Question about graphics requirements with Snow Leopard

brclark82

So as I was reading through the new features of Snow Leopard and Quicktime I noticed that Quicktime supported H.264 hardware acceleration but required an NVIDIA 9400 M graphics processor. I have an 8600M GT w/ 256MB VRAM, is this considered a better processor and therefore meets the requirement or not? (I have the last MB Pro made before the unibody design with the 2.4GHz)



Thanks

Marvin

The 8600M GT is round about the same performance as the 9400M and it supports hardware H264:



http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...GT.3986.0.html



It may be that Apple have just chosen not to support it or they may just have missed it out of the spec list.

s.metcalf

The 8600M GT is about the same performance as the 9600M GT, not the 9400M. It's listed as one of the cards that's compatible with OpenCL, so you should see a benefit there when apps are written for it. Not sure why they state the 9400M is required for hardware H264.



Does anyone know what sort of performance gains you're likely to see with hardware encoding?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marvin


The 8600M GT is round about the same performance as the 9400M and it supports hardware H264:



http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...GT.3986.0.html



It may be that Apple have just chosen not to support it or they may just have missed it out of the spec list.

Marvin

Quote:

Originally Posted by s.metcalf


The 8600M GT is about the same performance as the 9600M GT, not the 9400M.

The 8600M GT is faster in some areas than the 9400M but much lower than the 9600M GT - the 9400M has a higher shader clock than the 8600M GT even though it has half the number of them:



(Order is 9400M then 8600M GT then 9600M GT)



3DMark 06:

min: 2000, avg: 2070, max: 2148 Points

min: 2671, avg: 3347, max: 4434 Points

min: 3930, avg: 5136, max: 6296 Points



CineBench 10:

min: 3022, avg: 3712, max: 4402 Points

min: 2100, avg: 3207, max: 5230 Points

min: 3000, avg: 3702, max: 5177 Points



Doom 3 High:

min: 84.1, avg: 84, max: 84.1 fps

min: 84.8, avg: 113, max: 145.4 fps

min: 146.8, avg: 173, max: 205.7 fps

Quote:

Originally Posted by s.metcalf


Not sure why they state the 9400M is required for hardware H264.

I thought they may have only updated the 9 series driver but the 9 series chips use the 8xxx series .kext. This could change with Snow Leopard though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by s.metcalf


Does anyone know what sort of performance gains you're likely to see with hardware encoding?

It depends on the GPU and the quality of encoding but I think the speed up for decent quality on the Badaboom encoder on a GTX 285 was about 3x faster than a high end quad Core i7. Scaling it down, I'd expect the 9400M, 8600M GT and 9600M GT to match the encoding time for the CPU they are paired with.



However, the smart way to do it wouldn't be to rely on one or the other, which the tests seem to measure but to have the GPU do the parts it does best and the CPU likewise. The encoding could go up much more in this case. I would realistically expect 2-3x faster though, which is great because that's equivalent to 3 generations of CPU upgrades at once and it just needs a $29 software upgrade. SL will probably offer users the best value out of any system upgrade and yet they price it the lowest because consumers must only value features I guess.

mdriftmeyer

Quote:

Originally Posted by brclark82


So as I was reading through the new features of Snow Leopard and Quicktime I noticed that Quicktime supported H.264 hardware acceleration but required an NVIDIA 9400 M graphics processor. I have an 8600M GT w/ 256MB VRAM, is this considered a better processor and therefore meets the requirement or not? (I have the last MB Pro made before the unibody design with the 2.4GHz)



Thanks

Nvidia includes it for CUDA and VPAU on Linux so you can bet Apple should have no problem with OpenCL and h.264 for OS X on it.

s.metcalf

rewrite soon.