Anybody playing on a Retina 5K display? (new iMac)

[PrairieDad]

I'm considering jumping off the Mac/Apple ship altogether, and going either dual boot Linux/Windows, or pure Linux with Windows as a VM with GPU passthrough. But gosh, the 5K Retina displays are glorious, and unaffordable outside of an iMac, AFAIK... >$1100!

For USD2300, I can get a machine with 8 gig of 2400 RAM, a seventh generation i5 (not further specified...I assume 4 core and 4 threads, likely an i5 7600K) and most importantly, an 8 gig Radeon RX 580 GPU to drive the Retina. That's the lowest priced iMac with 8 gigs of VRAM, and preposterously expensive for what you get...barring the display I could do far better building my own...but Hackintosh is hard, thus the notion of giving up MacOS.

The question is, does anyone have a machine more or less like the new iMac? Have you run the benchmarks? I'd love to see how Mac benchmarks on the best iMac I can find compare with those on comparably priced PCs. The various YouTubers who test this stuff don't show even 8 gig RX 580s as particularly potent...and all those pixels!

Thanks!

 

[DoctorDon]

2017 iMac 5k 27" with 4.2 Ghz Core i7, 16G RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8M RAM: graphics benchmark: 27.2ms average frame time, 42.4mms 99th percentile; AI benchmark: 17.7 average turn time. Running OS 10.12.6 right now.

 

[PrairieDad]

2017 iMac 5k 27" with 4.2 Ghz Core i7, 16G RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8M RAM: graphics benchmark: 27.2ms average frame time, 42.4mms 99th percentile; AI benchmark: 17.7 average turn time. Running OS 10.12.6 right now.

Many thanks. Just what I wanted to know. I assume it's all gorgeous as can be? What graphics setting are you using within the app, for animations and shading, etc.?

 

[borad]

I don’t have a screen bigger than 2560x1600 but on my previous testing resolution had surprisingly little effect on frame rate.

 

[DoctorDon]

I'm running at 2560 x 1440. I think I left all the graphics settings on the defaults. I think it looks great, but I'm actually not that sensitive to graphics settings. (I have a colleague at work who's an expert in 3d visualization, and he's constantly pointing out rendering details, good and bad, that I missed entirely.) (And if you're wondering why I bought this particular iMac if I'm not into high-end graphics details, I typically buy the high-end machine and then run it for 6-7 years until it can't play anything.)

 

[LFRANK]

I run my iMac at 2560x1440 on the default settings. It runs fine and looks great. OTOH, for those games or Civ VI updates we on the Mac have yet to receive I've installed Win10 on a BootCamp partition. It's efficient and convenient having two OSes on one machine in my office.