Gma 950

[TSE]

Hey guys, TSE here, new member of these forums.

Alright, so, when Boot Camp 1.0 beta came out around a year ago, the GMA 950 on people's MacBook on the Official Apple Support forums said under Windows XP, under the computer specs it was described as Intel GMA 950, with a minimum VRAM of 16 MBs and maximum of 224 MBs. Is this correct?

Well, when I put Windows XP on my MacBook using Boot Camp 1.2 beta, it described the GMA 950 as Intel GMA 950, with a minimum VRAM of 16 MBs and maximum of only 128 MBs. Anyone else think this is weird? Will I get better graphical performance loading up Boot Camp 1.0?

 

[negatv1]

Likely to depend on how much RAM you have installed in the machine.

 

[mkrishnan]

I remember, long ago, there was some controversy over this, as the spec calls for 224MB of memory access for the GMA950, but in OS X, it appeared able to access less than that.

If you're really concerned about it, I'd hunt around for other XP drivers for the GMA950 rather than using Bootcamp again. Now that you're installed, your GMA950 should be just like a GMA950 in any other laptop, and if you can find a driver for it that'll let you use 224MB, you can just install it. But hopefully, you'll get the most recent such driver available, so that it's best optimized....

 

[TSE]

I remember, long ago, there was some controversy over this, as the spec calls for 224MB of memory access for the GMA950, but in OS X, it appeared able to access less than that.

If you're really concerned about it, I'd hunt around for other XP drivers for the GMA950 rather than using Bootcamp again. Now that you're installed, your GMA950 should be just like a GMA950 in any other laptop, and if you can find a driver for it that'll let you use 224MB, you can just install it. But hopefully, you'll get the most recent such driver available, so that it's best optimized....

Is there another program that gets as good performance as boot camp and has drivers to max out the GMA 950? I mean, why is apple capping the GMA 950 to 64 MBs under Mac OS X? This is ridiculous. Are there any hacks to unleash the GMA 950 under any OS (I don't want an emulator like Parallels, VMware, etc.?)

And to the post about RAM, I have 2 GBs of RAM.

 

[mkrishnan]

The thing to remember about bootcamp is that it is basically just a set of drivers. This is what I would recommend.

1) Find a copy of Bootcamp 1.0, if you don't still have the CDR you made. Boot up as is in XP and then just use the disc to replace the GMA950 drivers only, from the XP control panel.

2) But, I'd also recommend, you pick a method (geekbench, etc), to actually validate that what you do is improving anything (i.e. do pre/post tests). It may be that Apple changed the VRAM access to *improve* performance....