I’m a PC gamer, been one for a long time. So when I got my new iMac yesterday, which actually has a very good mainstream video card in the Radeon 5750, I had to try out some Modern Warfare 2 in the 27″ native resolution of 2560×1440.

Wow, is all I can say.

While in some very busy multiplayer running FRAPS under Win 7 Pro 64-bit/ Boot Camp, I was seeing a very consistent 65 frames per second, and a 60-s benchmark showed frame rates peaking in the 90′s (MW2 is FPS capped at 90, I think), and never dipping below 40, which is not just playable – its great!

Here is a video I posted of the game which shows it running great – but since its a FRAPS recording, the recording itself is affecting gameplay, even though I recorded it at half-res with no sound @30FPS. Actual gameplay is much better than you see here.

Historically any serious gamer will tell you to avoid a Mac. First and foremost because they never ship with great gaming video cards, and only recently started to use good ones. Mac OS X, of course, has a tiny percentage of hit game titles, usually ported late, and although Valve’s great Steam was recently ported to Mac, the OS itself does not deliver the performance of the Windows version (yet).

There has always been the option to buy a Power Mac, but in terms of gaming *value*, that’s money poorly spent. Most of the Power Mac’s cost is based in it’s use of Workstation-grade CPUs, RAM, and motherboards, super-fancy enclosure and Apple Tax, which in practice really only delivers a lower failure rate, and perhaps some I/O performance that isn’t really relative to gamers.

The new 27″ iMac with Radeon 5750 is a really interesting first for Apple, because as long as you also want that display, the combination of computer and display at $2000 starts to become reasonable. An equivalent Dell box and monitor would be about $1700, and that’s about as close as Apple gets to Dell prices in terms of hardware bang-for-the-buck.