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imac 7,1 can't use openCL?

wywern209

wywern209

macrumors 65832
Original poster
Sep 7, 2008
1,503
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do you rly want to know?
I checked apple's website and went down to the requirements page. turns out, you require a nvidia or a very very recent ati chip to run openCL. the imac that i own has a ati radeon 2600 pro. what i don't get it, how is a nvidia 9400m more powerful than 2600 from ATI:confused: there seems to be no other reason than the fact that apple is being lazy about supporting fairly recent hardware. I only got this imac a couple of years a go and its still pretty new. Does apple expect me to get a new mac?:rolleyes:
 
Open CL will help you how? I mainly want to speed up encoding and I think the 2600 already beats the 9400 and there isn't any indication that Open CL will help the 9400M in that regard.

It will be interesting to see if Open CL makes any difference for what individuals do. What do you do?
 
Yeah I agree, my 8.1 iMac also doesn't support open CL. I anticipate that Apple will support more graphics cards with further 10.6.X updates.
 
You know, when they first announced Snow Leopard and openCL (what was it a bit more than a year ago?) how many macs shipping at the time would have supported it? I feel like, and I could be wrong, that almost none at the time were compliant.
 
walnuts said:
You know, when they first announced Snow Leopard and openCL (what was it a bit more than a year ago?) how many macs shipping at the time would have supported it? I feel like, and I could be wrong, that almost none at the time were compliant.
Click to expand...

Well, any of the nVidia 8xxx or higher and ATI 4xxx series. That's all the MacBook Pros, Mac Pros and some of the iMacs (I think).
 
Cave Man said:
Well, any of the nVidia 8xxx or higher and ATI 4xxx series. That's all the MacBook Pros, Mac Pros and some of the iMacs (I think).
Click to expand...

Not sure about your police-work there, Cave Man. I have a 2008 Mac Pro which has a ATI Radeon HD 2600 which is apparently not OpenCL compatible. I believe this was the standard option until the Nehalem update on March 3, 2009.

I'm disappointed, because I was wanting to experiment with using OpenCL since I regularly use all 8 cores for numerical work.

Also, my iMac at home, which I purchased on March 3, 2009 also has ATI Radeon HD 2600 which was standard until that date (I bought the March 2, 2009 version since the exchange rate here priced the new ones out of the market). If the OpenCL compatibility had been advertised better at the time I may have purchased differently.
 
Cave Man said:
Please note my first post in this thread where I mentioned the 2600. I suppose I could have been more specific and said "some" Mac Pros...
Click to expand...

Yes, I saw your first post, which discusses the 2600, but I still don't agree with the "That's all" in the following:

Cave Man said:
That's all the MacBook Pros, Mac Pros and some of the iMacs (I think).
Click to expand...

since the standard options on the Mac Pros and iMacs were not compatible when, as Walnut said "they first announced Snow Leopard and openCL (what was it a bit more than a year ago?)", in fact: not until March this year.

Saved by the "I think".
 
wywern209 said:
I do mainly HD video work on the imac so i believe that openCL will help with the transcoding of videos and the rendering of them.
Click to expand...

Right. But it is not clear that the 9400 with Open CL will beat the 2600 without it. The 2600 has support for encoding. And the 2600 is a slightly better chip according to all the sources I've read. So if you think about it, you have the better graphics chip -- so why worry about Open CL when 1. It may not make a difference to you and 2. You've had the advantage of a better product this whole time :)

If you'll notice, the FCS 3 was released BEFORE Snow Leopard. It strikes me that this anemic update doesn't even support Open CL
 
wywern209 said:
I checked apple's website and went down to the requirements page. turns out, you require a nvidia or a very very recent ati chip to run openCL. the imac that i own has a ati radeon 2600 pro. what i don't get it, how is a nvidia 9400m more powerful than 2600 from ATI:confused: there seems to be no other reason than the fact that apple is being lazy about supporting fairly recent hardware. I only got this imac a couple of years a go and its still pretty new. Does apple expect me to get a new mac?:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

It's not about speed. The ATI 2600 GPU is old (it was old when they decided to use it) and it simply does not support the feature. The 9400M might not be that fast, but it happens to support Open CL, making it the minimum required.
 
Sirmausalot said:
Right. But it is not clear that the 9400 with Open CL will beat the 2600 without it. The 2600 has support for encoding. And the 2600 is a slightly better chip according to all the sources I've read. So if you think about it, you have the better graphics chip -- so why worry about Open CL when 1. It may not make a difference to you and 2. You've had the advantage of a better product this whole time :)

If you'll notice, the FCS 3 was released BEFORE Snow Leopard. It strikes me that this anemic update doesn't even support Open CL
Click to expand...

9400 with OpenCL will beat the 2600 without it? Uh, OpenCL is supposed to help take the load off the CPU by assigning tasks to a GPU, not make a GPU faster.
 
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