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Ridiculous: 9600GT is worthless

T

the mac geek

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 20, 2008
30
0
So, just popped the CF from my D300 into my card reader after shooting a bit today. I fire up Aperture, import the images and start to edit. My Macbook Pro starts running as if it were a G4. At the time I was running on the 9600GT, you know, the card that should give me better performance.

I really noticed the slow down when I was simply dragging the sliders. They moved like some slathered molasses on them.

So, I switch over to the 9400GT noticed a significant improvement. My CPU usage was less (ironic), and things were moving generally more snappy.

I am just a tad bit bothered by the weak performance this card offers, yet, the MBP is priced higher in part because of this card. Has anyone had similar experiences? Maybe it is just me. Sucks, this is actually the third machine I have had since I bought mine when they were released.

For those who are interested, here are the specs:
2.4Ghz
4GB
Stock HD
 
I run Assassin's Creed in Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on all the highest settings.

That's gotta mean something, right?
I mean ... it can't be a completely worthless card?
 
Some bug in the OS, probably. Dual graphics is still in its beta stage at this point, because one is not supposed to reboot the damn thing just to change one setting.
 
Either you're doing something very wrong or your card is faulty. The 9600M GT is roughly twice as powerful than the 9400M. :)
 
You are right - it is ridiculous.

The drivers for the 9600GT are just rubbish. It isn't a hardware problem or anything - boot up Windows and the 9600GT smokes on NVIDIA's new "official" drivers (for laptops).

Back on OS X, go to the movie trailer part of Apple's website and watch a 1080p trailer on the 9600GT (stutters) and then same one on the 9400M (fluent). How Apple ever let this out is crazy.

Now NVIDIA are officially supporting laptop drivers, Apple have no excuse not to be collaborating with them to get the best and most optimised drivers yet.
 
Apple arn't concerned about the 9600 at the moment or the useless drivers its got, they're conecerned about Snow Leopard, theres no point wasting resources making the drivers better when people are going to be upgrading to a 64bit o/s soon, and also in Snow Leopard the graphics cards will be acting in hybrid sli with open cl so the whole driver issue goes out the window.
 
kastenbrust said:
Apple arn't concerned about the 9600 at the moment or the useless drivers its got, they're conecerned about Snow Leopard, theres no point wasting resources making the drivers better when people are going to be upgrading to a 64bit o/s soon, and also in Snow Leopard the graphics cards will be acting in hybrid sli with open cl so the whole driver issue goes out the window.
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard could be up to 6 months away.

They released the Unibody MBP in October. 8 months on crap drivers?

So according to you, we have to upgrade to Snow Leopard just to get the 9600GT to work as it should?
 
Kilamite said:
You are right - it is ridiculous.

The drivers for the 9600GT are just rubbish. It isn't a hardware problem or anything - boot up Windows and the 9600GT smokes on NVIDIA's new "official" drivers (for laptops).

Back on OS X, go to the movie trailer part of Apple's website and watch a 1080p trailer on the 9600GT (stutters) and then same one on the 9400M (fluent). How Apple ever let this out is crazy.

Now NVIDIA are officially supporting laptop drivers, Apple have no excuse not to be collaborating with them to get the best and most optimised drivers yet.
Click to expand...

I'm almost certain that HD trailer performance in 10.5.5 was just fine (I vaguely remember testing this specifically for CPU usage), on both 9400M and 9600GT. I hadn't tried with 10.5.6, but it definitely is impaired on both cards. Terrible. It plays marginally better in VLC than it does in QT, but it's not acceptably good in either case.
 
kastenbrust said:
Apple arn't concerned about the 9600 at the moment or the useless drivers its got, they're conecerned about Snow Leopard, theres no point wasting resources making the drivers better when people are going to be upgrading to a 64bit o/s soon, and also in Snow Leopard the graphics cards will be acting in hybrid sli with open cl so the whole driver issue goes out the window.
Click to expand...

How do you know that there will be an option of hybrid sli? Just because apple has the capability to put hybrid sli in doesn't mean they're going to. Just like the unibody MBPs can hold up to 8 gigs of ram, but apple software limits it to 4.
 
kastenbrust said:
Apple arn't concerned about the 9600 at the moment or the useless drivers its got, they're conecerned about Snow Leopard, theres no point wasting resources making the drivers better when people are going to be upgrading to a 64bit o/s soon, and also in Snow Leopard the graphics cards will be acting in hybrid sli with open cl so the whole driver issue goes out the window.
Click to expand...

