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NVIDIA invited me to their press event in London for their new mobile GPU - the 9400M. Unfortunately as I live in the wilds of England and have only small sums of hard cash to hand, I had to leave early and travel on the cheapest form of transport. In the 21st century it’s not robot cars or teleportation, it’s flying. Yes, the train was more expensive. Daft, eh?
I left my house at 5:10 in the morning. That’s too early. It was dark and a warm breeze blew autumnal leaves down the street. I shuddered at the early hour and the thought of the long day of traveling and waiting ahead of me. The taxi driver was cheery and chatted all the way to the airport. After a twenty minute conversation about computers, jobs in the North East and the decline of our home town, we arrived at Newcastle Airport. Strip lightning, horribly bright for 5:30AM, make me blink and probably look dead. If I was an airport worker, I’d bring a shotgun to work. Just in case the hordes of sandal wearing flyers and binge drink horrors turned into the undead. But then again, this is why I don’t work at the airport. Airports don’t like their staff carrying illegal firearms around. Goodness knows why. The zombie apocalypse is coming. The buggers at check in made me take my shoes off too, just in case I’d hidden all sorts of fun things in there. Luckily I’d flushed the huge quantities of cocaine stuffed in my moccasins in a fit of panic prior to check in. Onward!
If I don’t come out of this event with a MacBook Pro, I consider it a wasted trip. In case you missed the news, Apple have rebelled against Intel and ditched their Integrated Graphics in MacBooks and MacBook Pros for some newer, more powerful NVIDIA GPUs. This means that every Mac (forget the Mini for the moment) can play games. Every. Single. One. The days of Intel Integrated Graphics are over. Mark Rein was right, we all knew it. By raising the level of hardware in Macs, Apple are making it easier for developers to make the jump. It also means that when Snow Leopard ships with all it’s CUDA innards, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Pros are all going to crunch numbers and subroutines faster. Encoding your videos, your MP3 collection, playing games, will all be much faster. Not to mention the obvious benefit of having a computer that can actually run a game at better than 6FPS! Transgaming will be happy too, as Ciderized games will be able to run on every Mac sold from now on (I told you, forget the Mini!). Previously IGP were not supported.
The event was lead by Rene Haas, NVIDIA’s General Manager of Notebook GPUs, who had a lot to say about the new 9400M. In a nutshell, NVIDIA are trying to lure notebook manufacturers away from IGP. Why? Because IGP are crap. They cannot run games. The problem: IGP are hugely popular. They’re cheap and installed in a lot of machines. Developers have to attempt to develop for them because of their ubiquity. This funnels resources away from fun things; like making games look awesome on higher end hardware and limits development as a whole. As Mark Rein famously stated – Intel are killing gaming.
Not anymore. The 9400M from NVIDIA is a GPU and a chipset built into one, half the size of a traditional system. It’s tiny and it’s cheap. In fact, as Rene Haas told us all, it’s the same price as IGP. It also uses the same amount of power as IGP and delivers 5x performance compared to IGP. Quite literally, a breakthrough. Rene demoed CoD4 on a 2.4GHZ Sony Vaio with IGP, that oddly enough looked like a 1980′s Cylon. The experience, well, there was no experience. It was around 6FPS, painfully jittery and glitched. Switch to the lower clocked MacBook – yes, a MacBook – with the 9400M, and CoD4 was butter smooth at native resolution with most settings on Low to Mid.
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The MacBook Pro features a 9400M and a 9600M that can run together in Hybrid SLI. While not technically SLI, it’s good to know things are moving forward with GPUs at Apple. Rob at Barefeats recently compared the 9400M and 9600M:
As you can see, in the case of OpenGL 3D accelerated games, the 9600M GT stand-alone GPU in the “late 2008″ 15″ 2.8GHz MacBook Pro is 121% to 286% faster than the integrated 9400M. It seems the only reason to enable the 9400M is if you are trying to stretch battery life.
The above results are also useful if you are trying to decide between the MacBook with the integrated GeForce 9400M (only) and the MacBook Pro with the “available” stand-alone GeForce 9600M GT. Though the 9400M is much faster than the integrated Intel GMA X3100 used in the previous generation MacBooks, it’s no match for the 9600M GT.
Rene wouldn’t tell me about upcoming Apple products that will feature NVIDIA chipsets and GPU’s, but when I asked him if all Apple products (most importantly the iMac and Mac Pro) were going to feature NVIDIA chipsets and brand new GPU’s, he simply smiled and told me to wait and see. I think we’re going to see Apple move to NVIDIA hardware completely, definitely GPU’s. CUDA is going to play a huge role in Leopard. With a tighter integration of hardware, better drivers (Rene said that drivers for Mac OS X will definitely be improved) and a focus from Apple and NVIDIA, we’ll see huge performance boosts across the board, that with a bit of luck may give Mac gaming the steroid injection it needs.
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I asked Rene about the weird choice to force the user to logout to change graphics cards on the MacBook Pro. He didn’t understand it either, as Vista based systems can switch between cards whenever they wish. It feels odd that Apple have chosen to prevent this. The good news is that if Vista can do it, then so can a Mac; the ‘feature’ is purely software, so perhaps we’ll see this changed in the future.
The MacBook Air is also going to see a 9400M – slightly under clocked – soon. Personally, I think that the Air’s days are numbered. It’s expensive, SSD isn’t as great as promised and you need loads of wires to actually get the bloody thing going. One thing is certain: the MacBook is going to sell a boatload.
Whether or not Apple actually understand what they have to do regarding games is another matter. I’d be happy for NVIDIA to pave the way with their The Way It’s Meant To Be Played, as Bit-Tech recently reported:
We went down to the GeForce 9400M launch and had the chance to pose a few questions to Rene Haas, Nvidia General Manager for Notebook GPUs, who revealed that Nvidia would most certainly be using the The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program to encourage developers to release more titles for Mac, with release dates for Mac games falling much closer to the PC launches.
I have to wonder if NVIDIA and Apple are on the same page about gaming. I still can’t get anyone at Apple to speak to me about games and that’s a worry when keynotes and hardware are about gaming. I hope that this isn’t another example of Apple trying to get games or simply use games as a launch pad, a temporary tool to show off what the new MacBook range can do. What we need to see are the benefits of having this hardware. Maybe Snow Leopard will bring that, but in the meantime – Apple, please, create a games division! And talk to me about them!
