Well, I was wrong. No GTS 250, but we do get new GT 120, GT130, HD4850 and HD4870 GPUs in various configurations of Mac Minis, iMacs and Mac Pros. More details on the Apple UK Store.
Great news on faster cards all round, but some weird choices by NVIDIA and Apple. GT 120 and GT 130, which are rebranded Series 9 cards, nothing higher? As it’s likely these Macs will see Snow Leopard, I would have assumed they would have tried to get the latest, high performance cards to really show off the speed of Snow Leopard. Then again, maybe these cards have been chosen so they can be run in SLI in Snow Leopard? We’ll have to wait and see.
That’s my initial thoughts, simply because I’ve been waiting for better GPUs since last summer. Once the dust settles, I’ll take a closer look at these new machines.
By
Alex McLarty on
January 17, 2009 in
Interviews.
Tags: AMD, Aperture, Aspur, ATI, Blizzard, Cider, Color, Core Animation, Core Image, CUDA, Dashboard, Expose, Feral, Final Cut Pro, Finder, Front Row, iChat AV, iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, MacSoft, Motion, OpenGL, Pages, Photobooth, PPC, Quartz 2D Extreme, Quartz Composer, Quartz Extreme, Radeon, Snow Leopard, Transgaming, Unity.
Whenever I call Chris Bentley, Mac 3D Manager from AMD, it’s always 10AM and the questions are heavy: Tell me secrets! Explain quantum mechanics! It’s either one or the other. And put it this way, I don’t know any secrets or understand quantum mechanics. Yet. But what I do know is that AMD are committed developers and they’ve got a great team working to make drivers for OS X better and faster. Score!
My latest my latest batch of questions for Chris are below, so take your seats and read all about drivers and cards for OS X, the challenges, the heart ache, and the history of 3D games on the platform.
I will pilfer all of AMD’s secrets from Chris. One day. Not sure about understanding quantum mechanics though…
Continue reading ‘Interview with Chris Bentley from AMD’
John Gruber has posted his predictions for Macworld Expo 2009. Among them are new monitors (long overdue), a new MacBook Pro and a demo of Snow Leopard. Gruber isn’t a rumour crazy, so you can take his predictions as ones coming from sense and an awareness of Apple.
Continue reading ‘Macworld 2009′
By
Alex McLarty on
December 30, 2008 in
Articles.
Tags: City of Heroes, Gears of War, HD3870 for Mac, Mac OS X, NVIDIA, OpenCL, Prince of Persia, Ryan Gordon, Snow Leopard, Windows, WoW.
Peter Cohen and Chris Holt from Macworld have posted a simplistic look at Mac gaming in 2009:
Circumstances can change very quickly in the world of gaming. This time last year, for example, you didn’t hear from too many game developers when it came to their iPhone plans—there wasn’t even an SDK to plan for 12 months ago. And yet, mobile gaming turned out to be all the rage in 2008. Some would say that just proves attempting to predict where a market is headed is a foolhardy proposition. We say we’re just the fools to undertake the job.
I don’t mean to be a finicky arse here, but the article basically states that there’ll be more of some things and less of others. Not exactly an in depth prediction.
Continue reading ‘The future of Mac gaming’
Missed this one. Two days ago the OpenCL 1.0 Specification was announced and ratified:
“The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable compute and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of cooperation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA. “As an open, cross-platform standard, OpenCL is a fundamental technology for next generation software development that will play a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem and we look forward to seeing implementations within the next year.”
“We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple developed OpenCL so that any application in Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, can harness an amazing amount of computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”
In a nutshell, your GPU will be used for more general purpose calculations. Snow Leopard will take advantage of this from the ground up, meaning applications and the OS should be faster. Things like encoding movies should be super fast - down from a couple hours to minutes.
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