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The GPU Does NOT Matter

Sure, I'd say the dedicated graphics isn't always needed. If I wasn't planning to dual boot into windows and play some games, I would not hesitate with the 13 inch or the low end 15. They're still powerhouses, and demand respect for that. I for one have absolutely no problem with calling laptops with just the 9400m "pro."

The dedicated graphics are undoubtedly better for 3D rendering. If you use programs that do that, get it. The 9600m also *may* provide significantly better performance eventually with Open CL, but we have no proof of that now. And to be honest, I don't remember the last time I saw my CPU so maxed out that the graphics needed to take over some of the burden.

Ultimately, the 9600m was right for me for specific reasons, and the 9400m is also right for certain (or most) users for specific reasons. I think Apple is doing the right thing by offering both options.

And as for Dwalls90's aunt using discrete graphics, you can't blame Apple for the end user not properly researching their options.
 
you all bullshot too much. if the discreet graphic is not better then why waste your money? Also what is up with the sd slot? The reason they included the sd slot so they can remove the express card slot. You know the sd slot is the cheapest replacement for the express card slot. Apple needs to rename the 15'' macbook.
 
Demosthenes X said:
The literature on the Adobe suite you linked lists features that are GPU-accelerated by OpenGL cards. I see no mention of the 9600M being an OpenGL card...
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and you say you know stuff about video cards and gpus ?

it is open gl...and that article is older, just goes to show how little you know...thats been out for a year...
 
MacModMachine said:
and you say you know stuff about video cards and gpus ?

it is open gl...and that article is older, just goes to show how little you know...thats been out for a year...
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:rolleyes: Yeah, stupid me, looking at NVIDIA's website to get information about an NVIDIA product. I said "I see no mention of OpenGL", not "they are not OpenGL". But don't let that get in the way of your pretentiousness...
 
Demosthenes X said:
:rolleyes: Yeah, stupid me, looking at NVIDIA's website to get information about an NVIDIA product. I said "I see no mention of OpenGL", not "they are not OpenGL". But don't let that get in the way of your pretentiousness...
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Classic your 13" macbook pro only has a 1.5 GBp/s Sata II. LOL. Are you sure that it deserves the pro name?
 
I have an 24 LED Apple Cinema Display and using it with my Macbook Pro in desktop extended with the 9400 does produce noticeable performance hit and lag with UI. Just try activate Exposé or Spaces with a few windows open in this mode and you will notice that the animation does get choppy. Another test is to try to run the "Word of the Day" screen saver in this mode and you will see that the movement of the words is not as smooth and drops frames. The sluggishness of UI is more apparaent when I'm using up a lot of ram buy doing hi res drawings in Photoshop and Illustrator - maybe because VRAM is shared?

Perhaps it is an optimization problem rather then the limits of the GPU? I always thought today's GPU should be powerful enough to handle simple UI animations smoothly regardless of load.
 
Shiner said:
Classic your 13" macbook pro only has a 1.5 GBp/s Sata II. LOL. Are you sure that it deserves the pro name?
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Do you really attach that much significance to the word "Pro"? It's a word, nothing more and nothing less. As long as my computer does what I need it to, I don't care what they call it. That's especially true about whether or not a name as the suffix "Pro".

Quit being so pretentious about the name of the computer, and appreciate how good these computers are. The new MBPs are exceptional machines, and are quite good value, too. Win.
 
i really SINCERELY doubt that the 13" MBP has only 1.5 sata connection, since the 13" MB unibody firstgen 2.0 has 3gigabit sata, and i just checked, it happens that one is in the house. :)

and i said in another thread i will say it again, the suffix pro doesnt make a computer pro if it runs safari and mail..
the users makes a computer pro.

damn, im on the no man's land;D everybody hates me...
 
In OSX there's no OpenCL yet. However in Windows land there're already GPU accelerated apps.


Elemental's Badaboom (www.badaboomit.com) can transcode video into H.264 using nvidia DX 10 cards. It's very much faster on the GPU than it is on the CPU. For instance it can take an hour to rip a 40 min TV show from DVD into a PS3 compatible MP4 container using my CPU.

cuda_compare2.gif


With GPU accelerated encoding it can do this in 12 minutes. The GPU based framerate is around 84 fps (~3-4x faster than realtime). THis is with a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo with an nvidia 8800 GT. I also have a G98 based 8400 GS (not the old G86 based 8400 GS) which is identical GPU-wise to the 9400. On this card the same task runs at 22 fps (slightly faster than CPU). The 9600 is more than twice as fast as the 9400 so provided you're not CPU limited it would be a lot faster on the 9600.

