You can softmod the GeForce 6800 and 6800GT/Ultra (PC) version from 12 pipelines to 16 making it a $2,000 Quadro FX 4000. I'm not aware of such a option for the mac branded products. There's also softmods for ATI x800 cards as well...
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
Quote:
Originally posted by emig647
Didn't mean to post yet...
Though I completely agree with Onlooker about the graphics cards. I believe that is the main turn off for professional graphics workshops right now. Though I don't see a huge difference between a 6800ultra and FireGL or Quadro in maya right now. This isn't my field so I can't say any more than that. But I know what would make Onlooker happy is the newest Quadro, or maybe even any quadro, card released for the mac. Is this true with all professionals in this field?
You can softmod the GeForce 6800 and 6800GT/Ultra (PC) version from 12 pipelines to 16 making it a $2,000 Quadro FX 4000. I'm not aware of such a option for the mac branded products. There's also softmods for ATI x800 cards as well...
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
Softmod is close, but it's not exactly the same. There is the Quadro driver that utilizes OpenGL a bit differently I believe. Although I would be better than what we have now.
So, even Apple's best quarter in years didn't extend to the PowerMac.
Apple confessed that they're no longer expecting 200K units per quarter. They said further that they're not concerned with the performance of individual lines, only with aggregate sales. I'm sure that's if it's true, it's true up to the point where the line costs them money—and I'm not really convinced that it is true. I think they're putting a brave face on the wildly variable, but ultimately favorable, results of the last quarter.
This is actually something I predicted way back when I first joined the board, although I was off by a number of years: The tower is a hangover from 30 years ago. Most users simply don't need one. They bought towers because, for the performance they required, there was no other option. Now there are options, and tower sales are in the toilet. Not because pro sales are down, but because a whole lot of pros are better served by something else in Apple's product line.
But clearly, and especially in some markets that Apple is just breaking into, the need for absolute, pedal-to-the-metal power remains.
Since gross margin (and every other kind of margin) actually went up, it's clear that Apple has weaned itself of its long-standing dependence on the towers' profit margins. They saw this coming. And, contrary to the profits vs. marketshare opposition set up so commonly on these boards and elsewhere, they've managed to shift the burden of maintaining the bottom line to precisely those models that are flying out of the Apple Stores. This gives them a lot of flexibility with the high-end models that they've never had before. The pro models can become more specialized, and there's much less pressure on any of them to sell in large quantities.
So, why not break the PowerMac == tower equivalence?
Back in the halcyon days of Future Hardware when I thought we'd have FireWire 3200 by now, I postulated a modular pro line. Need a quiet workstation with a choice of monitor(s)? Get this little box here. Need absolute computational power, and nothing else? Get this bigger box (but still much smaller than a tower) here. Heck, get three of 'em. Need hard drive expansion? Add this little box here. Need more? Add another. Need PCI? This box over here... and so forth. The Mac mini points the way, design-wise, and the connective tissue my vision required is finally here in the form of PCI Express (which can run over a wire) and HyperTransport (which can also run over a wire). There is no longer any particular reason to offer a tower, although of course they could keep one around for people who actually do need everything that a tower offers, and who'd prefer it in one package.
This really could redefine the landscape, completely. Pros could build systems à la carte, swap out the parts the need or don't need without cracking a case open, add new things, etc. As with the mini, there would be fertile ground for resellers, VARs and third parties to offer accessories and solutions. And, as of right now, they could be enhanced with Xsan, racks of Xserves, etc. for file storage and extra muscle for batch work. Apple could accommodate everyone from the lone pro who wants everything crammed into one tower, to the pro in a shop who just wants a quiet little box powerful enough to preview her work before she saves it to the SAN and sends it to the render farm.
This is all, of course, 100% blue sky, and I reserve the right to be horribly off track. I'm offering all this mostly to stimulate discussion on the future of the PowerMac. Because as it is, it's not prospering.
