You should let the game check and determine the quality settings on the first run after installation. I suspect that it will likely come up with a High setting by itself.

That being said, you can always go for the best tradeoff afterwards. Start with setting the overall graphics quality to Ultra-High. Water Reflection will be Medium by default (which is ok), and View Distance around 62. Play around with the latter, but with only 1 GB of video RAM, I wouldn't set it too high. Better to have more room for high resolution textures than to fill it with ground clutter.

Settings with a greater impact on framerate will be Shadow Quality (I set mine from Ultra to High without noticeable loss of quality) and Particle Density (dito), especially in PvP. The latter will be further addressed with a new PFX priority system and more options to tune in the upcoming 1.4 patch.

Don't expect FPS wonders -- 29-39 frames per second on the landscape is actually quite good and fluid. In crowded cities and during PvP this might drop to the mid twenties and below, but you can alway adjust for lower settings situationally if you plan to stay longer in a particular area. VSYNC should always stay OFF, because it will half framerates.

From what I hear, ESO actually manages to look pretty even on weaker machines with lower quality settings. A higher single-thread performance on the CPU seems to help with framerates as well, although the Mac client behaves better with thread balancing on multiple cores than its Windows pendant does. In an extreme measure, you could try to disable one or two CPU cores with a (free) Xcode tool, to achieve higher and/or more persistent Turbo Boost stages on the rest.

Btw, I'm running ESO on a late 2013 27" iMac with the GeForce GTX 780M and 4 GB of video RAM, and with the settings and results I described above on the native 2560x1440 resolution. As always, YMMV. But maybe someone with a late 2013 21.5" iMac and the same GC can give a better picture.

Pavlina20 wrote: »

Well, I'm buying a new system, so I'd really like one of the NEW systems and not a refurb. I'm playing on low settings, everything turned off now on a MacBook Pro Mid 2012. My poor old iMac can't even think of running this game. We need a new iMac anyway so looking to buy a new one. I get 20s framerate right now and it makes the game barely enjoyable, to be perfectly honest.

Thanks for your input.

FYI, this is the system I really want, but maybe I won't be able to justify the price

3.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i5
Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
8GB (two 4GB) memory
1TB hard drive1
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M with 1GB video memory

Honestly to achieve Ultra-High performance at the native resolution of the 27 inch display at 2560 x 1440, you need to go for the higher end 3.43.4Ghz model and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5 [+ £130.00] GPU.

The lower end model with only 1GB VRAM will really not improve much over the existing performance. It really is the limiting factor in the system on any iMac.

The cost is higher but the package really does deliver and as you can't update GPU on Macs (except Mac Pro models) it makes sense to spring for the best GPU option available at purchase.

With that setup I have Ultra-High settings with Shadow Quality to Medium (as it helps performance quite a bit and visually not much difference) and return View Distance to previous default of 62. In cities PVE I run at a solid 35-40fps. Out questing it's 45-55 FPS and in dungeons 60-80 FPS in public dungeons.

Buying the default GPU on Macs is just crippling an otherwise perfectly good computer. I have said before that it is a shortsighted decision of Apple to equip these really good Macs with really underpowered GPU as it is just a let down for those wishing to use them for any form of 3D gaming generally.

The Nvidia GTX780M 4GB VRAM remains pretty much the best mobile GPU available for PC gaming and will provide plenty of performance for the next few years.

Pavlina20 wrote: »

Yeah, I thought that would be the deal. I truly love my Apple iMacs but it just really seems a losing deal for me. I don't really need the power for anything else and spending 2650 AUD is a bit beyond my budget I think, I was hoping to spend considerably less. Boo. Especially since I hear I can get a gaming PC (does that stand for Piece of Crap? LOL) for around 1000 but that is prob USD and not AUD. Luckily I have some time and I'll keep looking. To either postpone the purchase to the next year at the very least. Thanks.

No problem, happy to help.

Wise not to rush into it and consider the cost/ benefit. For pure gaming a PC will offer better value/ performance.