Will Diablo 3 run better on my Mac if I play in Windows 7 via Boot Camp?

Diablo III doesn't play very well for me in OS X, even with most graphics quality settings set to low.

A Battle.net support article says that the minimum system requirements in Windows 7 are lower than Mac OS X.

If I play Diablo III in Windows 7 via Boot Camp, is the game performance going to be better than playing in OS X natively?

Solution 1:

TL;DR version: Yes, Diablo III runs better in Windows than in Mac OS X.

I have a Mid 2011, 27" iMac (Specifically, with a Core i5, 2.6GHz CPU and a Radeon HD 6770M graphics card). I installed Diablo 3 in both OS X and Windows 7 and ran a few simple tests by loading up a character who was parked at the Act II starting area.

The location I used

Default settings

The default/suggested video settings were the same on both platforms:

1920 × 1080 resolution
High texture quality
Medium shadow quality
High physics
High clutter density
Anti-aliasing on

High resolution

My 27" iMac's display has a native resolution of 2560 × 1440. I did a separate set of tests at this resolution as well.

Low FX

Changing the texture, shadow, physics, and clutter settings only had minor effects (at least on my machine), but I did notice a significant boost by disabling anti-aliasing and turning on the "Low FX" mode.

Results

(In the chart below, D means default settings, L means default settings with Low FX mode enabled and anti-aliasing off.)

             1920× D  1920× L  2560× D  2560× L
             --------------------------------
       OS X: 34 FPS   39 FPS   23 FPS   27 FPS
    Windows: 47 FPS   53 FPS   27 FPS   35 FPS
Improvement:   ~38%     ~35%     ~17%     ~29%

I didn't exhaustively test every combination of settings and resolutions, but based on these results, I'm willing to state that yes, Diablo III runs better in Windows.