Vid cards have ALWAYS been a weak point with Apple. It's really a choice... if you go Apple, don't ever plan on running a high quality game on its best settings. Just ain't gonna happen.

The best Gaming system that Apple offers, as far as I know, is the Mac Pro with 2 Radeon HD 5770.  Roughly equaling a single HD 5870 in specs (maybe slightly better depending on the games).  But they do offer the Mac Pro with a single 5870 too.  So the choice they offer to take the 2 cards road is kinda useless. ¬_¬

Going the single card route is also more energy efficient.

@Hynad

Apple canada states it has a 1gig 5750...so you are correct.

http://www.apple.com/ca/imac/specs.html

@rocketpig

Now that makes me curious...why does one need an I7 with a video card like that?

Yea, having a huge monitor can be problems with getting super good graphics in games.  We bought our computer like a year ago, and it cost $1300 I think (we tried other methods to get a cheap one, but ended up getting a faulty computer, so just went and bought one in a store).  Its got an older quad core, (9650 I think), and 1 gb 4650 graphics card.  Strange enough, they bundled with it a 27" 1920x1080 screen. (just to clarify, its not a mac, but the same general idea results).  The massive screen is sweet for doing pretty much everything, including gaming, but since I have my games set to a 1920x1080 resolution, I'm only able to run smoothly on like medium.

Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, any 2D program for, you know... WORKING. :D

There are loads of processor-intensive programs out there that rely very little on a video card for added performance.

Wait, so Mac vs PC commercials...the Mac one is the working one? The PC guys is just a slacker gamer in a suit? :)

Seriously though, I can see intensive photoshop sessions needing the I7. Adobe really need to start utilizing the GPU for image manipulation in photoshop...

That's what the commercials are trying to say, but unfortunately, 90% of the business world uses pcs for work purposes because they are cheaper, work just as good, and have a lot more programs for them

It already does... OpenGL drawing is available in CS4 and CS5... it makes image manipulation much smoother..

I guess it shows I haven't done graphic or flash design since 2006 :)

To reply to some comments above:

There are things that need crazy CPU speeds, and there are things that need crazy GPU speeds. Most of them are not the same thing. For gaming, it's all about GPU. For Video conversion, Photoshop, code development, movie making, etc, the CPU is king. I plan on using the Mac for all things CPU related.

The screen in this computer is ungodly good. For gaming, I will use my high end Windows 7 gaming rig hooked up to the Computer. Aside from spending a $1,000 or the screen by itself, there is no other way to produce the visuals this screen can produce. With the PC hooked into the iMac, I just hit command-F2 to toggle between the Windows 7 computer and the iMac.

My laptop has an ATI X1600 GPU with 256 Meg. Oddly, it's the first and last laptop from Apple that will natively drive a dual-link DVI monitor. If I want to use this Dell 30" with any Laptop Apple has ever sold aside from this exact model, I need a $99 adapter that's a little flaky. You can drive a 2560x1600 30" monitor with a displayport from any new Macbook, just not one with only a Dual-Link DVI input.

It does not matter what video card a Mac Pro has in it with respect to gaming. If you bought a Mac Pro to Game, you bought the wrong computer.

To the comment about a large screen effecting gaming performance, the screen in the iMac is smaller in both physical size and resolution then the monitor I am typing this on right now. The Dell is 16x10 aspect ratio, and the iMac is 16x9. Both are 2560 across, but due to the change in aspect ratio, the iMac losses 160 pixels from time to botom (1440 vs 1600). It's a small price to pay for the quality of image improvement. I can't wait to see what games are going to look like in this screen! :)