Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Nvidia 8600M GT 256 that good?
- Thread starter djinn
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yeah, it is amusing. Rather obvious why the gamers see it that way though...
OpenGL 3 -- yeah, definitely. We'll see... Apple's OpenGL implementation hasn't traditionally been that speedy, despite them leveraging it for the desktop (ie not just games) for so long. I guess most of the desktop stuff didn't need to be "high performance" in the way games do though. Look at the benchmarks of various OpenGL games on the same hardware to see what I mean.
Well, it's that or Apple's drivers aren't a patch on nVidia's in-house ones. I've no idea if Apple writes their own, but I've always assumed so, especially given how IOKit resembles nothing else in terms of driver model.
Honestly, my MBP boots Windows 90% of the time. I'm not a big fan of OSX, but am a huge fan of the MBP. Not to say I hate OSX, I'm just indifferent. Mac, Windows... either isn't a big deal for me. I spend more time worrying about doing work on my machine (or fun
rather than worrying about what OS is running it.As for OGL, another great thing about the 8600 is that nVidia has had better OGL support in hardware than ATI the last couple of generations.
Honestly, my MBP boots Windows 90% of the time. I'm not a big fan of OSX, but am a huge fan of the MBP. Not to say I hate OSX, I'm just indifferent. Mac, Windows... either isn't a big deal for me. I spend more time worrying about doing work on my machine (or fun
As for OGL, another great thing about the 8600 is that nVidia has had better OGL support in hardware than ATI the last couple of generations.
nVidia's Windows OpenGL drivers have historically been better much than ATi's.
As Carmack said a few years ago, nVidia's been the "gold standard" -- though the Vista drivers for the 8800 series have been a rather rocky road...
demos?
just got a new high-end macbook pro... does anyone know some good demos or games to show off my new graphics card?
just got a new high-end macbook pro... does anyone know some good demos or games to show off my new graphics card?
Yes thats true with regards to Nvidia being the king for OpenGL. It does surprise me alot the lack of proper support for the 88xx series. I would never have expected that from Nvidia. ATI has always had the upper hand in regards to Directx though. Maybe Nvidia decided to persue DX10 more in the initial driver release since so many games have went that way over the years. Hard to say but I suppose eventually we will hear the reasons why. Historically though Nvidia eventually recovers quite nicely with very good drivers being released down the road. I can remember a time when their initial TNT2 drivers were not so hot and a short while down the road the released a great set that provided not only proper support but also like a 30-40% performance boost! Those were happy times.
I read an article a few weeks back where someone from nVidia said that writing DX10 drivers was harder than they'd anticipated. Can't remember where I read it now though, and a quick google turned up nada.
I think the big perf boost drivers from nVidia was probably the Detonator launch? I remember that. I had an overclocked TNT at the time... as well as a VooDoo 2 in a different machine... as you said, happy times
Historically, my experience has been that nVidia's drivers - both DX and OpenGL - have generally been better than ATi's. Certainly, ATi in the pre-Catalyst days had some pretty major problems. Almost as far back as the TNT2 days, the MAXX was notorious for having awful drivers. Of course, that's ancient history now...
At this point I've generally not had a lot of problems with drivers from either. I'm not a fan of the "look" of recent-ish ATi control panels though. That's the nearest I have to a complaint, and it's less than minor.
I've no horse in that race, I've owned (and still do own) cards from both. I've just gone with whatever looked like a better buy when I was ready to upgrade -- and all it takes is one good special offer...
That said, right now I'd buy nVidia. ATi and AMD both seem to be a day late and a dollar short of late -- something I find worrying. Competition is always a good thing, and while Intel might eventually become a solid competitor for nVidia, they're far from that yet, and there's no-one else in the x86 market to take on Intel... I guess the rumors of nVidia working on an x86 processor might bear out, but I have doubts...
Mac or Windows?
On the Mac, Quake 4 is pretty.
On Windows, the most impressive thing I've seen recently is probably S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is... well, perhaps not pretty. Impressive though.
Company of Heroes is pretty good too, especially with the recently released DX10 patch, but I have doubts that'll run well on an MBP with all the eye candy in DX9 mode, never mind DX10... come to that, not sure how well S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (bloody periods...
) will run...I read an article a few weeks back where someone from nVidia said that writing DX10 drivers was harder than they'd anticipated. Can't remember where I read it now though, and a quick google turned up nada.
