Own a MacBook or MacBook Pro that doesn’t have an Nvidia 9400M? Don’t expect to use hardware acceleration for h.264 video decoding in Snow Leopard. Yup, a quick check of Apple’s Web site shows that only the 9400M will be compatible with Snow Leopard’s ability to hand off h.264 video decoding to the GPU. Tough break, kids. (Or you can get a Windows PC, which has had hardware-assisted h.264 decoding for some time now.)
In other news, OpenCL, the feature that offloads CPU cycles to the GPU, will work with a number of GPUs. And they are:
• NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130
• ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870
I must say, the last time I was truly impressed with a new version of Mac OS X was Tiger, and that was seven years ago. Perhaps that’s why Snow Leopard is only $30?
What? Seven years? Nope. Tiger came out April 2005. The FIRST commercial version of OS X came out seven years ago in March 2002.
Leopard has a lot going for it. Once I tried it, I knew it was way better than Tiger. Some differences were subtle but important. Like many updates to Applescript.
And FYI, any NVIDIA graphics card with CUDA will be supported by OpenCL. So that new $450 monster for the Mac Pro just introduced will not only have 240 cores, but they’ll all be reachable for use by Snow Leopard.
And you can bet there will be updates to MacBook Pros that will support OpenCL.
Tiger… hmm, thats the one that came right before leopard… LMAO.
btw, h.264 is only officially supported for the 9400M right now… doesn’t mean it is or will be the only one.
Then you could check out the NVida “Pure Video” and “PureVideoHD” apps which can, on some GPU’s, transfer all of the decoding work load off the CPU and onto the GPU
PC win
I’m a bit annoyed that the iMac I bought in March doesn’t support OpenCL. (It uses a Radeon 2600).
I did get a good deal on it though – just over $1200 shipped for a 24″ 2×2.8Ghz.
March of 2008?, sorry the last iMacs to have ATI 2600 graphics were 2008s, did you buy a refurbished 2008 in 2009 the price you payed would indicate that. In any case why are you annoyed? You really don’t have anything to complain about, if you want open CL sell your current iMac and buy a 2009 24 inch $1500, or a 20 inch for $999 in the referb store.
the bs is that H.264 is only accelerated in Quicktime X player, so far, not Front Row. So because you can’t open H.264 AC3 video files in Quicktime X player you can’t get acceleration, until someone develops some kind of plug-in/codec for Quicktime X. I haven’t checked iTunes yet… maybe with iTunes 9 it might…