Snow Leopard Bringing Substantial Package of Enhancements and Refinements

[fpnc]

9400M isn't the only one. There's a list of support models that you forgot to read.

9400M is an example. There are many more supported models. Notebooks have less computing power, so it's easier to make a point when advertising performance boosts.

You MAY be confusing support for OpenCL and the decoding of H264 video. Only the 9400M fully implements GPU assisted H264 decoding but there are quite a few GPUs that support OpenCL. However, I'd expect that other hardware (GPUs) will get some improvement in decoding but not to the extent offered by the 9400M. Apple is being pretty clear on this, the 9400M is the only GPU listed as supporting H264 decode while OpenCL gives a fairly long list of supported GPUs (and the OpenCL list also includes the 9400M).

Yes, you are correct and this is NOT a new Snow Leopard feature. My late 2008 MacBook already does GPU assisted decode of H264 video. You can confirm this quite easily by playing a 1080p video on any unibody MacBook and note that it doesn't even require 25% of one CPU core to do the decoding. Meanwhile, my 2.66GHz Intel Mac Pro requires almost 100% of a CPU core to decode the same video. Thus, Apple's claim that this is a new Snow Leopard feature is quite dubious. Basically, all they are doing is officially acknowledging something that they had already implemented last year (under Leopard).

Wrong.

It's been pretty well documented that the 9400M under Leopard is already doing H264 decode. This has even been discussed by Apple in some of their technically oriented presentations. Also, as I originally stated anyone who has a 9400M-equipped Mac can easily confirm that these machines are H264 decoding "monsters" in comparison to just about any other piece of Mac hardware.

 

[fpnc]

...In my tests, playing the 720p "Artbeats RED Demo Reel.mov" from Apple's HD H.264 website on a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (which has a GeForce 8600M), I saw 74.1 seconds of CPU time used to decode the movie on Leopard with Quicktime 7, and 55.5 seconds of CPU time with Snow Leopard, in other words 25% less CPU time...

Thanks for that bit of data. I just tried that same video on my 2GHz unibody MacBook running Leopard and it did the complete decode in 31.3 seconds (CPU time after downloading and saving the video to disk). This seems to be yet another confirmation of the existing support for 9400M-accelerated H264 decoding under Leopard. I'd bet that when I upgrade to Snow Leopard on Friday that the times will be essentially the same. If I get another 25% I'd be very pleased but I expect that the numbers will be very close to what I'm already seeing under Leopard.

 

[fpnc]

Am I right in saying that my month old 3.06 GHz iMac with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 won't run this?

You should get improvements similar to what Maristic is reporting. However, your iMac probably won't perform as well at H264 decode as does one of the 9400M-equipped Macs. That may change, however, in a later release of Snow Leopard. In any case, your iMac should already handle 1080p video without issues so unless you need to display multiple HD videos concurrently I don't think you need to be concerned.

Also, your iMac's 4850 supports OpenCL which should be useful for a variety of tasks (eventually, as software is adapted to make use of OpenCL).

 

[Dry Rot]

You should get improvements similar to what Maristic is reporting. However, your iMac probably won't perform as well at H264 decode as does one of the 9400M-equipped Macs. That may change, however, in a later release of Snow Leopard. In any case, your iMac should already handle 1080p video without issues so unless you need to display multiple HD videos concurrently I don't think you need to be concerned.

Also, your iMac's 4850 supports OpenCL which should be useful for a variety of tasks (eventually, as software is adapted to make use of OpenCL).

Thanks. I still think it is odd to bring out a new OS in which one bit won't work on a top line 1 month old model.

 

[MorphingDragon]

I think they started out with only 9400M H264 support as this would be the lowest common denominator on macs released preinstalled with it.

 

[Droid13]

For those that need brute force number crunching...

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have two of these connected to your Mac Pro?
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/product_geforce_gtx_295_uk.html

That would be something nice to couple together with the CUDA/OpenCL thing, surely? Plus you could use your machine as a space heater in winter.

Alternatively, you could try out a couple of these:

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desk...ages/ati-radeon-hd-4870X2-specifications.aspx

Using all that power for tasks other than playing games, and for tasks other than video, is a good thing. The era of the personal supercomputer...

Now for the question, since I am not really sure: am I right in thinking that this sort of thing was not possible under Mac OS X before OpenCL?

 

[AdeFowler]

snizzle,

but command Z has worked for a long time as long as the move to trash was the last thing you did.

In a perfect world you're right. I opened iTunes a while back and discovered 50+ tracks by various artists with exclamation marks by their names. Turned out I'd inadvertently trashed a playlist (Move to trash).