Stop supporting legacy users and only care about making money? That sounds like a road to failure.
 
Warranty Voider said:
How do you know that there will be an option of hybrid sli?
Click to expand...

Because ive reviewed the Snow Leopard beta and been messing around with its kernel.

Warranty Voider said:
So according to you, we have to upgrade to Snow Leopard just to get the 9600GT to work as it should?
Click to expand...

Before Apple even starts making drivers they would have to acknowledge there was a problem, and so far i've heard nothing, ok maybe they will release some driver updates, but i doubt it, i think theyre going to really push Snow Leopard as hard as they can.
 
kastenbrust said:
Before Apple even starts making drivers they would have to acknowledge there was a problem, and so far i've heard nothing, ok maybe they will release some driver updates, but i doubt it, i think theyre going to really push Snow Leopard as hard as they can.
Click to expand...

They don't have to acknowledge anything.

Now NVIDIA have released laptop drivers, Apple can work with them to provide the MacBook Pro's with decent drivers. All they have to do is provide another graphics update.
 
For the newbies who havn't experienced a MBP before, AAPL is notorious for underclocking GPUs below spec for heat considerations. Silly, I know.

But that's odd. While it should be clocked the same in Windows by default, the newer drivers will see an improvement , although these too are written by apple and released through the boot camp update program, unless you hack the drivers.

You can use rivatuner to clock your machine to spec which i'm inclined to believe was more for battery life than heat. The old school heat pipe design could handle it but I havn't seen the innards of the rev f mbp.
 
Umm

for all the people that say 9600m GT stutters on 1080p trailers from apple.com

I'm currently running firefox, photoshop CS4 with 3 projects, Final Cut Pro with a 1080p project and ms word WHILE watch a 1080p trailer and it runs perfectly smooth under the 9600m, you probably have a defective card.
 
duykur said:
I'm currently running firefox, photoshop CS4 with 3 projects, Final Cut Pro with a 1080p project and ms word WHILE watch a 1080p trailer and it runs perfectly smooth under the 9600m, you probably have a defective card.
Click to expand...

What trailer did you watch?

Post the link please.
 
Kilamite said:
Hmm, even on 10.5.6, a month or so ago I tried watching one on the 9600GT card and it would stutter. That link played back perfectly.

There was a few threads about people with the same issue - wonder what's changed.
Click to expand...

as i said, maybe defective cards.
remember only people with problems post on the forums.
 
I was having this problem on my MacBook Pro as well. WoW was unplayable at 1920x1200 and 1080 movie trailers would stutter and not play smoothly. I also had kernel panics and random freezes. I decided to take the MBP back and get a MB, and am now waiting for the new iMacs. (Of course when I took my MBP back a week ago I was expecting new iMacs at Macworld. Now who knows how much longer I'll have to wait.) My 2.0 MB performs better than my 2.4 MBP did. So, something was wrong. Bad memory and/or bad video.
 
This is intriguing to me. I just watched that linked trailer on my MBP using both the 9400M and 9600GT. Both played the video fluidly with absolutely no stuttering at all. 24FPS all the way through both.

What I did notice though is that when viewing the trailer on the 9400M Quicktime's CPU use was at ~24%. Meanwhile, with the 9600GT Quicktime's CPU use was at ~31%. It's weird, in my opinion, that the more powerful card would require more CPU to play the same video.

You guys could be right about the drivers being significantly lacking. Either that or the 9400M has built-in hardware to decode h.264 video (I think that's what the trailer was) while the 9600GT does not.

--mAc
 
alphaod said:
Stop supporting legacy users and only care about making money? That sounds like a road to failure.
Click to expand...

Seems Apple already does this. At least so far, I cannot figure out how to get tap to click to work in Windows on my early 08 MBP like it does on the late 08 MBPs. Will likely try to manually install a new driver at some point, but it's annoying.
 
Eddyisgreat said:
But that's odd. While it should be clocked the same in Windows by default, the newer drivers will see an improvement , although these too are written by apple and released through the boot camp update program, unless you hack the drivers.
Click to expand...

Are you saying the drivers you download from Nvidia's own website to run in Windows under bootcamp are written by Apple then and not Nvidia?
 
mAc-warrior said:
Either that or the 9400M has built-in hardware to decode h.264 video (I think that's what the trailer was) while the 9600GT does not.--mAc
Click to expand...

I think 9600GT and 9400 are about identical when it comes to hardware accelerated decoding of video formats. I have 9600GT and Leopard 10.5.6 and 1080p videos work perfectly fine.
 
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