expected power boost from GPU processing in Snow leopard?

[mrklaw]

I'm considering the new macbook or MBP. mostly down to screen quality and size (want to use it for photo editing, and my current MB is a little cramped at times in photoshop)

but a part of my head keeps looking at that 9600GT. I won't play a lot of games, but what about this GPU general processing I keep hearing about, accelerating photoshop, and other applications when snow leopard comes out?

what kinds of applications would benefit, and what kinds of improvements would we expect?

eg I do quite a lot of h264 encoding. sounds perfect for a GPU speedup, but are we talking 20% faster, or 300% faster? One is a nice to have, the other is a reason to go MBP over MB

 

[itcomic]

much better performance with a real GPU. Exact # not sure but it will be significantly better. MB = casual homework, internet, surfing or anything that is not video intense related.

 

[vkt]

The entire Adobe Creative Suite 4 will perform much better on a new MacBook Pro. I am not qualified to give you percentages on speed boosts, but I guarantee there's blogs out there who are benchmarking this as we speak. You don't even need Snow Leopard to see the initial benefits that the new Nvidia GPU will provide within the CS4 Suite, because it's Open GL hardware accelerated. Hope that helps at least a little bit.