Although NVIDIA hasen't made an "official" announcement, the newly announced Second-Gen Gemstone notebooks (from Acer) sport the new 9650M GS GPU. So, the 9xxx series of cards are not far off- think we'll see these in the Montevina MBP?
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NVIDIA 9650M announced- Candidate for Montevina Update?
- Thread starter JWest
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Yes. I don't want to spend $3K on laptop with last years video card. Hopefully it will be available as a 512MB config. with a 17" matte screen option.
It's the exact same specs as the 8700m, just as the 9500m is the same specs as the 8600m. All we are getting are die shrinks and some updates to the most current directx version. I still hope there's going to be some actually new architectures coming out in the 9xxxm line.
edit: I should add that although products with 9500m and 9650m have been annonced, nvidia has just posted pages for these specific products, with no actual acknowledgment of their existence on the site other than the pages themselves (no 9xxxm section). Also, both of these cards are listed as "GS".
My guess is that they are waiting to formally launch the mobile 9m line, which will mean GT models will newer GDDR RAM and possibly some new architectures that actually represent advances other than plain old die shrinks.
edit: I should add that although products with 9500m and 9650m have been annonced, nvidia has just posted pages for these specific products, with no actual acknowledgment of their existence on the site other than the pages themselves (no 9xxxm section). Also, both of these cards are listed as "GS".
My guess is that they are waiting to formally launch the mobile 9m line, which will mean GT models will newer GDDR RAM and possibly some new architectures that actually represent advances other than plain old die shrinks.
Bigger numbers in a product line do not equal better.
Jesus....
The 9 series cards are just like the 8 with die shrinks.
Little to NO Performance enhancements.....
Jesus....
The 9 series cards are just like the 8 with die shrinks.
Little to NO Performance enhancements.....
No argument there...
That would be nice.... Just funny how people see the higher number and assume better performance....
NVIDIA should have named it 8650 GT lol
Actually that's not completely true. The 9500 is the same as the 8600 (but with a die shrink). As for the 9650, I'm pretty sure it's more akin to an under powered 8800, but that's just speculation on my part. It's hard to say until nvidia releases specs.
EDIT: I found some links to nvidia's specs, it appears as the the 9650 is the successor to the 8700. In other words, it's an overclocked 9500, which means we won't be seeing huge performance increases. Here's the links:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_9500M.html
9650
Ugh, I can't imagine them putting in an overclocked anything in the MBP. Already its got a bit too much power and heat running through for a 1" laptop imho. Damn hot, I don't think I'd risk overclocking the current 8600.
It looks like the 9M Series isn't that much of an improvement over the 8M Series. A few power tweaks on the lower end cards and more decoding features Apple doesn't use.
8600M GT = 9500M GS
8700M GT = 9650M GS
Hopefully ATI can come up with something interesting in the Mobility 3800 Series.
8600M GT = 9500M GS
8700M GT = 9650M GS
Hopefully ATI can come up with something interesting in the Mobility 3800 Series.
I actually prefer ATI cards to Nvidia cards, for the simple reason:
1) They have better drivers in Mac OS X, Vista, and XP.
Nvidia puts out cards without even complete drivers, and sometimes never even finishes them in the first place. The X3100 is a great example of this. Intel (the company that owns Nvidia) doesn't even give drivers that fix bugs with their processors (many games were known to have problems with dual-core processors) but at the same time AMD put out drivers that fixed it with their processors.
Nvidia and Intel DO have better hardware, but atleast AMD and ATI put out decent drivers that fix problems with their hardware.
1) They have better drivers in Mac OS X, Vista, and XP.
Nvidia puts out cards without even complete drivers, and sometimes never even finishes them in the first place. The X3100 is a great example of this. Intel (the company that owns Nvidia) doesn't even give drivers that fix bugs with their processors (many games were known to have problems with dual-core processors) but at the same time AMD put out drivers that fixed it with their processors.
Nvidia and Intel DO have better hardware, but atleast AMD and ATI put out decent drivers that fix problems with their hardware.
From my experience and those of my peers both ATI and nVidia provide sufficient drivers.
Intel doesn't own nVidia. Surprisingly enough Intel has a better relationship with DAAMIT then with nVidia. The older Intel GMA series had issues with software emulation of hardware shades on the CPU. The GMA X3xxx and beyond have hardware shaders so this isn't an issue. What problems with dual core processors were reported?
If there is no higher performance why then won't Apple even give us the "higher numbers"? They can very well hide away all technical details and list the Macbook Pro as sporting a "512MB Graphics Processor" if it is truly not important.
Now I feel quite bad for having purchased a Mac with last year's graphics card.
From my experience, ever since I owned Pentium 3 computers, they always had driver problems, and Intel never did anything about them. I then owned a BlackBook 2.0 Core Duo running windows XP and it was having the dual-core problem where certain 3D games would have huge bugs or just not run at all. I asked Intel where are the drivers, they said the only fix was to turn off a core, which made it so my MacBook didn't meet the system requirements. AMD released a driver that made dual core processors work great with 3D games. Intel's X3100 actually has potential as far as integrated graphics goes, but Intel sent it out without complete drivers and it sucked, worse then the previous GMA 950 in most cases. Heck, it took them a year to release T&L drivers for the X3100, whats up with that?
I had a Nvidia 6600 on my old PC, and it was having problems, the fan blew out and the thing was getting HOT. I immediately called Nvidia and they said there was nothing they could do because it might have been an installation mistake. I have installed hardware into computers for 10 years. I don't think that was the case. Besides, this was after 4 months of using it, wouldn't this have happened before then? No budge with their service. So I bought an ATI Radeon 9800 which I used ever since without problems.
This was just my experience, you may have had different.
I just read that a 9650M GT is gonna be announced any day now and it's identical to the 8800M GTS but smaller and more power efficient.
Looks like we have our new MBP GPU!
Apple would go with this cutting edge stuff rather than the old 9650M GS right?
Looks like we have our new MBP GPU!
Apple would go with this cutting edge stuff rather than the old 9650M GS right?
Well, given that we're talking about graphics cards here, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I was reading a thread in a GPU forum about the upcoming 9650M GT and a dude said "as usual ASUS and Apple will get it first" and I thought it sounded a bit weird
Damn you Apple! CPU hasn't been bottlenecking anything for 2 years, get your act together with GPUs!!!!
I was reading a thread in a GPU forum about the upcoming 9650M GT and a dude said "as usual ASUS and Apple will get it first" and I thought it sounded a bit weird
Damn you Apple! CPU hasn't been bottlenecking anything for 2 years, get your act together with GPUs!!!!
You have to remember this is in a 1" enclosure. People already complain about how hot it is, so they are limited by size and heat. Sure they could make a huge laptop that has the most powerful video card, but that's not practical for what they are trying to do. What other card could they use in a 1" enclosure especially considering the size of the card, heat and the amount of room they have?
Because there are no 55nm 256bit cards. Unless Apple can greatly improve MBP cooling with a case redesign or concede that a Pro laptop should not have it's internals hampered by a vain obsession with remaining 1", it's 128bit I'm afriad, and not even particularly impressive 128bit cards at that.
Particularly in the 15". I just read that the 9650M GS is actually 65nm, and would be too hot for the 15", so unless Apple decides to lead the way instead of lag behind and go for the soon-to-be-released 9650M GT, we're stuck with the pretty mediocre upgrade offered by the 8700M -_-
You forgot about the ATi Mobility Radeon 38xx Series.
The MXM card is huge though. 128-bit is what we're going to get for awhile in the MacBook Pro. Even with the die and process shrinks the 256-bit mobile cards are still furnaces.