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

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

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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