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Snow Leopard H.264 Hardware Acceleration and OpenCL Requirements

So people who spent 2000$ over a 4850/gt130 iMac won't get h.264 hardware acceleration for Quicktime X?? :confused:

Maybe they mean "at LEAST a gf9400", is it possible??

So maybe this is the real reason of the 9400+9600 solution on Unibody MBPs?

So I must choose between an iMac good for gaming and an iMac good for watching 1080p movies?
 
gianly1985 said:
So people who spent 2000$ over a 4850/gt130 iMac won't get h.246 hardware acceleration for Quicktime X?? :confused:

Maybe they mean "at LEAST a gf9400", is it possible??

So maybe this is the real reason of the 9400+9600 solution on Unibody MBPs?

So I must choose between an iMac good for gaming and an iMac good for watching 1080p movies?
Click to expand...
That iMac still has the 9400M G for its chipset.
 
Eidorian said:
That iMac still has the 9400M G for its chipset.
Click to expand...

Are you telling me that:

iMac with GT120 ------> Actually GT120+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

iMac with GT130 ------> Actually GT130+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

iMac with Ati4850 ------> Actually Ati4850+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

???

So the only Mac without the 9400 (and thus "Qt X hw h.264 acceleration") is...the MacPro??

So I can buy an Ati4850-powered iMac and still get a "hidden" gf9400 and h.264 hw support in Quicktime X?
 
LEgregius said:
Looking at your system specs, there is no way 64bit and OpenCL COULD be supported at all. You will get performance boosts on the multi-threading, however.
Click to expand...
Judging by the first system (Core Duo MacBook Pro) you're right that 64-bit could never have been supported at all - but with correct chipset support, PAE could have theoretically allowed >4 GB of physical RAM, divided up into 4-GB chunks per process. The question of whether or not OpenCL could have been supported really depends on the GPU - likely not because the GPU vendors probably hadn't even contemplated such features when they were designing the hardware.

Judging by the second system (iMac G5), well, various levels of 64-bit support has been there all along - greater than 4 GB of physical RAM was supported starting with at least 10.3, but each process was limited to 4GB. Individual processes were allowed to access greater than 4GB of memory (virtual and/or physical) starting with 10.4, but processes accessing the GUI were limited to 32-bit. Full 64-bit GUI support was added in 10.5.

But in all of these cases, due to the PPC architecture, there was not the same potential performance benefit as with the x86-64 because, unlike x86-64, PPCs don't double the number of available CPU registers when they switch to 64-bit mode. Rather, 64-bit might actually slow down PPC slightly, and the primary benefit would really be that it would make it possible for programs to directly handle exceptionally large volumes of data - and this benefit is already available to any applications that need it in 10.5. So expanding 64-bit on a PPC any further than it has already been deployed would likely be more of a hinderance than a benefit.
 
gianly1985 said:
Are you telling me that:

iMac with GT120 ------> Actually GT120+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

iMac with GT130 ------> Actually GT130+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

iMac with Ati4850 ------> Actually Ati4850+9400 (a là Macbook Pro)

???

So the only Mac without the 9400 (and thus "Qt X hw h.264 acceleration") is...the MacPro??

So I can buy an Ati4850-powered iMac and still get a "hidden" gf9400 and h.264 hw support in Quicktime X?
Click to expand...
That's correct.
 
goosnarrggh said:
Judging by the first system (Core Duo MacBook Pro) you're right that 64-bit could never have been supported at all - but with correct chipset support, PAE could have theoretically allowed >4 GB of physical RAM.
Click to expand...

None of the Yonah chipsets supported more than 32-bits of physical addressing - so this was not a software or BIOS limitation.

So yes, you'd need the "correct chipset" to support it.
 
Man, hopefully Apple will release updates in the near future that will have wider support for H.264 hardware acceleration.
 
AidenShaw said:
None of the Yonah chipsets supported more than 32-bits of physical addressing - so this was not a software or BIOS limitation.

So yes, you'd need the "correct chipset" to support it.
Click to expand...

Thank you. That is, in fact, exactly what I said, and exactly the way I understood the situation.
 
Damn, I luv the support they got for video nowadays. Like I wasn't dying to get LP before, this must be in my top 3 reasons to drool for it now... Pretty sure the hardware acceleration will banish the occasional lags from my HD H.264 "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" :cool:
 
Sound reasoning

AidenShaw said:
Note that OpenCL (and to a lesser degree video decoding) can make the graphics chipset run hot - as hot as the CPU since in effect that's what it becomes.

Apple may have realized that some of their systems based on mobile parts don't have adequate cooling for the graphics chipset.

They may have chosen to disable certain models that would technically be able to use the acceleration to avoid damage to the machine.
Click to expand...

This is the first satisfying reason I've read for this lack of support on slightly older hardware. Apple do make a fuss about having their machines run quiet with lots of slow-spinning fans rather than a single fast one. I know my Radeon HD 2600XT in my Mac Pro has a very slim cooling system on it. I believe you're onto something.

Still, I wish my hybrid 2006/2008 Mac Pro was better supported in Snow Leopard. There hardly seems to be a big reason for me to upgrade. I mean, if I want the advertised reduction in disk usage, I can run Monolingual to remove the PPC code from my Leopard system and achieve identical results.
 
LOL! So now you see why some people complain when Apple sells machines with "old" video card technology relative to what's available for the Windows crowd (during the same time period).

If they had used current/cutting edge cards for their time, some of you with 2 year old machines might have been able to have these new features. Now you just have a REALLY outdated computer. Of course the sheeple will probably just buy another Mac with the "latest" hardware.
 
Why is it that the Windows NVidia drivers basically support all of their products while the OS X drivers don't? They don't have the same unified driver architecture?
 
edesignuk said:
Oh splendid. The video card in my ~£2k Mac Pro from just over a year ago isn't supported.

I know things have to move forward, but it's still irritating.
Click to expand...

Buy one or more GT 120 cards (or whatever your budget permits), plug 'em in, and have fun. I guess you want the highest speed available PCI slot(s). The bonus is your display card will only be used for display (OpenGL).

[I've not researched to see what's involved exactly, but it should work as long as your software supports multiple OpenCL targets.]
 
Nooby question - my MacBook does do the hardware acceleration, so does this mean that any application that uses the h.264 gets hardware acceleration, or just when I'm playing videos directly in Quicktime X? Thanks for any info.
 
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