microsoft...

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Yeah, I don't get that either. Must be a scale from "ye olde days", or an foreign and distant land, like transilvania.

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Does anyone take Walt seriously anymore? He might has well change his web address to apple.com/walt :-)

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Not sticking up for Microsoft at all but they made the scale like that so that they can push the top number higher as better computers come out. Example: Your computer will always be a 5 so long as the hardware stays the same and Micrsoft will increase the scale to keep your score the same and increase with new systems. Still silly, yes.

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Hmm, my 2.16GHz 17" iMac C2D pulls a 4.7 in the Vista experience score.... the 2.8 and new chances only gives it a .3 edge?

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Too bad about the glossy screens though! :-(

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would it be worth it to just throw in my 7600GT?
who makes the boards on the 2600s they throw in Macs?

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The vista rating is not to show you how much you have upgraded. 5 is the best computer that was available at the time Vista came out. So if everything in your system is higher than 5 than it is better than anything available when vista was released. The thing holding back the new imacs is the video card at only 5.2 for gaming performance...

I have vista on my new iMac. I am installing BioShock right now. We will see how it plays. It will be tough for her. But Half Life 2 and C&C 3 play really well with graphics all the way up at 1280x760 resolution. It is much better than my Gaming PC I had before this. (granted it was an athlon xp 2100+. The funny thing about that is it ran vista like a champ, but OSX requires CPU features that chip doesn't have and will not run as a hackintosh... and they say vista has steep requirements :-)

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Im not trying to troll but this is why i build my own machines. im not spending upwards of 2+ grand for a pretty pre built machine that only scored a 5 on the 5.9 scale. My 6 month old desktop cost 900 and its scoring a 5.4 right now...

I just wish macs werent so damn expensive, then i would be rocking an iMac with vista and os x

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Hey scott - all of the new iMacs and the newest MacBook Pros are definitely DX10 compatible (in Windows, of course) and use a "unified shader architecture". It sounds like this is a pretty major change from the way previous graphics cards worked, so it may take a while for the drivers to be fully optimized.

These ATI cards may not be ideal for hard-core gaming but are definitely not awful, are a lot better than the X1600 in most of the previous iMacs and seem to offer great OpenGL performance:
http://www.barefeats.com/imacal2.html , which should be good for Core Image, Core Animation, etc...

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I have the 2.8 GHz 24" and get 5.0 with Vista but it is because of the memory. The system runs at 800 MHz and they put in 667MHz memory. With an upgrade the score will go up. I installed Vista to game with C&C3 and Supreme Commander and it runs very fast. Now I find myself running Vista most of the time. I still love my sexy mac though worth every penny.

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