How often do MA increase the requirements to play EU? I'm about to buy a new computer that more than covers for the current requirements, but if they were to change within a year or two then I may have to look for something more ... monsterous.
To my knowledge it happened only once with the change to CryEngine2, that some users with older hardware were left in the dust. Meaning, those with stuff already dated at the time. If you get something current and a foot or so above bare minimum now, it probably would be unreasonable to fear such a thing happening too soon. Make sure its graphics card covers DirectX 10 at least, better 11. These shouldn't get outmoded for a little while.
You should be safe for awhile, honestly you could say the requirements went down, the most intense was Cyrene and it got a massive graphical drop. Do make sure to load up on memory as Entropia is memory hungry, also make sure you have a SSD for the hard drive. As far as OS, if you are a windows user go for Windows 8 with classic shell unless Windows 10 is fully out by the time you upgrade. Depending on how technically minded you are you may want to go for the Windows 10 technical preview.
As long as Cry3 will not be announced to be introduced I think you'll be fine. These days it's also not that hard to upgrade single pc parts if you know how to do it yourself or know a friend to do it. Plus you can tinker with the new system once you get it (overclocking, ports, stuff like that)
Thanks for your replies. I'm going for either the better 21" iMac or the lesser 27" iMac. Both meet the requirements and then some. I plan to get a software that allows me to run Mac and Windows at the same time, and the salesman I talked to yesterday said doing that would halve the computers performance. But even then I still cover the highest setting. He obviously suggested using Bootcamp to run either Mac or Windows, not both simultaneously. But that would just be inconvenient for me.
I grew up with Apple so PC is out of the question. I only have one because I needed one for educational purposes some years ago.
So, after half a year I've bought my new iMac and installed Parallels 11 and windows 10 yesterday (along with EU and EL). All I can say to future Mac users who thinks of doing the same - DON'T! Buy a gamer PC instead. The resolution cannot be changed leaving you with graphics that looks like they did during the 90's! You cannot resize the window to get more space, only resize it to make EVERYTHING bigger. Increasing RAM to improve graphics settings (that was suggested on some forums) does nothing. EU runs EXTREMELY slow like this, even slower than a PC laptop with memory under requirement set on Low settings! Lesson learned the HARD way!
Maybe you could try Oracle VM VirtualBox. I don't know how it performs with games, certainly slower than on a PC but if it's your only resort maybe worth a shot. I use it mostly with Linux guest systems, but any combination of host/guest OS is conceivable. There is a learning curve and likely some searching involved to get the graphics settings to do what you want. If your time is valuable, maybe getting a used PC is the easiest option.
Parallels... perhaps try using win7 (has less code to run) instead of win8 or win10. Besides Parallels or VirtualBox you could try VMware to run windows on Mac OS. Hopefully mac users can let you know which of those 3 virtual engines gives the best performance. But in my experience with virtual engines and emulators they all eat (hardware) resources. I'd definitely second San's approach, buy a used pc and maybe use a switch box?