I think the big perf boost drivers from nVidia was probably the Detonator launch? I remember that. I had an overclocked TNT at the time... as well as a VooDoo 2 in a different machine... as you said, happy times
Historically, my experience has been that nVidia's drivers - both DX and OpenGL - have generally been better than ATi's. Certainly, ATi in the pre-Catalyst days had some pretty major problems. Almost as far back as the TNT2 days, the MAXX was notorious for having awful drivers. Of course, that's ancient history now...
At this point I've generally not had a lot of problems with drivers from either. I'm not a fan of the "look" of recent-ish ATi control panels though. That's the nearest I have to a complaint, and it's less than minor.
I've no horse in that race, I've owned (and still do own) cards from both. I've just gone with whatever looked like a better buy when I was ready to upgrade -- and all it takes is one good special offer...
That said, right now I'd buy nVidia. ATi and AMD both seem to be a day late and a dollar short of late -- something I find worrying. Competition is always a good thing, and while Intel might eventually become a solid competitor for nVidia, they're far from that yet, and there's no-one else in the x86 market to take on Intel... I guess the rumors of nVidia working on an x86 processor might bear out, but I have doubts...
Youre absolutely right it was the Detonator launch I was referring to and I agree the earlier ATI drivers were less than steller to say the least. When they went to Cats it drastically improved and I also agree that their control panel has turned to something I don't care to mention. I also have cards from both sides and an older laptop with a radeon 9600 in it which was pretty impressive in its day. My desktop running vista has the 7900 in it and the new Macbook Pro on its way to me has the new Nvidia chip so I am excited about it. I feel the Nvidia driver will ultimately turn up as decent. I actually have more faith in their driver releases than ATI still. I haven't seen Intels new x3100 or whatever it is but from what I read about it, its not too much more than the gma950 stuff. I hate intel video always did and was rejoicing back when the pulled out of the graphic business some years back. When they re-entered it seems the same old song and cheap graphics now abound the lower end laptop market. I do think Vista is going to force alot of OEM builders to move from integrated graphics fairly soon unless somebody can produce something halfway strong enough for todays current 3D demands. I will be surprised if intel can pull that off with their awful graphics chip track record. When I heard about the ATI - AMD merger, I initially thought inte-nvidia could be next. I guess will see what pans out but I am happy to see the nvidia chip in the new pro and it was part of my decision to purchase it.
Everything I've read on the x3000/x3100 suggests it was designed to do full DX10 via programmable pipelines, but so far... well, I haven't followed it closely, but last I heard it was still doing vertex shading in software, just like GMA950 does... maybe that's changed, I dunno.
I do know Intel's gone very quiet on DX10 compatibility for it, and quite a few benchmarks I've seen showed it being worse than GMA950... though they were all late last year/early this year. Hopefully it's improved.
I can't say I like integrated video either, but I guess it has a place -- loads of people just need something to browse, do email and do word with, which the integrated part seems adequate at, and at least it's pretty good on power usage for a laptop... if it runs outlook, powerpoint and can be hooked to a projector, that's a huge chunk of the business market happy
Likewise, I don't see the MacBook moving away from some form of integrated any time soon -- it's adequate for the majority of consumers, it's incredibly cheap (for Apple), and it keeps the MacBook from threatening the MacBook Pro market, especially when Apple can leverage technologies like Core Video.
It's pretty funny that Jobs has gone from claiming integrated is awful to shipping it. Is it hypocrisy when he says it wearing his marketing hat?
Intel intends to make some major improvements to their video line of course. While I don't see this as threatening the ATi/nVidia's gaming and pro graphics market, it'll probably mean they stay "good enough" for the majority of home/business users.
Vista's new enough that few enough are using it yet anyway...
I don't think nVidia wants to be bought -- I recall reading somewhere that AMD approached nVidia first, before ATi -- and given hardware cycles at that point, nVidia was the obvious choice. nVidia rebuffed AMD, ATi didn't and the rest as they say...
Intel's Larrabee(sp?) project could be interesting... as could AMD's Fusion. Both leave nVidia out in the cold though...
Getting back ontopic, yeah, MBP looks like a solid update. I'll be happy to get one. I just wish they'd gone with 256MB/512MB for the video RAM rather than 128MB/256MB -- I like a good game, I do, and even on medium settings S.T.A.L.K.E.R. needs more than 256MB to having to stream textures...