I totally understand, and I agree. Lack of support for the ATI HD2600 makes no sense at all.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Snow Leopard H.264 Hardware Acceleration and OpenCL Requirements
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes, you're right it is a bald-faced lie.
Apple sells it's computers with the USP that the software is designed to work hand-in-hand with the hardware. What they don't tell you is they only design the hardware to work as such for a limited amount of time.
Yes it still works fine, but you're missing the point. I bought this iMac specifically so I could make use of 64bit Processing and the faster graphics card (faster than the MacMini I would've bought otherwise with the cash I had to spend).
I'm just seriously irked that Apple has restricted many of it's customers from features (admittedly non-committal features from the early SL presentations, I'll give them that) presented as being an advantage to their platform.
Yes, I do real work thankyou. I'm sure OpenCL could bring huge speed boosts to Logic, PD Extended and Final Cut.
bummer that they don't support H.264 on my 8600M GT. Would help when you watch a video in the background and do stuff in a application. As I understand it the OpenCL support helps you ENCODING H.264 videos.
I like you hope it's not going to fry my NVIDEA.
I've seen OpenCL beta software running on windows. A guy from EA wrote a cloth simulation in OpenCL and was able to simulate and render hundreds of cloth shirts at 60hz on an Nvidia 8800GT. He also showed it on a 4xxx ATI and on a Quad Core CPU.
Also, CUDA and OpenCL work very similarly, so any case where someone wrote something in CUDA and got a certain speedup, you could get the same speedup by porting the code to OpenCL. CUDA is just Nvidia proprietary stuff.
The Bullet Physics engine is working on an OpenCL backend right now. They have a CUDA backend already. In early test with the CUDA backend, they said
Look Here
So they got a 100% improvement in performance just by offloading a part of the physics pipeline to the GPU. They have constraint solving working in a demo now, but I didn't see any benchmarks on that yet.
From Apple's viewpoint it makes complete sense. You are given a teaser in SL that won't work on your hardware but Apple can sell you hardware that it will work with. $29 is only the beginning.
Given that most iMacs from the last 2 years are capable of decoding in hardware and have no hardware restrictions for OpenCL, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Apple wants to upsell you to a new computer.
If that's true... well I never. I wanted my current Intel Mac to last me at least 3 years. It's not even 1 year old yet, and... it's outdated already, as far as Snow Leopard is concerned? That just makes me gape in utter disbelief.
AMD and NVIDIA still write the drivers for Apple, and they certainly want everything to work on their cards. Apple just recently got geometry shader support in OpenGL on for the AMD cards. The 2000 and 3000 series cards have been able to do them from the beginning. It just took AMD that long to put the support in the Apple drivers. I think the same problem exists for OpenCL. I think I actually heard from someone at AMD that only the 4000 series cards would support OpenCL at first. Apple is not immune to that statement.
The less cynical part of me says that Apple was supporting current hardware first and will get to the 2600's soon enough. Its easy to forget older hardware, though.
Typical apple, make you pay a premium, then make you think your machine will be supported and take advantage of everything in SL....
OpenCL - NO
64Bit - NO
Intel - YES
FUUUUU- YES
Latest CPUs - NO
PREMIUM PRICES - YES
=( time to say goodbye to the Apple Platform, Hello Win7.
OpenCL - NO
64Bit - NO
Intel - YES
FUUUUU- YES
Latest CPUs - NO
PREMIUM PRICES - YES
=( time to say goodbye to the Apple Platform, Hello Win7.
So you enjoy having the CPU on 140% and the fans on full speed for 1080 videos? Because I'm not. F*** Apple, the 8600 has the same h264 video accelerator part like the 9400, they just block it because they can do.
I just got me a 24" white imac with the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, don't tell me that won't be supported, ok for dropping ppc support, but they can't NOT support a gfx card that is two years old or so...tell me that isnt so....