Nvidia developed CUDA based H.264 encoding libraries for their cards which a lot of video editing apps use. There're a lot of CUDA based video editors which do GPU based H.264 encoding.

Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 supports it ( also on Ati cards using STREAM). Super Loiloscope (http://loilo.tv/) is another app which offers GPU based encoding. This is the first video editor to be renderless, i.e. doesn't need to import videos to edit them. You can mix and match HD video clips in real time and preview them instantly using GPU accelerated video decoders and any installed DirectShow filters on the system. It also supports CUDA based final output rendering in MP4. On my system CPU based encoding of a 10 minute video (720p H.264 source) I made took over an hour to encode (this uses Quicktime's encoder which is crappy for CPU encoding). The same app with CUDA took 8 minutes to encode (with the 8800 GT), i.e. faster than realtime. The app currently doesn't run on the 8400 GS (G98 == GF 9400, once again not the old G86 based 8400 GS) as it has fewer than 32 shaders. I think nvidia's latest driver lifted the restriction so that their H.264 libraries run on GPUs with less than 32 shaders. The 9400 and the 9600 have the video decoding abilities for H.264 (bistream, H.264 VLD) and should offer the same performance for it (0% CPU load for two H.264 streams at upto 60 MBPS each at the same time). However for encoding they're worlds apart.

For those of you who say GPUs have no effect on video encoding performance. You're right if you're talking about the Mac. In Windows land it makes a massive difference and has done so since August last year.

With OpenCL all of that will change. The 9400 sucks as a GPU.

http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/cuda-optimization_en_GB.html


http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?sitesize=yes&i=3475&p=5

OpenCL as an API is very similar to nvidia's CUDA and nvidia cards should be faster at it as it favours their architecture.
 
Aperture clearly demonstrates the performance divide between the 9400M and 9600GT despite only partially utilising GPU performance.

Personally I find the "Pro" branding a little bit of a stretch when the 9400M is really a low-end consumer component, even the 9600GT can only considered mid-range.

IMO Apple are yet to recreate a true parallel for the MBP 12" which more closely matched its larger brethren in performance terms while having an even smaller footprint.

Having said this, the UMBP 13" is closer to a UMBP 15" than any past MB has been to a MBP so ultimately I think that the branding is correct.
 
Dwalls90 said:
You still don't understand. A GPU WILL NOT REPLACE THE CPU. For one who does NOT do anything visually intensive, the GPU is USELESS, BEFORE and AFTER OpenCl is released.

...

And so where do you see that Apple has claimed OpenCL will transfer GPU power to CPU processing? Trust me, if they haven't advertised it as a feature of Snow Leopard by this point - It's not happening.
Click to expand...

From Apple: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#opencl

"Now a new technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard called OpenCL takes the power of graphics processors and makes it available for general-purpose computing. No longer will graphics processors be limited to graphics-intensive applications such as games and 3D modeling. Instead, once developers begin to use OpenCL in their applications, you’ll experience greatly improved speed in a wide spectrum of applications."
 
Oh, yes the GPU most definitely does matter.

Dwalls90 said:
Not a good idea. The Quadro is limited to workstation tasks, such as 3d shape generating and those extra performance benefits in CS4. In all other GPU tasks, it falls behind the GeForce line - and by a significant margin.

It would be nice if it were at least an option.
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It would be very nice. I have a G5 Quad, and it has the Quadro FX 4500, are you saying that the only use for that card is Photoshop CS4?
Would I be better off with the GeForce 7300 that also was an option at that time for that model?

I would like for Apple to stop skimping on their GPU options, for example, the Dell Studio 15" has the Intel GMA 4500 standard but has the ATI Radeon 450 as an BTO option.
 
The GPU does matter.

