On Monday, January 24, 2005, at 05:13 PM, Joshua Coombs wrote:
Core in Tiger moves all the work to the GPU. This will result in the bus seeing lower utilization, (meaning PCI cards should be enabled if they have enough ram) but more ram use by the GUI.
Read the info:<http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coreimage.html>
Tiger isn't moving 'all the work' to the GPU, more like they're using the GPU as a graphics co-processor, like a math co-processor for FP operations would be used. (or Velocity engine for vector operations).
One thing you're missing here is that for screen purposes (and the things that CORE is set to do) 32 MB is quite a bit of ram.
The reason that games require such massive amounts of Video ram is for storing texture and shape databases, plus do rendering of normals for bump maps, Z-fields for things like haze and mist effects.
Look at the list of effects (they call them 'Image Units'). They look like the Photoshop 'Filters' menu.
They're all straight, single transforms on pixel arrays, all 2-D, not 3-d stuff like higher end games stuff is doing.
These are processor, not memory intensive.
Big difference; you don't need huge RAM buffers for that work.
Also, the mini does have 4X AGP. While this isn't top end by any means, come on, it's not like it's nothing!
The Mini may have enough raw GPU horsepower to tackle Core, but die because it's light on ram, and then be doubly hit by not allowing DIME mode which would have allowed it to attempt it rather than having to fall back hard on the CPU when it runs out of ram.
You gotta love it...the 9200 in the mini, so wretchedly 'low-end' you're already disimissing it as a failure, is about what a year or two out of being the TOP end of graphics?
As for how Apple's going to handle it? They say on the Core web page:
"For computers without a programmable GPU, Core Image dynamically optimizes for the CPU, automatically tuning for Velocity Engine and multiple processors as appropriate."
Simple, anything it can offload to the GPU it does, what it can't it sends to the vector co-processor in the G4, using multiple processors as needed.
So in short, your answer is: The Mini will do Core stuff just fine. As well it should...I suspect the design engineers would be hanging from the yardarms in Cupertino if it doesn't run Tiger well.
This should make stuff like iMovie kick a**...real-time transitions anyone?
(a DV frame is tiny in comparison to the screen...32 MB is more than enough to hold a bunch of frames.)
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