The new PBG4 and graphics

thorondor

Registered
Anyone got an idea if OS X is optimized for the Radeon Mobility card in the new PBG4?

And in what way would that card be able to speed up graphics in OS X? (Maybe that eye-candy will work better on it)
 
Better cards normally mean better 3d drawing rather than 2d.

Any 3d (or vector(?)) apps (Lightwave, Maya etc.) or games (Quake 3 Arena), their performance will be greatly enhanced. But for things like photoshop, not much difference.

Can anyone correct me?
 
to Uoba

> But for things like photoshop, not much difference.
> Can anyone correct me?
but Radeon chip (faster then 128 in 2d and 3d) and more VRAM it is good news for Photoshop, FCP etc. users... I think that this card should be faster everywhere :))))
 
OS X does NOT currently offload any of the graphics that display windows and such to the GPU. So getting a GF3 will not help your windows minimize smoother or windows resize better. The only things that will help that are 1) more RAM and 2) a faster CPU -- I recently tried window resizing on an 867 MHz G4 -- it was flawless.. my 450 MHz G4 cube has no such luck, even though I've got so much RAM.

OS X is a RAM and CPU hungry operating system. However, the good side of this is that the hardware is now catching up to the software, as opposed to the opposite problem we had with the Classic Mac OS. Already Mac OS X runs very well on new systems (and decently on older ones, when configured correctly), and so it can only get better from here.

From a recent Ars Techinca article, I think Apple is working on a way to offload the display graphics to the GPU, but there is no ETA on when this feature will be implemented. OS X just has built-in drivers for the cards when using OpenGL and other such technologies.
 
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