When it comes to the benchmarks, there are subtle differences between the 15-inch 2.53GHz and 2.66GHz models in our Speedmark scores, but there are dramatic differences in 3-D games scores, with the higher-powered graphics found in the 2.66GHz model helping that system to nearly double the amount of frames displayed in our Quake 4 timedemo tests. (More games scores will be included in our full review of these new MacBook Pros).
Click to expand...

Full article.
 
Dwalls90 said:
can people ...start understanding what GPU's are actually used for?
Click to expand...

Isn't this a wait and see area of progress? The GPU matters for work that can be given to the GPU. As time goes on, OS's progress, GPU's update, and things change, i'd say the GPU will be able to do more, and thus be more important. It's job spec, and usage in everyday tasks is likely to increase, no?
 
Dwalls90 said:
1) Open CL will benefit nearly the same from the 9400M as it will the 9600 GT. It's not like the raw processing power of the 9600GT being much greater than the 9400M, means that same raw processing power advantage will be translated into CPU power. In addition, nearly no setups can completely utillize the CPU's that exist today, aside from maybe video encoding.
Click to expand...

Ever heard of real-time audio processing? Audio units? RTAS? VST? The dangers of blanket statements...

I run against the top end of my CPU regularly.
 
davidcalvet said:
I am reading all those threads but still confused ...

I am thinking to get a MBP 15", because a want a bigger display.
Also I read somewhere that SNOW LEOPARD will be very demanding on graphics.
So do you think that it will be better to get the dual GPU MBP or the basic one, with 9400 will be ok ?
Can it be that future vesions of OSX will be very hard on graphics ?
As far as I know we can not expend the GPU ona MBP, so better go to the dual 9400/9600 ?
thank you, and keep this forums alive, they are so helpfull
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard is not more demanding than Leopard now. What it will do however is take advantage of the GPU power available to it using the OpenCL technology. Right now that technology is very young and you are most likely not to reap the benefits soon. The integrated cards and the dedicated cards are both used by this technology. If you pay less for the 9400m version of the 15 inch MBP, you'll get less performance than if you were to buy a more expensive machine with dedicated graphics, but it will not really make a difference unless the programs you use need the extra GPU power.

It really depends how you are using your machine, but sounds like you have dont use programs that take advantage of the GPU, so I would not worry about it and purchase whatever you can afford.
 
"It kills me to see people claiming that the 9400 M suits their needs for "video editing"

Yeah, tell RED ONE that. They just announced a dedicated video card STRICTLY TO HANDLE EDITING. So maybe you don't need one to edit your old DV tapes, but with these new 4k+ motion cameras, you need everything you can get. Speaking of... get a life instead of flaming your ignorance on the boards...
 
brock2621 said:
"It kills me to see people claiming that the 9400 M suits their needs for "video editing"

Yeah, tell RED ONE that. They just announced a dedicated video card STRICTLY TO HANDLE EDITING. So maybe you don't need one to edit your old DV tapes, but with these new 4k+ motion cameras, you need everything you can get. Speaking of... get a life instead of flaming your ignorance on the boards...
Click to expand...

And you think people buying RED are editing their footage on a baseline MacBook Pro...? Seriously? What an absurd argument.

I'll wager <0.01% of MBP users are using their machines to edit RED footage, Yup - better make sure every single model has a dedicated GPU, just in case someone wants to edit their RED footage. :rolleyes:
 
Demosthenes X said:
And you think people buying RED are editing their footage on a baseline MacBook Pro...? Seriously? What an absurd argument.

I'll wager <0.01% of MBP users are using their machines to edit RED footage, Yup - better make sure every single model has a dedicated GPU, just in case someone wants to edit their RED footage. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...


The point wasn't that the 9400 is a bad chip and the MacBook Pro is bad, it was that GPU are important for video editing(which is exemplified by a company releasing GPU just for editing video)
 
zap2 said:
The point wasn't that the 9400 is a bad chip and the MacBook Pro is bad, it was that GPU are important for video editing(which is exemplified by a company releasing GPU just for editing video)
Click to expand...

Final Cut Pro does not leverage the GPU for video editing. Color and Motion do, but that's graphically intense work. I'd have to read up on what RED is doing, but RED is far from your typical camera and the footage it generates is well above the norm. A MBP with the 9400M is more than sufficient to deal with any consumer or prosumer DV or HDV video, and that's what the machines are being sold for. Not to edit RED footage.
 
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