Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

craigsharp

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 2, 2008
140
3
Oklahoma
So I have a dual 1.25 MDD with ram to it's max, and I have a 9800GT 128mb I'm about to flash with the mac rom. Will that allow for "smoother" HD playback? Right now it just has the ATI 9000 64mb. Will I see an improvement?
 
Unfortunately not, the CPU handles that. OSX doesn't take advantage of the GPU by offloading that work to it from the CPU the way Windows does with the proper cards.
 
Thanks for the replies, but i dont think they will unleash the GPU in an older MDD. Darn, oh well. Hopefully, but i doubt it.
 
Humble Opinions and Rants

craigsharp, i concur. Apple is always about "future" and never about the past; and by future i mean profits driven (in these days, who/which co. isn't?) blu-ray looks futuristic, but not adopted by Apple so far ...

look at the G5s, they are 64-bit machines, how long did it take for 10.5 to arrive? and take a peek at 10.6 ... the most promising so far of delivering an optimized 64-bit which apparently, unfortunately, may not be offering PPC-support!

the testing and coding and optimizations are probably done on the non-released macs, thus, all our current macs are not that "future-proof" as we assume.

hope is all we have, is it not? again, just my humble opinions and rants.
 
Let us know if it works

So I have a dual 1.25 MDD with ram to it's max, and I have a 9800GT 128mb I'm about to flash with the mac rom. Will that allow for "smoother" HD playback? Right now it just has the ATI 9000 64mb. Will I see an improvement?

The ATI card you talk about supports Core Image and Quarz Extrem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image

In my opinion you will see a major improvement compared to the card you use now in many areas.
If your HD playback is mediocre right now, it may have an impact to "usable".
However if HD doesn't even work with the system you have, I doubt that the card will make it perfect..

By the way, the 9800 is a very very hot running card. You may have to imporve your cooling system in your MDD especially if you live somewhere in the south! I would go for the ATI 9600 with 256MB if I would be you.

I would be very interested if it works. I would be interested myself since I have a super fast MDD 1,42 dual with a Raptor start up drive that runs almost everything.
 
I've tried playing 720p videos from QuickTime on my upgraded G4 PowerMac, but it just can't keep up. While it would be nice to be able to play HD H.264 videos, I don't think it will be possible on the G4s.
 
Give VLC media player a shot, Windows Media Player and Quicktime are nowhere as slim resource wise. WMP and QT make my G4 (See sig) slow to a crawl, but VLC plays everything without a hitch.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.