H.264 hardware acceleration requires 9400M graphics
The system requirements are fairly steep to support H.264 hardware acceleration or play in Apple’s OpenCL sandbox. As you might expect, the great majority of Mac users won’t be able to take advantage of either of these breakthrough technologies.
Apple has published specifications and requirements for Snow Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.6). Here are Apple’s lists of compatible graphics cards for each technology:
H.264 hardware acceleration — nVidia 9400M
OpenCL
— nVidia Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.
— AMD/ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870See also:
— OpenCL: What’s it all about
— Snow Leopard nears completion
For the uninitiated, H.264 hardware acceleration improves the performance of video playback, leaving your computer’s CPU free for other tasks. Although all currently shipping Mac have the required 9400M graphic chip, Apple hasn’t moved to loose hardware acceleration on users, which could be used to greatly speed DVD to iPhone/iPod video conversion and playback high-definition video content from the iTunes Store.
For its part, OpenCL is a specification which details how developers can offload processing tasks from a Mac’s CPU to its graphical processing unit (GPU). This technology is similar to nVidia’s CUDA, but is open to and has been adopted by dozens of companies, which which lets any application tap into gigaflops of available GPU computing power and is based on the C programming language.
Are you looking forward to these technologies or should we wake you when it’s time to eat?
Related Posts:
