Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Mac Mini & iBook VRAM - is 32MB enough for Tiger? Maybe…(updated)

Occasionally I touch base with Ric Ford at Macintouch (a great Mac resource) and he popped my question on the iBook VRAM and Tiger up on his site.

Since it’s my letter anyway, lemme repost my question here.

Some pre-history: I bought my old iBook (8MB VRAM) slightly more than 6 months before the release of Jaguar, and sure enough the Mac OS wanted at least 16MBs of VRAM. You could turn down the colors and suffer with sluggishness, but it was clear I bought it too early.

Now I want to buy a new iBook and I had hoped for a slight bump in the Video RAM to 64MB since both the Mac Mini and iBook only have 32MB VRAM and Tiger’s due in 6 months. In last year’s Apple Tech conference, Apple claimed Tiger effects like the liquid ripple in Dashboard required a 64MB video card. While it’s eye candy on the OS, I plan on buying Keynote 2 where some of these transitions may well come in quite handy.

To make things interesting, Apple once had a list of compatible video cards on their Core Image page, but now those listed cards have been replaced with a marketing laundry list of Core Image features and only the vague promise of “hardware scalability”.

This is the list from the cached copy on Google. Apple’s supported graphics cards were:

ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra

Please note no mention of the ATI Radeon 9200 (with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM over an AGP 4x bus) which is in the iBook, eMac and Mac Mini. Some would say that it’s enough. Most would say it’s a $40 video card and a 64MB version might cost $10 more.

Can anyone comment on this scalability issue? Would Tiger produce chunkier effects or remove some effects entirely? Is the processor going to be taxed to support Tiger’s cool graphics, when it could have just been offloaded to a graphics card with the appropriate amount of VRAM?

Ultimately - Is any computer purchase with 32MB VRAM purchase now going to be a mistake? I think this is an essential issue for any current Mac buyer.

UPDATE:

Here’s the deal - VRAM is more an issue for performance, and Tiger will be more aggressive in balancing graphic power between the video card and the system CPU. There’s an off-chance that some visual effects that are not available in Panther would be available in Tiger. Tiger should better use the AltiVec unit in older systems, and it’s quite possible that graphic performance would improve.

For now, the biggest issue with the existing ATI Radion 9200 in the Mac Mini and iBook is that it can’t support the Pixel Shader 2.0 libraries. These are essential for the translucent effects that we’re seeing more and more of, in software like Keynote 2, Tiger on the Mac and Windows Media Center and “Longhorn” for the “other guys”. The 9200 *could* do it, I hear - if the driver libraries were re-written, but ATI probably won’t do such a thing. It’s an old card and we all know how that game is played.

I’m already seeing many things I was afraid for: In Keynote 2, quite a few effects aren’t available to older hardware. On the Mini/iBook front, 3 current transitional effects you can’t use are burn, flash and droplet.  I have no idea what these effects look like - they may be crap for all I know, unlikely, but possible. Still, maybe with tiger..maybe with Tiger…

That said, I went out and bought a new Powerbook 12”. I’d certainly wait a while for a video card update before buying a Mini.

Posted by Admin on 01/18 at 12:22 PM
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Monday, January 17, 2005

Oh, so it’s OUR fault now?

image

The folks at Miller are opening the wrong barrel of worms: Their new site tries to be viral [Prevent Taste Loss] but loses against sites like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which was so successful that it even had a Snopes urban legends page. Everyone’s chasing the holy grail of marketing - getting that 20s-something disillusioned youth (who substitutes snide for substance) onto their website. Must be tough being “the Man” these days…hell, every company is “the Man”, even coolies like Apple.

I have an idea - In my opinion, Miller should stop producing that fecal-tasting brew and just make a beer that actually tastes good...

Posted by Admin on 01/17 at 04:16 AM
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Memo: Keep my day job…

Seems any job I could have based on prognostication should include where my next meal would come from.

Man - I got alot of that wrong. Apple came out with the mini, the shuffle and the office suite (and since when is 2 applications a “suite”?). I got the shuffle right, but let’s face it - I’d have to be deaf, dumb and perhaps dead to have missed that one.

The Mac Mini surprises me, not just at the price, but at the form factor. It makes a Shuttle PC look huge. Add the video adaptor and wireless networking and you’ve got an interesting box there in the living room. I see a port of Myth TV coming down the pike VERY quickly…

The office suite. Hmm. “So how many pages in that Pages document?” Could have been worse - they could have called it Document. I guess they’re going to hold back from attacking MS Office for a while more, which makes sense since buying an office system without MS Word, as the boss’s secretary would say, “ain’t gonna happen”.

All-in-all, fun while it lasted. Will I buy a Mini? Nope - no need. I’ll hold out a little while longer for a proper PVR.