Now imagine selecting all those songs and selecting Put Back. Sadly it was no where near as easy as that

 

[MacBoobsPro]

Does Quicktime X take advantage of the GPU when transcoding stuff too? I was looking forward to faster transcodes until I actually read it properly and it says decodes.

Any ideas?

 

[CaryMacGuy]

Multitouch for Santa Rosa Macbook

What are the chances that the 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook has multitouch with Snow Leopard. It can accept two finger gestures, what is a couple more?

 

[vjpulp]

iChat Enhancements: Snow Leopard brings 640 x 480 video chats to iChat Theater, four times the resolution of those in Leopard,

This sounds irritating to me. I always thought that the resolution was depending on the used camera. But if it's really the case - would that also have an impact for, say, PhotoBooth images? Will the resolution be better there as well?

 

[alent1234]

You should get improvements similar to what Maristic is reporting. However, your iMac probably won't perform as well at H264 decode as does one of the 9400M-equipped Macs. That may change, however, in a later release of Snow Leopard. In any case, your iMac should already handle 1080p video without issues so unless you need to display multiple HD videos concurrently I don't think you need to be concerned.

Also, your iMac's 4850 supports OpenCL which should be useful for a variety of tasks (eventually, as software is adapted to make use of OpenCL).

the ATI is a much faster card than the 9400M which is integrated into the chipset and is 2 years old. apple is just lazy and didn't want to write a driver or use what AMD gave them

 

[JFreak]

What are the chances that the 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook has multitouch with Snow Leopard. It can accept two finger gestures, what is a couple more?

I'm also hoping for that feature, being a 2007 SR MBP owner

 

[alent1234]

For me it's the Macs that can't see the SMB shares. Some Macs can too and others won't.

Vista and Windows 7 don't have any problems.

the shipping version of Vista used the original SMB protocol from 1993. SP1 and later including Win 7 uses a new fully redesigned SMB protocol that is a lot faster.

6 months ago when i was testing the beta on a few of my computers i noticed file transfers were almost twice as fast compared to XP and earlier

 

[Dry Rot]

the ATI is a much faster card than the 9400M which is integrated into the chipset and is 2 years old. apple is just lazy and didn't want to write a driver or use what AMD gave them

Great. Glad I gave Apple extra $$s to upgrade to the ATI card and not get a driver for it with SL a month or two later.

 

[kas23]

What are the chances that the 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook has multitouch with Snow Leopard. It can accept two finger gestures, what is a couple more?

I just hope they give us the ability to disable multitouch. It's the only thing I hate about my new MBP. When I'm using Safari, I'm always accidentally zooming in and out. Now the suffering is going to be widespread.

 

[jmpage2]

Uhm, Finder HAS had complete overhaul in SL some 'under the hood' that affect it's performance and several that affect how you use it.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html#finder

I can appreciate that the Finder has had a cocoa re write but it's still a joke compared to Windows File Explorer.

It is always painful to organize a bunch of files on the Mac and takes much longer to do the same tasks than it does on any Windows box.

No cut/paste in the Finder? No auto-eject of removable volumes? These things have been on Windows boxes forever.

I like OS X, but Finder needs to grow up and work for us like you would expect in a 21st century OS.

 

[Jamie 360]

iPhoto Compatibility advice

My 2006 Intel 2.0 Macbook had Tiger installed. I upgraded to Leopard and had to go back to my original included CD to reinstall IPhoto. Do you think that will still be an option after I upgrade to Snow Leopard?? I honestly don't use iLife programs enough to purchase it, I just like to keep my photos organized in iPhoto. Almost afraid to upgrade to Snow Leopard if I lose iPhoto for good.......

 

[Maristic]

Great. Glad I gave Apple extra $$s to upgrade to the ATI card and not get a driver for it with SL a month or two later.

Here is a perspective that may help you not feel so bad: When you bought your machine, you were probably quite happy. Once you have your machine, Apple may release software that makes your machine run even better, and when they do, be pleased. But if they don't improve one particular thing, well, the machine still works just as well as the day you bought it.

In this case, if you didn't think "Geez, H.264 decoding sucks on my machine" when you bought it, it's silly to start feeling bad when Snow Leopard comes out and improves H.264 on your machine, but doesn't improve it quite as much as they do on other machines. Especially since your machine has enough horsepower to decode H.264 without breaking a sweat.

As people have pointed out, it's possible that more video cards will get supported for H.264 decoding in a 10.6.x release, but even if not, your machine (including your video card) will still run better on Snow Leopard.