I have to agree with this because of design options and because of heat and power and noise. Designing a box that can cool the CPUs dual hard drives and a hot video card and still have power and cooling capacity for other cards is really getting difficult. I don't think that Apple can power everything and cool it as well without making the box sound like a vacuum cleaner at least under heavy loads. Maybe a box that can hold two HDs, and the CPUs and a Video card. The rest could be in a seperate box connected to the main machine. Like was mentioned it would be nice to be able to connect the main box to another box for extra CPUs if needed, like in the 3D world or FCP rendering, ect. Maybe by doing this the size could be smaller saving desk space and still allowing for expansion. Maybe the cost could come down maybe a little because it would not be as difficult to design a box when the thermal load is a known as opposed to a box where Apple has to design a power supply for their stuff and for the add ons, as well as the cooling of their stuff as the add ons. To me the design and flexability just get very easy as well as cheaper.
You can softmod the GeForce 6800 and 6800GT/Ultra (PC) version from 12 pipelines to 16 making it a $2,000 Quadro FX 4000. I'm not aware of such a option for the mac branded products. There's also softmods for ATI x800 cards as well...
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
I'd love to get my hands on that source code. Maybe someone like uhhhhhh ahem... Programmer... uhhh... could help me with something like this :P
There needs to be more ports to the mac like this.
I have to agree with this because of design options and because of heat and power and noise. Designing a box that can cool the CPUs dual hard drives and a hot video card and still have power and cooling capacity for other cards is really getting difficult...
Personally I feel this is the hard drive manufacturer's and video card manufacturer's problem. Creating a part that puts excessive (spelling) heat in a computer isn't the builders responsibility to prevent.
There are hard drive coolers and extra VGA coolers now. You can even water cool your graphics card now. You can cool many things with water cooling. Have a huge 120mm fan in the back and an 80 in the front to get a vaccum going through the case to cool the water resevoir and have a little air flow, then water cooling for everything else.
I don't know why people saw the water cooling in the dual 2.5's as a bad thing (I was one of them). Now I see it as a very awesome idea. It can probably take out another 2 or 3 fans of that case (even though they've already cut it in half going from rev a to rev b).
I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. All in all, every case manufacturer is having to think of new ways to cool the components, doesn't this signify a failure of everyone that is doing all the extra components? Yes and no.
I'd love to get my hands on that source code. Maybe someone like uhhhhhh ahem... Programmer... uhhh... could help me with something like this :P
There needs to be more ports to the mac like this.
I'm pretty sure the Mac versions are shipping with 16 pixel pipelines enabled. And according to a guy I know in the driver group of a GPU company, the Mac version of the driver is usually more like a PC "pro" driver than a PC "gaming" driver. Macs aren't game machines.
Softmod is close, but it's not exactly the same. There is the Quadro driver that utilizes OpenGL a bit differently I believe. Although I would be better than what we have now.
And no.. we don't have it.
This is the problem in a nutshell: What you pay for in a pro card is mostly the driver, which (unlike with the consumer cards) includes a correct and complete OpenGL implementation which is tested for compatibility with major software applications. The pro card also has a firmware ID that identifies it as a pro card. The added cost of a pro card covers the considerable additional expense involved in maintaining and testing this driver. The apps that are tested for compatibility also test for the pro card. If they know it's there, they know they're interfacing with a driver that supports their full capabilities, and so they unlock their full capabilities. Even if you flash a consumer card so that the full hardware capabilities are there, an app like Maya won't assume that it's talking to a driver that can effectively use those capabilities, so it'll still protect itself against the much spottier, less accurate OpenGL support in consumer drivers.
The problem on the Mac side is that Apple breaks this entire arrangement. Apple ships something very close to a correct and complete implementation of OpenGL with their OS, and they only want GPU drivers to function as interfaces between the hardware and this library. This has several consequences: First, NVIDIA and ATI can't just port their drivers over; second, they can't certify their pro cards for compatibility with various pro apps when an entire, crucial layer is out of their control; and as a result, the pro apps can't assume that they aren't running on a consumer platform of dubious quality. But Apple can't certify anything either, because they don't control the GPU. The rather absurd result is that you can have a pro card (for all intents and purposes), a pro implementation of OpenGL, and a pro app, and still get consumer performance.
