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Whats better ATI Radeon HD or NVIDIA GeForce?
- Thread starter MikeMacPL
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1. Intergraded ones are low powered and uses DDR3 which is "stole" from RAM. 9400M benchmarks are VERY low, something that you could expect from 500 PC laptop.
2. Those models which has 9400M are for people who knows nothing about computers or for people who knows that they don't need powerful GPU, so people won't buy SL. 9400M can't take big advantage of OpenCL.
I think it'll do it perfectly. Even last gen Mini did that and it had intergraded GPU with 64Mb of DDR2 mem.
Depends about bit rate, if it's too high, it can't (there is no computer which can play the highest bit rates, so don't worry).
Which is the better buy iMac?
New 24inch iMac 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB Memory 640GB hard drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
or
24inch iMac 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB Memory 320GB hard drive ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory.
New 24inch iMac 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB Memory 640GB hard drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
or
24inch iMac 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB Memory 320GB hard drive ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory.
2008 model. If you want new ones, you should get the 2.93, if you want take advantage of Snow Leopard and do some gaming or something else which needs better GPU.
DON'T ASK THAT QUESTION! I am getting flamed on another thread for stating that I think they are very comparable, and since you can get the early 2008 24"/2.8 for $1199 refurb I suggested that it may be a better deal for the dedicated graphics card and the faster processor. Granted, the new 2.66 takes DDR3 RAM and can ultimately be upgraded to 8GB. If you think you'll need to extra RAM, that may be better for you. I photo edit and video edit, and never use more than 3GB of my 4GB, so to me it would not be worth it unless I started using apps that need more RAM.
I have always liked ATI more, because they are better built in my opinion. Every NVIDIA I have had (and I mean EVERY...that's about 7 high end ones) has failed. I kept trying with NVIDIA because I kept hoping that the reviews on the cards were going ot be right, but I guess not.
Go ATI whenever possible, and supporting AMD is not THAT bad....I mean they are going to go out of business relatively soon anyway.
Go ATI whenever possible, and supporting AMD is not THAT bad....I mean they are going to go out of business relatively soon anyway.
I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about OpenCL. OpenCL is NOT going to magically make your computer and all of your existing apps run faster -- the only thing OpenCL does is allow developers to write their apps so that they take advantage of the GPU. That means that until applications are OpenCL-enabled (and many likely never will), you aren't going to see any benefits due to OpenCL.
As to the assertion that the 9400m won't be able to do much with OpenCL, I highly doubt that that's true. Your average machine these days has 2 or 4 processor cores. Even a diminutive GPU like the 9400m has what are effectively 16 mini processors all to itself (these are usually termed 'stream processors') -- obviously not Core 2-style processors, but they will still beat the heck out of the main CPU in total processing power for the tasks that they're used for (mainly graphics acceleration, and now other tasks with the introduction of OpenCL).
It just depends on what you want. ON the new iMac you get a larger hard drive and the 4 gigs of memory along with an extra USB 2.0 port and the ability to go to 8 gigs of memory in the future.
The old iMac you get the better gpu (according to current benchmarks) and a hair slightly faster cpu.
Pretty much the same otherwise afaik.
The old iMac you get the better gpu (according to current benchmarks) and a hair slightly faster cpu.
Pretty much the same otherwise afaik.
Haha... Good luck with that dude! My last gen MBP couldn't handle 1080p h264 video. Lot's of desktops I use can't handle that.
9400m can -> it has hardware x264 decoder.
Radeon 2600 wouldn't play 1080p h264 -> it has no dedicated hardware decoder. Unless you've got some 3Ghs under the good, forget about it.
I have to admit that I don't know much about OpenCL but it won't make difference for normal user, only for professional graphic designers/editors etc. People just keep saying how "good" it'll be and "Should buy the better GPU so I could take advantage of Open CL". We'll see when SL is released
Why people used last gen Minis as a home theater and it played 1080p finely? My PC laptop handled 1080p OK but not in full screen, but 720p worked finely even in full screen and it has ATI radeon X1300 with 128Mb of memory.
Personally, I'd go with the older gen 2.8Ghz with a discrete graphics card with dedicated vram.
Agree!
(1) GPU stream processors are really just fast arithmetic units. Most stuff you need for displaying graphics is just specialized maths. Unless you've got some specific operations to do, you won't really have that much use for them
(2) It's hard to take advantage of parallelism. Now you've got 2 cores and you hardly take most of it. With 4 is even harder. How about 64? Only certain types of operations can be split easily; like when you're applying an effect to a photo -> split it to bits and make each processor do it's share; same for video editing, etc; or software like Mathematica, to speed up computation. Your Safari won't run any faster!
(3) With discrete GPU, you have to take into the consideration the time it takes to transfer data from RAM to GPU and back from GPU to RAM. It is a serious issue. If you really want to use the most of GPU, you need to think carefully how will you manage the data. It's very problem specific issue and generic solutions wouldn't work really fast.
I was thinking about the integrated graphics recently. It uses RAM for memory. Normally, the memory reserved for GPU is separated by impenetrable barrier set by BIOS. Maybe (just Maybe) Apple could pull some tricks (or rather some dark magic) and let OpenCL access stuff in whole of RAM. It'd be impossible for PC market -> no one controls all the hardware and getting all manufacturers to do it would take years. But the situation's different for Apple.
I just have a hunch. Who knows? Maybe its doable?
1080p is 1920xwhatever. What's the point if you can't play it full screen? I've got few 1080p films and my MBP would choke when trying to play most of them. Somehow I can't see how Mac-mini would be able to handle that.
720p works on because your processor can handle that. For 1080p to run on the processor alone, you'd need something like 2.8 or 3Ghz C2D (just my rough estimate).
Wasn't previous mini shipped with Intel integrated joke of a graphic card? It simply lacks the power to decode h264...
1080p = 1920x1080
I really didn't care could my laptop play 'em or not because it wasn't a big pleasure to watch 'em in 15" display.
At least they did, not sure about bit rates.