 

[soLoredd]

i think it's hilarious that people are actually throwing a fit because of a graphics card requirement and saying they're not upgrading. so you're going to give up the decreased memory usage, the decreased hard drive usage, the increased speed in the finder, safari, mail, ical, etc... all because your current computer doesn't meet specs for one particular feature. funny.

as far as i'm concerned this is the most important os x release since 10.2 and is going to pave the way for some truly amazing products/os updates for the next five to ten years.

i only wish other companies (adobe) would take time off from adding mostly useless new features to address performance, stability and general fit and finish of their apps. i'd gladly pay a fully price upgrade to cs5 if the apps were identical in features to cs4, but utilized all the benefits of os x and as apps felt more like pixelmator

Since this is directed at folks like me, I'll bite. NO, I will not be updating to Snow Leopard, not at this point. Leopard works fine on my MBP, I have no issues with memory or hard drive space. I run all the apps I need, when I need to, and it works.

I'm really getting sick of the iPhone approach that Apple is taking with the rest of their products. The hardware from the 2G is perfectly fine running a full-spec 3.0 but they crippled it in order to get 3GS sales. They are doing the same thing with their computers now. There is no reason why Penryn MBPs or iMacs or anything else can't have a full-fledged 10.6.

 

[CREA]

Due to conflicting information on here (and vagueness of the Apple) I decided to call AppleCare to see if I could get any clarification on on the whole multi-touch issue with MacBooks.

I have a MacBook 4,1 (early 2008) and according to what the specialist said - for 2 finger gestures, pinch, rotate and all the additional gestures would be supported. For 3 finger gestures, swipe and the other normal additional gestures would be supported. The only thing he could not find documentation for was 4 finger gestures.

So, according to him and his documentation, the multi-touch controller that is in MBP and MBA models are NOT required for these gestures.

This is all according to AppleCare. He could have been completely wrong, but I'm not sure why he would be telling me these things when he knew exactly what model I had and we were on the phone for quite a while. He took his time to look through his support documents, so I don't believe he was just pulling this out of his ass in order to push me to buy Snow Leopard.

If this is true, yay.

 

[kerryn]

OpenCL

requires one of the following graphics cards or graphics processors:

* NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX5600
* ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

So it looks like I am out of luck hoping for any graphics improvement on my SR Macbook (Nov 07). I would be nice to ave a Macbook that did not going into overdrive anytime a flash file was fed to it.

 

[199708]

I do hope that they fix the problem with flash making my fans go crazy, my alum MB is only a few months old but sounds like a jet taking off when working with flash/youtube.

 

[Maristic]

I'm really getting sick of the iPhone approach that Apple is taking with the rest of their products. The hardware from the 2G is perfectly fine running a full-spec 3.0 but they crippled it in order to get 3GS sales.

Saying it doesn't make it so. The major things the 3G can't do that the 3GS can are video (3GS has hardware-assisted H.264 encoding, and a camera better suited for video), and Voice Control (3GS has a much faster processor, that may make their voice recognition algorithms feasible to run on the phone). 3.0 gave you lots of cool new features, faster Safari, better Calendar support, copy and paste, and so on, but rather than see the positive in all the extra things you got that you didn't have when you bought your phone and loved it, you look at the few things you didn't get and whine about how you know what they could have done and how they suck.

Every line of code Apple writes has a cost. It requires an engineer to write, and QA to test, and more engineers to maintain. Sometimes they're going to decide to use their engineering talent to write code for new machines or new features and leave old ones behind. It's a shame, when they don't do what you'd like (myself, I'm still waiting for a version of Photo Booth that doesn't mirror image recorded video), but you have zero entitlement to have them spend their engineering resources in the particular way you want.

NO, I will not be updating to Snow Leopard, not at this point. Leopard works fine on my MBP, I have no issues with memory or hard drive space. I run all the apps I need, when I need to, and it works.

Well, no one is making you upgrade. If you're happy with your machine, cool.

But the cost of Snow Leopard is less than the cost of a nice lunch out with a friend. If getting to enjoy a lot of small improvements for more than a year isn't worth that to you, well, don't pay it. But it's a no-brainer for me (especially as it's only $10 for me ).

 

[mrial]

I just hope they give us the ability to disable multitouch. It's the only thing I hate about my new MBP. When I'm using Safari, I'm always accidentally zooming in and out. Now the suffering is going to be widespread.

My wife does this when she is using my MBP ... because she insists on using two hands, clicking with the left while moving the pointer with the right. Use one hand ... use tapping with one finger to click, tapping with two fingers for contextual menu ... etc. I love the multi-touch (after I got used to it).

 

[Peabody]

What are the chances that the 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook has multitouch with Snow Leopard. It can accept two finger gestures, what is a couple more?

Nill. We're stuck in 2 finger gesture land.

I know of one I'd like to show Apple.