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buying a mbp soon

D

derajfast

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 24, 2004
784
0
but i have a quest about the video codes and playback ability


ive heard that video playback is actually choppy? would the 256mb vid card make a difference bt the 128mb one with regards to video playback and using something like imovie speed wise?

also, 2 sticks of 512mb ram is faster than 1 1gb stick?
 
It is true that 2 x 512 MB RAM. This allows the RAM to run in duel channel. Also think about the density. Much easier to find a page in two 512 page books than a 1024 page book.

The video play back should not be affected much by the VRAM. This is because video playback can run on much lower system stats than that. You really need to try a better player like VLC Media Player.
 
What about 512 x 1 and 1024 x 1? Does this still consider as Dual Channel? My MBP is coming with 512MB standard and I'll add another gig when it arrives.
 
I would either do 2 x 512 or 2 x 1GB. That way it will work in duel channel. Now what I did was down grade the 1.83 to 2 x 512 to keep as a backup. I then bought 2 x 1GB seperately because the chips are picky about what they will do a Duel Channel with. They need to have the same chip placement and timing. It is all about timing. So you have to think about that. Not in duel channel will make the RAM run at about 75% of the speed it is capable of in duel Channel.
 
Sorry, when you are trying to type Anatomy Notes and reply at the same time, you just do not pay attention to spelling. I was reading a research article on HD power consumption 5400 vs 7200. Then I saw one of there more recent articles was about the Core Duo and its features. I therefor read the entire 25 pages and saw that it listed Dual Channel as a supported feature. Nothing MBP directly related was listed but the Chip's test computer supported it.
 
The MacBook Pro Technology Overview, page 14 states:

For a performance improvement when working with large files, two easy-access slots
allow you to upgrade your MacBook Pro with up to 2GB of memory. And if both slots
are loaded with an equal amount of RAM, you can take advantage of the system’s
dual-channel memory architecture for an additional performance boost. With a dual-
channel memory interface, both banks of SDRAM can be addressed at the same time,
enabling MacBook Pro to reach a memory throughput of up to 10.7 GBps.
Click to expand...

Yes, the MBP supports dual-channel memory. It requires two DIMMs of the same capacity, so 1x512 + 1x1024 will *NOT* enable dual-channel mode. And from experience with other dual-channel systems, it is more likely to work if you have identical DIMMs. (i.e. sell the included 512MB module, and buy a matched pair of modules.)
 
Do not throw it away!!! It is important to keep the original RAM for trouble shooting and if you get the waranty they will try to blame anything that goes wrong with it on the RAM that you put in. So if you cannot put the original RAM back into it to trouble shoot then you are really SOL.
 
how much you think i could sell the 512 for?


so back to the video question.....i dont do any gaming, so would 256mb of vram be of any benefit to me? i do do some video editing, but nothing major via imovie and idvd......i read somewhere that the mbps with 128mb ram (maybe it was the dual core imacs) had trouble playing vid and was a bit choppy, but the 256 were fine
 
You really should not sell that. It could cause you trouble in the long run. It is not worth the 40 that you could sell it for. By the way, if you are not using Final Cut, Photoshop, or gaming. You should be fine with 128 VRAM. You will notice very little difference. I do Final Cut and I also do Photoshop as well as WoW, so I got the 256 VRAM.
 
well i have photoshop and do use from time to time, but its more for just touching up old photos and making some stupid things with my friends in them.....certainly nothing too intensive.....i have a 1.33ghz pbook now with 1.25gb ram and i have no complaints about the speed of photoshop
 
so that wont have any effect on video playback whatsoever? no choking or skipping or anything when i try to switch scenes or have a lot of programs open? bc my powerbook does it now and i watch a lot of video and it really bothers me
 
Well, think about it like this. You are having 8x the Video Bus Speed with the PCI Express slot. You are also having a lot faster of a FSB, RAM, and CPU. These are the factors that you should be looking at. My GF has an iBook G4. Videos never have that problem with her unless she is using the wrong player. Use Windows Media Player for WMV, Quicktime for .MOV, and VLC Media Player for everything else. That is the best advice that I can give you on this. The Video RAM is only going to make a difference in heavy Games, Video Compiling, and Real-time Photo editing. Now, if you are not doing any of these then the upgrad would probably not be worth your time and money But if you are doing anyone of these I would do the upgrading. Like me for instance. On March 2nd I have a photo shoot. I have to edit probably over 500 photos in 24 to 48 hours (Money from that is pretty nice). So it is worth it. Now, if you want the processor upgrade, it is only minor but still an upgrade. If you really wanted to upgrade some things: NOT THROUGH APPLE upgrade the RAM to 2 x 1GB. That will be a great increase. It will speed everything up greatly.
 