This is fundamentally a support and QA issue, but it's a serious one. Nobody wants flaky results when they preview an architectural design in formZ.
I'm not sure what they way out is, but that's the problem as far as I can see. It's not a problem that a hardware configuration can solve, either. I'm not aware of anything intrinsic to the hardware that would prevent NVIDIA or ATI from flashing a Quadro or FireGL card and sticking it into a Mac and expecting it to work.
I'm not sure what they way out is, but that's the problem as far as I can see. It's not a problem that a hardware configuration can solve, either. I'm not aware of anything intrinsic to the hardware that would prevent NVIDIA or ATI from flashing a Quadro or FireGL card and sticking it into a Mac and expecting it to work.
Sounds like a perfect explanation to me. Makes perfect sense.
This is the problem in a nutshell: What you pay for in a pro card is mostly the driver, which (unlike with the consumer cards) includes a correct and complete OpenGL implementation which is tested for compatibility with major software applications.
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
I covered that in my explanation.
The pro apps look to see what they're running on. If it's not a certified platform, they will assume that they're running on a consumer platform, and switch to software rendering for a lot of their work. In this case, the actual capabilities of the driver and the hardware are irrelevant, because the app doesn't think they're there.
So, as I summed up the problem on the Mac side: You can have what amounts to a pro card, you can have a pro driver, and a pro app, and still get consumer performance. It's not a hardware problem. It's not a software problem. It's a QA problem. But it means that until someone figures out how to certify NVIDIA + Apple OpenGL and ATI + Apple OpenGL for compatibility with Maya, etc., we won't see the full performance that those apps are capable of on the Mac—no matter what hardware's in the AGP slot.
Or, to cover your question directly, the benchmarks reflect full hardware-accelerated rendering on the PC vs. a combination of hardware and software rendering on the Mac. The only reason for the software rendering is that the app doesn't know that the Apple platform is capable of supporting full hardware acceleration.
I'm not saying your wrong, but it seems pretty hard to grasp. If this is truely the case it would have been fixed a log time ago wouldn't you think? What I'm basically saying is, if that is the only reason, why has it not been addressed after all this time? I am suspicious of these reasons.
I'm not saying your wrong, but it seems pretty hard to grasp. If this is truely the case it would have been fixed a log time ago wouldn't you think? What I'm basically saying is, if that is the only reason, why has it not been addressed after all this time? I am suspicious of these reasons.
Given that Apple clearly wants in to the field, you'd think that any problem would have been solved by now.
This one is plausible, IMO, simply because it involves quality assurance and testing among multiple parties, which complicates everything.
Whereas, if it were just down to NVIDIA shipping the right card, why wouldn't they have done it shortly after A|W released Maya?
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
Personally I feel this is the hard drive manufacturer's and video card manufacturer's problem. Creating a part that puts excessive (spelling) heat in a computer isn't the builders responsibility to prevent.
There are hard drive coolers and extra VGA coolers now. You can even water cool your graphics card now. You can cool many things with water cooling. Have a huge 120mm fan in the back and an 80 in the front to get a vaccum going through the case to cool the water resevoir and have a little air flow, then water cooling for everything else.
I don't know why people saw the water cooling in the dual 2.5's as a bad thing (I was one of them). Now I see it as a very awesome idea. It can probably take out another 2 or 3 fans of that case (even though they've already cut it in half going from rev a to rev b).
I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. All in all, every case manufacturer is having to think of new ways to cool the components, doesn't this signify a failure of everyone that is doing all the extra components? Yes and no.
