Intel Gma 950 Yosemite Mac OS X Uses A

As an owner of an older model, I am wondering if the new onboard GPU Intel GMA950 is actually better than the previous one, a Radeon 9200 It even uses shared memory, which always seemed like a big no-no to me for any kind of halfway-decent performace.

Specs of the new version: Does it perhaps support some vital features needed to run Quartz Extreme or whatever GPU compositor Apple will use in Mac OS 10.5.

While power gamers are probably not the target market for any mini device let alone a Mac, I do think its rather disappointing that this one isnt even likely to be able to play World of Warcraft very well.

Logically, the 9200 should be choking on its 32MB and the 950 should be cruising, but I think Rosetta explains the performance parity.

I tried the Halo demo on a new iMac 20, and it was Chop City.

Intel Gma 950 Yosemite Mac OS X Uses A

Since Mac OS X uses a lot of video acceleration for UI rendering, 32MB video memory is sometimes not enough.

Furthermore, the lack of pixel shader 2.0 means no Core Image functions and no ripple effects.

Since Mac mini is not designed for playing games, I can understand why they choose GMA950.

However, I still think itll be much more attractive if it has Radeon X1600 like iMac.

Personally Im looking forward to next generation Intel Mac mini, ConroeMeron based ones.

ATItextfragmentshader, doh, cant memorize that ext for the life of me.

But it comes to show how much attention is paid to GMA from developers.

There are many scenarios where dedicated video memory (even as less as 3264MB) gives big advantage.

These are hardly small omissions - check to see how HL2 runs on a GMA950.

Four ALU blocks, each of which can co-issue a vec3 and a scalar instruction per cycle, and that includes MAD or DOT3 (DOT4 at the loss of co-issue) with all sorts of complex modifiers.

AFAIK the GMA has half of the processing capabilities per clock at best.

If you love pixels and transistors, youve come to the right place.

Intel Gma 950 Driver For Mac Yosemite