Posted by Admin on 01/12 at 03:06 AM
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Monday, January 10, 2005

Hoo-hah! MacWorld Predictions

MacWorld is tomorrow in California - bastards. Sunshine and new hardware. So since we’ll not be there it’s time to put my predictions in writing. Some are no brainers, and some wish-fulfillment. But it’s a game, right? So let’s consult the Magic 8-ball:

“Signs point to yes”
- New iPod Flash - unless you’ve been hibernating, this is a fait de complet.  The latest buzz is that it’s a remote-control-type device.

- New QuickTime - the h.264-based video (4 times more efficient than current, if I recall correctly) with AAC Pro (the new audio component to h.264) and support for OGG playback. This will make many a Linux user happy and negate a bit of the iRiver advantage.

- New iTunes - New iPod, new QuickTime…new iTunes. duh.

- Keynote 2 - Long overdue, it has the possibility to be a real PowerPoint killer if Apple can smooth out the rough edges. It needed more transitions and pushes, and the ability to have multiple pushes-per-slide, more clipart and easier bullet-ing. QuickTime export really stands to have great gains on file size.

- Asteroid - Some kind of Firewire DJ control. Kids will like it, I guess. Damn kids - playing music at all hours. And stay off my lawn!


“Reply hazy, try again”
- A Mac Office Suite - Possible, but that would mean either upgrading the AppleWorks codebase, which if I recall wasn’t terribly optimized for OS X to begin with, nor a G5. Building from scratch makes more sense, but we’re also talking about creating a word processor & spreadsheet companions to Keynote, which as I mentioned earlier needed stabilizing itself. Mail competes pretty well with Outlook except for the scheduling component - iCal needs to be integrated better. You also need a competitor for Access, especially since the MS option doesn’t include it and MySQL is built in to OS X. Filemaker makes sense except that they’re doing very well without being bundled but it competes with MySQL. It makes more sense to build a MySQL front-end with the same drag and click ease of Access. Ultimately, I think Keynote 2 will arrive and perhaps a upgraded version of Notepad becomes our new Write application, and when a db and spreadsheet are ready, then the Office app cometh. IMHO, not this show.

- iBook upgrade - yeah, it’s only been a few months since the speed-bump, but Apple really needs to address the coming VRAM issue on the iBook and Tiger. If you say Tiger’s Core Image component requires 64MB VRAM, how long do you continue selling 32MB VRAM hardware? What happens when all these Christmas presents decide that they want to upgrade to Tiger in June, and find that they’re already severely outdated? Sure Core Image scales to older hardware, but seriously - 32MBs? Apple - you really need to address this.


“Outlook not so good”
The Headless Mac - Man, I really doubt the idea of a $500 headless iMac. Unless they’re dropping the eMac from the consumer market, I can’t imagine most non-Apple users heading for it.

So what is the mystery box…?


“Signs point to yes”
iHome - Apple’s PVC and answer to the iPod video issue. Another salvo in the consumer hardware market, I think the iHome will be the Mac Tivo - with the added ability of allowing iPods to shuttle video from project to presentation just by plugging in. iTunes music and iMovie, iDVD projects, the iPod carries it to an iHome which displays it, as well as doing the video recording/scheduling PVRs are known for. I would be surprised if it had a DVD player, but it could happen. I do expect it to be able to link with an Airport Extreme, so you can place your video where you want without having to keep it near the stereo or running wires across the room. Consider also the space-saving quality of h.264 in the new QuickTime. And if the rumor of Apple speakers are true, and they’re wireless speakers, then you begin to see how this can really change the marketplace.

What may separate it from the pack will be price - I think Apple’s on the edge of playing the value game. If iHome comes in under $500, it’ll completely own the market. Even if you have to spend another $200 or so for wireless speakers and an Airport Express, it would still be an amazing value and destroy the competition on price.


“Ask again later…”
Apple chose not to webcast it live (another pointer for me to a QuickTime upgrade) so by tomorrow midnight (Amsterdam-time) we’ll probably know all.

What do you predict?

Posted by Admin on 01/10 at 01:15 AM
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Sunday, January 09, 2005

Updates and MacWorld

It’s slow on this site mostly because 1) this is an experiment to see if I even care to blog, and 2) I sold the old home laptop and I’m waiting for MacWorld before making a decision on a new home computer.

I won’t have another PC in my house - game over on Windows. I work on them all day and I don’t want to be come tech support at home, so now with OS X it’s all Macs at home. The first update will be a new portable and later on in the year I hope to either add a Dual-G5 or, ahem - this is a big “or” - an xServe.

(Yeah, I could run Linux - I’ve done that under Suse and RedHat before on my Sun 5s and the old Pentium II, but now I tend to want to simplify my systems and that means OS X full-time. I just want it to work…Of course, I’m always open to new ideas—and if anyone wants to donate to the “educational fund”, please do.)

But the rumors of MacWorld’s headless Mac systems, home PVRs, new hardware and software makes one just want to wait a little bit more. I’ve got an eye on a new iBook, but the 32MB vram seems a little low when you consider the 64MB video requirements for Tiger…I’m hoping for a slight update on the iBooks.

Posted by Admin on 01/09 at 07:27 AM
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