I guess you answered it right there, Yes and No. For the manufactures of extra components to work at the their cooling issues they will have to address a few issues, like if they put the money into making a board that is cooler running and is 10% faster than the old board will they be able to compete with the competition whose board runs 20% faster but is hotter. My guess is that their is some value of cooling capacity that the industry knows about, and the efforts of the box makers to add cooling capacity and larger power supplies to their boxes. My guess is that the GPU makers are the ones that are really pushing it. Also remember that Apple has the faster versions of Firewire lying around if they decide to use them, and PCI Express and Hypertransport. The box with the CPU and GPU and like room for two HDs would only need cooling and power enough for those components. If folks wanted more expansion they wold buy a box that had the same cooling capacity as the CPU box and the same power supply but it could be stored on the floor or on the other side of the desk, out of the way, hidden, and quiet. The box for the desk could also be smaller and quieter, and overall flexability would improve and the cost for those that only need the CPU box may go down, while for those that need the extra components the cost would go up slightly. My guess. This solution would give Ives' elves more to work with for sure
That would depend on how much those apps use the Core technologies.
I guess the real question I wanted to ask is, to what extent does it seem that Apple will build these technologies such that they are readily available to 3rd party devs in a meaningful way. If devs can tap those resources, would it then be a case where much of the consumer/pro distinction is nullified by the technologies built into the OS, so long as a hardware set meets Apple's minimum requirements, and the dev has writtent their software to take advantage, you would be assured of maximum exploitation of installed hardware? iDunno, just asking...
Comments
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
Originally posted by emig647
Didn't mean to post yet...
Though I completely agree with Onlooker about the graphics cards. I believe that is the main turn off for professional graphics workshops right now. Though I don't see a huge difference between a 6800ultra and FireGL or Quadro in maya right now. This isn't my field so I can't say any more than that. But I know what would make Onlooker happy is the newest Quadro, or maybe even any quadro, card released for the mac. Is this true with all professionals in this field?
Originally posted by __MaGnUsSoN__
You can softmod the GeForce 6800 and 6800GT/Ultra (PC) version from 12 pipelines to 16 making it a $2,000 Quadro FX 4000. I'm not aware of such a option for the mac branded products. There's also softmods for ATI x800 cards as well...
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
Softmod is close, but it's not exactly the same. There is the Quadro driver that utilizes OpenGL a bit differently I believe. Although I would be better than what we have now.
And no.. we don't have it.
Originally posted by Amorph
So, even Apple's best quarter in years didn't extend to the PowerMac.
Apple confessed that they're no longer expecting 200K units per quarter. They said further that they're not concerned with the performance of individual lines, only with aggregate sales. I'm sure that's if it's true, it's true up to the point where the line costs them money—and I'm not really convinced that it is true. I think they're putting a brave face on the wildly variable, but ultimately favorable, results of the last quarter.
This is actually something I predicted way back when I first joined the board, although I was off by a number of years: The tower is a hangover from 30 years ago. Most users simply don't need one. They bought towers because, for the performance they required, there was no other option. Now there are options, and tower sales are in the toilet. Not because pro sales are down, but because a whole lot of pros are better served by something else in Apple's product line.
But clearly, and especially in some markets that Apple is just breaking into, the need for absolute, pedal-to-the-metal power remains.
Since gross margin (and every other kind of margin) actually went up, it's clear that Apple has weaned itself of its long-standing dependence on the towers' profit margins. They saw this coming. And, contrary to the profits vs. marketshare opposition set up so commonly on these boards and elsewhere, they've managed to shift the burden of maintaining the bottom line to precisely those models that are flying out of the Apple Stores. This gives them a lot of flexibility with the high-end models that they've never had before. The pro models can become more specialized, and there's much less pressure on any of them to sell in large quantities.
So, why not break the PowerMac == tower equivalence?
Back in the halcyon days of Future Hardware when I thought we'd have FireWire 3200 by now, I postulated a modular pro line. Need a quiet workstation with a choice of monitor(s)? Get this little box here. Need absolute computational power, and nothing else? Get this bigger box (but still much smaller than a tower) here. Heck, get three of 'em. Need hard drive expansion? Add this little box here. Need more? Add another. Need PCI? This box over here... and so forth. The Mac mini points the way, design-wise, and the connective tissue my vision required is finally here in the form of PCI Express (which can run over a wire) and HyperTransport (which can also run over a wire). There is no longer any particular reason to offer a tower, although of course they could keep one around for people who actually do need everything that a tower offers, and who'd prefer it in one package.
