Wanting to know about gaming performance on boot camp

Question

Hello I have an Intel imac 20” with 2 GHz core 2 duo processer 2 GB of ram and ATI Radeon HD 2400 128 MB.
And I will be getting leopard here soon but I basically want it for boot camp so I can play games on my Mac. I have played some games on my Mac but they run very poorly I downloaded unreal tournament 2003 and I couldn’t even run it, the frame rate was terrible it was the same for DOOM 3 it was extremely choppy even on low settings. I am wanting to play games like Command & Conquer 3 which I would just buy the one for Mac computers but after running the games I listed above I don’t think it will work at all is it my hardware or would I be able to run new pc games if I had windows through boot camp?
Any help would be greatly appreciative thanks.

Answer 1

Please note for a start that I am a beginner with Macs - only had my 24"iMac for 3 months, never paid much attention to Macs before. (But been playing with PCs and earlier things since they came out, spent 50 years or so with computing software and hardware). I got an iMac for reasons similar to yours, it seems - wanted the stability of the Mac platform (etc etc), but wanted to play 'real' games.
I set up a 250GB NTFS partition with Boot Camp (& iPartition), installed XP Pro SP2. Been loading and testing 19 assorted games that I like - mostly RPG/FPS, old and new. Of these 3 have NOT worked at all so far, 4 have worked with a bit of fiddling, the rest worked right off. Recent ones such as Guild Wars, The Witcher, Dark Messiah, Dungeon Siege 2, Hellgate London, Assassins Creed, Age of Conan:Hyborian Adventures & Overlord work just fine. Great graphics, decent frame rates, excellent sound. The only 'recent' game that is giving me problems is Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - but that gives everyone problems on PCs too! Especially as its useless as an RPG out of the box, needs extensive mods added that obviously cause problems. Some older games refuse to work - Might & Magic 7, Dungeon Keeper 2, are examples. I have yet to try DOSBox with the older games. The games requiring a bit of fiddling usually needed running in a 'compatibility mode', Win95 or Win98/Me.
I did have a very poor wireless data rate initially, using Airport (to my access point on the router). Seems a common complaint on these forums. I fixed it (eventually) by turning off Airport, using Ethernet to the router.
We seem not to play the same games - but if you have specific questions, drop me a line and I shall try to help. I am very happy myself with the iMac as a gaming platform. Room for improvements from Apple? - better keyboard mapping for some of the PC games; better audio level control; fewer wireless problems.
nackles