It is going to be a real kick in the teeth if the 9400M Mac Mini outperforms our iMac 2.66 GHz C2D's with 2600 cards in real world computing, like video encoding. Since video encoding is the most intensive thing we do, the rest being email and browsing, if the Mini is faster then look out eBay. 5 iMacs will be listed.
Like many others the Hackintoshes are looking more and more attractive.
Like many others the Hackintoshes are looking more and more attractive.
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.
Well, AMD has recently been doing really good work on their drivers. They have been fixing bugs like gangbusters, even on the linux front. The software isn't even done yet, so I don't think now is quite the time for sadness.
I wonder if Philip Schiller answers emails like Steve Jobs does
Well, everyone should have gotten upset about that years ago when the video cards added that feature. Given Apples traditional market, it's pretty unacceptable that this wasn't solved early on. Getting upset NOW when they are starting to support it in some graphics cards seems kind of backward, though.
Thank you for the courtesy of the reply.
100% improvement? Wow.
I'm going to have to google OpenCL. I have a general idea of what's involved with the spec, but, if this result is to be believed we all have a bunch of amazing apps to look forward to in the future.
I bought the top-of-the-line 3.06GHz 24" iMac with upgraded 8800GS video card less than a year ago. I will be REALLY pissed if it isn't supported. I can understand the desire to drop support for PowerPC, since the last PowerPC computer was sold, what, 4 years ago? But not supporting a computer less than a year old? Ridiculous and very upsetting
Also, to those saying a Geforce 8800GTS is the same as the 8800GS, look at this web site that seems to show otherwise:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html
The main difference I see is the memory bandwidth.
Looks like my 11 month old $2200 iMac isn't supported one operating system later. PISSED
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html
The main difference I see is the memory bandwidth.
Looks like my 11 month old $2200 iMac isn't supported one operating system later. PISSED
Have you seen the graphics cards with multiple additional power connectors and mondo cooling fans that take up an extra slot?
The GPU is faster, but we're only guessing about performance per watt. It's probably true that H.264 is lower power than OpenCL, but perhaps Apple didn't want to have a class of systems that could do H.264 decoding, but not H.264 encoding and OpenCL.
This is simply wrong.
Look at an iMac 20" logic board.
Notice the two copper heatpipes at the upper right, going from the Core 2 Duo CPU to the radiator which is cooled by a dedicated fan.
Notice the passive aluminum heatsink on the middle left which is over the graphics and chipset.
Cooling designs for the CPU and GPU are quite different - and to assume that watts can be shifted from one component to a different component can easily lead to killing a system.
By comparison, here's the heatsink on a Dell D620 laptop:
Note that the heatpipe goes from the radiator (also in the fan airflow) on the left, to the CPU block in the middle, and then extends to the right to cool the Nvidia Quadro discrete GPU.
Again, even with this design one would expect that it could pull more heat off the CPU than off the GPU.
_____________________
I'm just speculating, proposing a possible explanation for not supporting GPUs which are capable.
We know that Apple has been known to underclock GPUs for thermal reasons, it is reasonable to consider that the GPUs could exceed the cooling capacity if pushed by additional GPGPU applications.
Everyone, relax.
There are two issues here...
1) Accelerated H.264 decoding: available on more GPUs than Apple is supporting, but does it really matter? Is your machine struggling to play H.264 video now? If you've got an Intel-based Mac, I suspect not. Even on my daughter's 1st gen 2.0GHz Core Duo MacBook, a full screen 1080p H.264 video barely hits 25% CPU usage.
2) Open CL: This is a hardware issue. Only certain newer GPUs have the proper registers to do it. If its not in your machine, you're out of luck. If you've got a Mac Pro - any model - you can upgrade the video card. nVidia 8600's on up, ATI 4xxx series on up. The ATI 3xxx series may have some capability, but not sure. 8800GTs for 1st gen Woodcrest Mac Pro's are probably floating around on eBay. The Apple OEM Radeon 4870 works on 1st gen Mac Pros, despite what Apple says officially.