Video RAM amount makes ZERO difference on video playback. It also makes ZERO difference in Photoshop, iPhoto, iMovie, or any of the other 'i' Apps. It makes a slight difference in Final Cut, because Final Cut does use the video chip for generating some of its effects, but I doubt it would use up even 128 MB of video memory.

The big place it helps is games. And if 10.5 makes more use of the video chip for OS functions (like actually using Quartz 2D Extreme, which was introed with 10.4, but has never been turned on by default in any update,) it will make some difference.
 
True about the Photoshop except one thing. The real-time previews of what you are changing. With larger filters and larger files you may notice it being slower with less VRAM. I have been there. There is a difference on older, slower RAM machines between 128, and 256. Photoshop does use Video RAM but not much until doing these previews and changing settings.
 
I had no trouble playing all video included DVD movies except RMVB with my Titanium PB 1G. Playing rmvb files (stored on hard drive) were a little choppy with 1Ghz PB, where those files were playing smooth on my Dell (with 128MB vram), hopefully MBP will do better.
 
RMVB is a different player and that is mostly the player's fault there. The player is really not all that optimised for OSX. It is a windows player that had as little work done to it as possible so that it could play on OSX. You really should find other encodings of files. RMVB is not of the greatest quality either.
 
AJBMatrix said:
Download VLC Media Player off of http://www.videolan.org

Try playing a video with that. Then tell me what it looks like.
Click to expand...

VLC is very buggy(at least the older version, not sure about now I haven't used it for long time), I would recommend MPlayerOSX. It's free.
 
AJBMatrix said:
True about the Photoshop except one thing. The real-time previews of what you are changing. With larger filters and larger files you may notice it being slower with less VRAM. I have been there. There is a difference on older, slower RAM machines between 128, and 256. Photoshop does use Video RAM but not much until doing these previews and changing settings.
Click to expand...

It was my impression that Photoshop doesn't do any 'native' useage of VRAM. i.e. It only uses VRAM in that the OS loads the Photoshop window into VRAM.

I can't find any definitive answer on Adobe's website, and my personal experience is with pre-CS versions; so it's entirely possible that CS and/or CS2 use it. Basically, if they use CoreImage, then they can more easily take advantage of VRAM, but I can't find any info that even CS2 uses CoreImage.

All I could find is an anecdotal report that moving form a Matrox 550 with 32MB VRAM to an ATI 9250 with 128 MB VRAM made a huge improvement in Windows. That could be easily attributed to the more modern video chip having better Windows driver support than from any inherent Photoshop improvement.

For example, on Windows (and pre-Quartz Extreme Mac OS) systems, things are only loaded into VRAM as they look on the final monitor. Meaning if you have a 4000x6000 pixel image open in Photoshop, on a 1024x768 screen, only the 1024x768 part of it is loaded into VRAM. With Quartz Extreme, every separate window is in VRAM, meaning if you have 10 800x600 windows open in 24-bit color mode, you're using 14.4 MB of VRAM for those windows, plus any for the desktop background. But even with QE, it still doesn't load the entire 4000x6000 image into VRAM. With CoreImage, and a properly written application, it COULD load the entire 4000x6000 image into VRAM, but even that large an image would only be 72 MB. But, again, I can't find any info that Photoshop uses CI. (I would appreciate any info pointing me to the fact that it does, though.)

If Photoshop does use CoreImage, this would mean that it should run at near-100% speeds through Rosetta, because it means that most of the app isn't really emulated. (Anything that uses CoreX, or OpenGL, won't need to be emulated, because those parts were written in processor-independent code in the first place.) Filters are still emulated, though. So would still suffer from emulation lag.
 
The above post is correct. I do believe from experience with Photoshop that it stores the entire image in the VRAM.

Oh, and VLC is much better now that they got out of the Pre-Beta releases. They are now so much smoother. They actually had a release not too long ago and it was probably one of the better ones. It made things run even better. I like VLC just because of the smooth versitile codec integrations.
 
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