Tag Archive for 'GPU'

For the future, yo!

By Alex McLarty on February 5, 2009 in News. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Eating breakfast and scanning my RSS feeds. Ain’t I the modern man. I am not however applying moisturiser, I’m not that modern. So, before I pop off to University to learn about lovely OOP and SQL, here’s a tid bit from Bit Tech:

…it’s important to remember that the 8800 GT was a fine graphics card at launch. And although getting a little long in the tooth since its October 2007 release, is still able to slug it out with the ATI Radeon HD 4830.

Although the article was about a revamped, pornographic 9800 GT 512MB XXX Edition GPU, this one paragraph surprised me a little. My Mac Pro, the beast of the Apple lineup, uses a one and a half year old GPU. And that’s the crème de la crème. I knew the card was aging, but I’d somehow just let it slide…

And while Bit Tech are right, it’s still a decent card, it’s by no means a halfway decent for gamers. We need more power. More pixel pushing. More effects! We need more! More! Mo!

The State of Mac Gaming

By Alex McLarty on November 27, 2008 in Articles. 14 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

“The truth is Steve Jobs doesn’t care about games.” *
- John Carmack, 2008.

When you have a company so secretive as Apple, who knows what they’re working on? The latest iDevice, a new online service, a time machine? Sadly all three of those seem more likely than anything to do with games. 

For years, the Mac has been considered a laughable platform for games. Hell, the Mac gamer as a statement is still an oxymoron…

Continue reading ‘The State of Mac Gaming’

GPU Acceleration

By Alex McLarty on September 24, 2008 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Lionel at HardMac makes a good point about GPU acceleration and how it could force Apple to focus on certifying the latest cards for use in OS X:

As we reported it earlier, Adobe unveiled its CS4 suite yesterday with availability for the end of the year. One of the main new features for Photoshop is the ability to benefit from GPU processing power to speed up rendering and/or some functions.

If Apple was always offering graphic cards from the generation N-1 to Mac users, the new CS4 suite could push Cupertino to revise this weird strategy and better follow GPU availability, not only for gamers, but now for all Pro users. Indeed, Apple will most likely not let CS4 suite and other audio/video/graphic software to run faster on a Win-based PC than on a Mac, as it could push long-time Mac users to the PC world. So it has to do with market shares and Apple’s image.

Hopefully Apple will attempt to adopt some of the latest cards from ATI and NVIDIA to further enhance the performance of applications like Photoshop, ImageReady or Motion, which in turn will help us gamers!

It’s interesting to see computing come full circle, where seemingly different and unconnected parts and processes start to become one, allowing performance benefits and a better, more unified machine.