This really could redefine the landscape, completely. Pros could build systems à la carte, swap out the parts the need or don't need without cracking a case open, add new things, etc. As with the mini, there would be fertile ground for resellers, VARs and third parties to offer accessories and solutions. And, as of right now, they could be enhanced with Xsan, racks of Xserves, etc. for file storage and extra muscle for batch work. Apple could accommodate everyone from the lone pro who wants everything crammed into one tower, to the pro in a shop who just wants a quiet little box powerful enough to preview her work before she saves it to the SAN and sends it to the render farm.
This is all, of course, 100% blue sky, and I reserve the right to be horribly off track.
I have to agree with this because of design options and because of heat and power and noise. Designing a box that can cool the CPUs dual hard drives and a hot video card and still have power and cooling capacity for other cards is really getting difficult. I don't think that Apple can power everything and cool it as well without making the box sound like a vacuum cleaner at least under heavy loads. Maybe a box that can hold two HDs, and the CPUs and a Video card. The rest could be in a seperate box connected to the main machine. Like was mentioned it would be nice to be able to connect the main box to another box for extra CPUs if needed, like in the 3D world or FCP rendering, ect. Maybe by doing this the size could be smaller saving desk space and still allowing for expansion. Maybe the cost could come down maybe a little because it would not be as difficult to design a box when the thermal load is a known as opposed to a box where Apple has to design a power supply for their stuff and for the add ons, as well as the cooling of their stuff as the add ons. To me the design and flexability just get very easy as well as cheaper.
Originally posted by __MaGnUsSoN__
You can softmod the GeForce 6800 and 6800GT/Ultra (PC) version from 12 pipelines to 16 making it a $2,000 Quadro FX 4000. I'm not aware of such a option for the mac branded products. There's also softmods for ATI x800 cards as well...
I'd love a Mac workstation if one was available.
I'd love to get my hands on that source code. Maybe someone like uhhhhhh ahem... Programmer... uhhh... could help me with something like this :P
There needs to be more ports to the mac like this.
Originally posted by Brendon
I have to agree with this because of design options and because of heat and power and noise. Designing a box that can cool the CPUs dual hard drives and a hot video card and still have power and cooling capacity for other cards is really getting difficult...
Personally I feel this is the hard drive manufacturer's and video card manufacturer's problem. Creating a part that puts excessive (spelling) heat in a computer isn't the builders responsibility to prevent.
There are hard drive coolers and extra VGA coolers now. You can even water cool your graphics card now. You can cool many things with water cooling. Have a huge 120mm fan in the back and an 80 in the front to get a vaccum going through the case to cool the water resevoir and have a little air flow, then water cooling for everything else.
I don't know why people saw the water cooling in the dual 2.5's as a bad thing (I was one of them). Now I see it as a very awesome idea. It can probably take out another 2 or 3 fans of that case (even though they've already cut it in half going from rev a to rev b).
I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. All in all, every case manufacturer is having to think of new ways to cool the components, doesn't this signify a failure of everyone that is doing all the extra components? Yes and no.
Originally posted by emig647
I'd love to get my hands on that source code. Maybe someone like uhhhhhh ahem... Programmer... uhhh... could help me with something like this :P
There needs to be more ports to the mac like this.
I'm pretty sure the Mac versions are shipping with 16 pixel pipelines enabled. And according to a guy I know in the driver group of a GPU company, the Mac version of the driver is usually more like a PC "pro" driver than a PC "gaming" driver. Macs aren't game machines.
Originally posted by onlooker
Softmod is close, but it's not exactly the same. There is the Quadro driver that utilizes OpenGL a bit differently I believe. Although I would be better than what we have now.
And no.. we don't have it.
