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The 2009 (Gainestown) Mac Pro: Everything We Know

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Based on my experience with SLI on a PC, I would never use it again. Don't wish for it on Apple. It's just trash marketing designed to put more money into Nvidia's coffers at the expense of your sanity. Crossfire is not much better from what I've read.

Another aspect people here are overlooking is that crappy 3rd party video (and other) drivers are one of the main reasons PC's have stability issues. Be thankful that you can't download new video drivers for OSX every week, otherwise you would be diminishing one of the key strengths of OSX vs. Windows.
 
VirtualRain said:
Based on my experience with SLI on a PC, I would never use it again. Don't wish for it on Apple. It's just trash marketing designed to put more money into Nvidia's coffers at the expense of your sanity. Crossfire is not much better from what I've read.

Another aspect people here are overlooking is that crappy 3rd party video (and other) drivers are one of the main reasons PC's have stability issues. Be thankful that you can't download new video drivers for OSX every week, otherwise you would be diminishing one of the key strengths of OSX vs. Windows.
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From a technical standpoint Apple's drivers are thrid party drivers. Unless you are now claiming that Apple knows more about Nvidias and ATIs GPUs than they do...

Besides ATIs recent X2s fixes the problems associated with SLI and profile support of applications by only showing up as 1 GPU to begin with.
 
diamond.g said:
At a hardware level the system knows there is a card in it. At an OS level it know there is a card in it. It doesn't know what the card is thus the OS either doesn't boot or it kernel panics. Or is Apple finially getting with the time and providing a generic driver that any GPU would run with a la Windows?
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None of what I have said suggests that. A current Mac Pro will happily boot with multiple Apple supplied graphics cards. They will not work together to render images; there is no SLI or Crossfire support in the drivers. But OpenCL will be able to use all such cards to split the work load of the OpenCL kernels in use.
 
robbieduncan said:
None of what I have said suggests that. A current Mac Pro will happily boot with multiple Apple supplied graphics cards. They will not work together to render images; there is no SLI or Crossfire support in the drivers. But OpenCL will be able to use all such cards to split the work load of the OpenCL kernels in use.
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Ah, I see. I think part of the original problem was the lack of support of newer cards. It was said that Apple did include high end cards, just not the cream of the crop. Which is true, Apple no longer does so though, looking to use the mid range cards. Which is fine, if they gave an option for higher end. They don't and the one system that can take high end cards can't use them unless you boot Windows. I think this is due to Apple writing drivers for specific cards. Which would be fine if it was a card that didn't share roots with any other but there is no reason why an 8800GTX (or the entire 9800 GXX line) shouldn't work in the Mac Pro. They are all based on G9x cores which share the same code, just differing shader units and memory (bandwidth and size). If Apple were truly using OpenGL and OpenCL to power special effects then they should be able to write a generic VGA driver that would allow any VGA compatible card to at least run. From there they should be able to determine what abilites the card has (through querying the card) and scale the special effects from there.
 
Umbongo said:
I guess it depends what you consider high end. The 7800GT (G5), 1900XT and 8800GT were in the high end bracket of cards as defined by the manufacturers at the time of release. They just weren't the highest end in those brackets, which makes sense as such cards have a huge premium for little performance gain.
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Not to mention Apple was the 'launch customer' for both the GeForce 3 and the GeForce 4.
 
diamond.g said:
...If Apple were truly using OpenGL and OpenCL to power special effects then they should be able to write a generic VGA driver that would allow any VGA compatible card to at least run. From there they should be able to determine what abilites the card has (through querying the card) and scale the special effects from there.
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There is no need for a VGA driver for OpenCL to work: it has absolutely nothing to do with the display pipeline at all. It is not for graphical special effects or similar (at least not directly). It allows the power of the GPU to be used for general purpose computing: some of the stuff that normally runs on the CPU. As long as a card has an EFI firmware (which normal PC cards don't: they still have antiquated BIOS firmware) then it could potentially be used by OpenCL, even without graphics level drivers. This would require OpenCL support for the card though.

Note that OpenCL, rather like CoreImage and CoreVideo today does not have to run on the graphics card. If the library decides that it would be faster to execute on a CPU core it can: the point is to allow the spreading of load across all the processors in the system. The clever part is that the developer does not need to worry about this, or write different code for the CPU, the GPU or whatever else comes along...
 
robbieduncan said:
There is no need for a VGA driver for OpenCL to work: it has absolutely nothing to do with the display pipeline at all. It is not for graphical special effects or similar (at least not directly). It allows the power of the GPU to be used for general purpose computing: some of the stuff that normally runs on the CPU. As long as a card has an EFI firmware (which normal PC cards don't: they still have antiquated BIOS firmware) then it could potentially be used by OpenCL, even without graphics level drivers. This would require OpenCL support for the card though.

Note that OpenCL, rather like CoreImage and CoreVideo today does not have to run on the graphics card. If the library decides that it would be faster to execute on a CPU core it can: the point is to allow the spreading of load across all the processors in the system. The clever part is that the developer does not need to worry about this, or write different code for the CPU, the GPU or whatever else comes along...
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I think understand what you are saying, but I think you miss what I am saying. It has nothing to do with OpenGL/CL initially. It is all about getting more than just the Apple supplied cards to even work. That is what some people were complaining about.
 
By the by, it is looking like Snow Leopard is going to support the GT200 series and the 48xxX2 line. Not quite clear on GTX295 support, but it should be possible since it is just two GTX 260s. All gleaned from Insanely Mac.
 
diamond.g said:
By the by, it is looking like Snow Leopard is going to support the GT200 series and the 48xxX2 line. Not quite clear on GTX295 support, but it should be possible since it is just two GTX 260s. All gleaned from Insanely Mac.
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Gonna say the 4600 line, making the 4670 a candidate for the base card.

Where's the evidence for the 48xxX2, seeing as that card is obscenely out of Apple's range?
 
Tallest Skil said:
Gonna say the 4600 line, making the 4670 a candidate for the base card.

Where's the evidence for the 48xxX2, seeing as that card is obscenely out of Apple's range?
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Rumor based on post 11. The person claimed that Snow Leopard will support the 4870x2.
 
dansheppy52 said:
is this fake?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Core-i7-N...5|66:2|65:12|39:1|240:1318|301:1|293:1|294:50
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The price certainly is, but the chips do exist.

Eidorian said:
I just did. At least for the HD48xx Series.
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Okay, I went back and read these posts in the correct order, and I'm confused now.

Where was it that it was shown that the 48xx series had support in Snow Leopard? A link to a screenshot of the kext or something similar is preferable.

It wasn't post 11; that's for sure.
 
Eidorian said:
I just did. At least for the HD48xx Series.
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Tallest Skil said:
Okay, I went back and read these posts in the correct order, and I'm confused now.

Where was it that it was shown that the 48xx series had support in Snow Leopard? A link to a screenshot of the kext or something similar is preferable.

It wasn't post 11; that's for sure.
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Post 11 in the Insanely Mac forum post I linked to. Sorry for the confusion.
 
I think it is going to drive me insane. I'm beginning to find it odd that all the mac desktops are so long overdue - doesn't anyone else get an eerie feeling about that? What are they planning?
 
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