My 20″ 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo does a lot of things really well, especially now that it has 4GB of memory. I almost always have a Windows XP VMWare running in one of my Spaces windows (which is awesome, BTW). It runs compiles plenty fast, X-Plane runs like a champ, yadda yadda. However, I’ve had sub-par results with certain games when running Windows XP under boot camp — namely Starcraft and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. I’ve finally found a solution, and it wasn’t all that hard after some searching on Apple’s support forums.

With Starcraft, the problem is that the game is too old, really. It runs full screen 640×480 256 colors. The iMac runs 1680×1050 32-bit color. The drivers provided by Apple for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 don’t support 640×480 in any color depth or any resolution at 256 colors. I was able to kind of fix the problem by creating a hardware profile that disabled the Radeon video driver, falling back to the default VESA driver. But that rendered Windows pretty much useless for anything but Starcraft when booted in that profile.

With Flight Simulator, it just didn’t go fast enough. FS is pretty demanding on the card, particularly when flying a plane with a G1000. Frame rates would quickly drop below 15FPS, which is pretty much unflyable.

This discussion on Apple’s forum got me started down the path to upgrading the video drivers to ATI’s latest greatest. The drivers won’t install by default due to a weird part number on the iMac chips, but they will work. Here is a post with instructions on how to install the video driver. I’d recommend downloading the Catalyst Control Center package for the drivers, then follow his instructions. After the driver is loaded (and you’ve rebooted), go to C:\ATI\SUPPORT\\CCC and run the Setup application in there to install the Catalyst Control Center, which allows you to tweak various settings. One of the more important settings is in the monitor properties, where you can set the card to “Preserve Aspect Ratio”. Now, I get better frame rates in Flight Simulator, don’t have to do anything special to run Starcraft, and the aspect ratio for Starcraft is correct (I get black bars on the right/left of screen, but it’s better than everything being stretched). Much happier now — should have figured this out months ago.