This is the problem in a nutshell: What you pay for in a pro card is mostly the driver, which (unlike with the consumer cards) includes a correct and complete OpenGL implementation which is tested for compatibility with major software applications. The pro card also has a firmware ID that identifies it as a pro card. The added cost of a pro card covers the considerable additional expense involved in maintaining and testing this driver. The apps that are tested for compatibility also test for the pro card. If they know it's there, they know they're interfacing with a driver that supports their full capabilities, and so they unlock their full capabilities. Even if you flash a consumer card so that the full hardware capabilities are there, an app like Maya won't assume that it's talking to a driver that can effectively use those capabilities, so it'll still protect itself against the much spottier, less accurate OpenGL support in consumer drivers.
The problem on the Mac side is that Apple breaks this entire arrangement. Apple ships something very close to a correct and complete implementation of OpenGL with their OS, and they only want GPU drivers to function as interfaces between the hardware and this library. This has several consequences: First, NVIDIA and ATI can't just port their drivers over; second, they can't certify their pro cards for compatibility with various pro apps when an entire, crucial layer is out of their control; and as a result, the pro apps can't assume that they aren't running on a consumer platform of dubious quality. But Apple can't certify anything either, because they don't control the GPU. The rather absurd result is that you can have a pro card (for all intents and purposes), a pro implementation of OpenGL, and a pro app, and still get consumer performance.
This is fundamentally a support and QA issue, but it's a serious one. Nobody wants flaky results when they preview an architectural design in formZ.
I'm not sure what they way out is, but that's the problem as far as I can see. It's not a problem that a hardware configuration can solve, either. I'm not aware of anything intrinsic to the hardware that would prevent NVIDIA or ATI from flashing a Quadro or FireGL card and sticking it into a Mac and expecting it to work.
Originally posted by Amorph
I'm not sure what they way out is, but that's the problem as far as I can see. It's not a problem that a hardware configuration can solve, either. I'm not aware of anything intrinsic to the hardware that would prevent NVIDIA or ATI from flashing a Quadro or FireGL card and sticking it into a Mac and expecting it to work.
Sounds like a perfect explanation to me. Makes perfect sense.
Originally posted by Amorph
This is the problem in a nutshell: What you pay for in a pro card is mostly the driver, which (unlike with the consumer cards) includes a correct and complete OpenGL implementation which is tested for compatibility with major software applications.
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
Originally posted by onlooker
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
I covered that in my explanation.
The pro apps look to see what they're running on. If it's not a certified platform, they will assume that they're running on a consumer platform, and switch to software rendering for a lot of their work. In this case, the actual capabilities of the driver and the hardware are irrelevant, because the app doesn't think they're there.
So, as I summed up the problem on the Mac side: You can have what amounts to a pro card, you can have a pro driver, and a pro app, and still get consumer performance. It's not a hardware problem. It's not a software problem. It's a QA problem. But it means that until someone figures out how to certify NVIDIA + Apple OpenGL and ATI + Apple OpenGL for compatibility with Maya, etc., we won't see the full performance that those apps are capable of on the Mac—no matter what hardware's in the AGP slot.
Or, to cover your question directly, the benchmarks reflect full hardware-accelerated rendering on the PC vs. a combination of hardware and software rendering on the Mac. The only reason for the software rendering is that the app doesn't know that the Apple platform is capable of supporting full hardware acceleration.
Originally posted by onlooker
I'm not saying your wrong, but it seems pretty hard to grasp. If this is truely the case it would have been fixed a log time ago wouldn't you think? What I'm basically saying is, if that is the only reason, why has it not been addressed after all this time? I am suspicious of these reasons.
Given that Apple clearly wants in to the field, you'd think that any problem would have been solved by now.
This one is plausible, IMO, simply because it involves quality assurance and testing among multiple parties, which complicates everything.
Whereas, if it were just down to NVIDIA shipping the right card, why wouldn't they have done it shortly after A|W released Maya?
Originally posted by onlooker
But if Apple OpenGL is a pro driver why are the tests that are done on the Mac no where near what a Quadro FX 4000 does on PC. The Mac doesn't even match PC using the exact same standard GFX card in performance tests most of the time.
