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mac mini not as good as macbook

M

macforlife1987

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 25, 2008
16
0
When I play a video on my macbook I get a much better picture than playing it on the mini, I dont understand.

I use a samsung le32r88bd with my mini and when i play xvid movie the picture looks different. Could it be the size of screen making the difference.

Its a bit jittery at times too.

Both macs are 2ghz intel core 2 duos, I dont see why the macbook is giving better performance that a desktop basically.
 
Would a graphics card really make a difference in video quality? I've never really compared GMA 950 to GMA X3100 so I have no idea. But, videos play fine on my Mac mini with pretty much no slowdowns at all.
 
aaquib said:
Would a graphics card really make a difference in video quality? I've never really compared GMA 950 to GMA X3100 so I have no idea. But, videos play fine on my Mac mini with pretty much no slowdowns at all.
Click to expand...

hahahaha yes it would indeed be the difference between a choppy video and a not choppy video.


OP: is there anything CPU intensive running in the background (out of interest).
 
yea its the gma 950. no i never run anything at all in the background. why can you not upgrade the graphics card.
 
Ummmm... its GMA950 not x950

P.S.: I'm correcting Skil...... whoa:eek: Sorry.... just Kidding

And you cant upgrade the graphics "chip" (card in desktops with an AGP/PCIE slot only) because chips are embedded on to the PCB! In all IGPs (integrated graphics processors eg: 950, x3100, x4500, etc) there is no graphics card. The processor does all the graphics work as well as its normal work! And to change an IGP you'll need to change the controller (south bridge) which means you'll have to change the whole mother board itself!
 
im not sure that the grapics card will make a big difference. after all the file was only xvid,maybe you have some wrong settings on ur mac mini.
 
There's some questions which are still unknown.

First, the resolutions of both systems. If the MacBook runs at the native resolution of its LCD display, then it should be 1280 by 800. If the Mac mini runs at the native resolution of the Samsung LE32R88BD (which is a 32" HDTV, for those who didn't check) then it should be 1366 by 768. So the MacBook has a screen of 1 024 000 pixels and the Mac mini has a screen of 1 049 088 pixels, a difference of 25 088 pixels. It's only 2.45% more pixels, so I don't think that's a problem. There could be something about the aspect ratio (MacBook is 1.6, Mac mini is ~1.78) where one machine has to resize the image in full-screen mode.

If we compare an XViD encoding on a 13" screen vs a 32" screen, then it's not surprise it's not gonna be as good on the 32" where all the pixels and the compression artifacts are basically 2.5 times as big.

The choppy playback may also come from other factors such as main system RAM. If the MacBook runs without swapping but the Mac mini has to swap all the time during playback then it's going to me a choppy playback. System RAM wasn't mentioned.

You also didn't mention what program was used for playback. It could be QuickTime with an Xvid plugin, it could be VLC, etc. Without knowing what is used for playback we cannot simply assume that the problem arises from the GMA950 vs x1300 difference since we don't even know if the playback software can take advantage of either GPU.

I hope this helps.
 
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