Can you give me a link to these tests?
Apple's use of inferior graphics cards, I can't help but wonder if this has more to do with licensee preference going to those who sell the most???
Otherwise, we must assume that Apple is either blind or so greedy that they don't give a rats a$$ about their users needs.
Its seems obvious that they deliberately cripple perfectly good configurations right from the starting gate
with the cheapest P.O.S. GPU cards they can get in bulk.
The iMac G5 is wonderful, but they lost my sale with a 64MB
permanent GPU card.
The Mac mini is wonderful, but they lost my sale with a 32MB GPU
They could have sold many more systems to many more users if
they had simply made better cards available in BTO systems.
How much longer will they continue to insult our intelligence?
Someone needs to kick some serious butt in Apple's hardware configuration department
and put an end to this ridiculous lack of quality.
The best sales force Apple Computer has is their loyal user base,
yet they continue to ignore our feedback.
WTF!
Originally posted by Matsu
Amorph, to what extent will 'core' technologies effect the performance of pro apps?
That would depend on how much those apps use the Core technologies.
Originally posted by Programmer
Can you give me a link to these tests?
This had been discussed in this loooong thread some time ago. Look also for links in there as well as for onlooker's resume on page 6 (near the end).
So are we to assume that Apple has a solution in the works with Tiger
or will they continue to ignore the issue?
They just released another product last week with the same old problem.
When we see a great new product like the Mac mini crippled by
a 32 MB GPU, how are we to have any confidence that Apple is
giving the GPU problem the priority is deserves?
The fact that they don't even offer an upgrade shows me that
someone needs to be fired!
Originally posted by emig647
Personally I feel this is the hard drive manufacturer's and video card manufacturer's problem. Creating a part that puts excessive (spelling) heat in a computer isn't the builders responsibility to prevent.
There are hard drive coolers and extra VGA coolers now. You can even water cool your graphics card now. You can cool many things with water cooling. Have a huge 120mm fan in the back and an 80 in the front to get a vaccum going through the case to cool the water resevoir and have a little air flow, then water cooling for everything else.
I don't know why people saw the water cooling in the dual 2.5's as a bad thing (I was one of them). Now I see it as a very awesome idea. It can probably take out another 2 or 3 fans of that case (even though they've already cut it in half going from rev a to rev b).
I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. All in all, every case manufacturer is having to think of new ways to cool the components, doesn't this signify a failure of everyone that is doing all the extra components? Yes and no.
I guess you answered it right there, Yes and No. For the manufactures of extra components to work at the their cooling issues they will have to address a few issues, like if they put the money into making a board that is cooler running and is 10% faster than the old board will they be able to compete with the competition whose board runs 20% faster but is hotter. My guess is that their is some value of cooling capacity that the industry knows about, and the efforts of the box makers to add cooling capacity and larger power supplies to their boxes. My guess is that the GPU makers are the ones that are really pushing it. Also remember that Apple has the faster versions of Firewire lying around if they decide to use them, and PCI Express and Hypertransport. The box with the CPU and GPU and like room for two HDs would only need cooling and power enough for those components. If folks wanted more expansion they wold buy a box that had the same cooling capacity as the CPU box and the same power supply but it could be stored on the floor or on the other side of the desk, out of the way, hidden, and quiet. The box for the desk could also be smaller and quieter, and overall flexability would improve and the cost for those that only need the CPU box may go down, while for those that need the extra components the cost would go up slightly. My guess. This solution would give Ives' elves more to work with for sure
Originally posted by Programmer
That would depend on how much those apps use the Core technologies.
I guess the real question I wanted to ask is, to what extent does it seem that Apple will build these technologies such that they are readily available to 3rd party devs in a meaningful way. If devs can tap those resources, would it then be a case where much of the consumer/pro distinction is nullified by the technologies built into the OS, so long as a hardware set meets Apple's minimum requirements, and the dev has writtent their software to take advantage, you would be assured of maximum exploitation of installed hardware? iDunno, just asking...