Im about to purchase a last generation MBP, and I was just wondering if the 512mb videocard is worth the extra 200$ over the 256mb of Nvidia 8600 GT.

So, the new unibody Al Macbook has a 2.4ghz processor, two gigs of ram and a better video card. I mean new. As in, purchased TODAY.

How come my 2.0 dual G5 with 3 gigs of ram plays the new South Park episode just as fast?

And how come it glitches?

I just don't get it. I sold my beloved PB 12" that was about the same?

via MacNN:

Apple has filed for a trademark on OpenCL technology, documents from the US Patent and Trademark Office show. The standard is intended to better distribute processing power on a computer, by using the normally segregated processing on a video card to help with tasks unrelated to graphics. Video cards can be extremely powerful, Apple notes, but only tend to maximize their use in certain applicati...


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Apple has filed for a trademark on OpenCL technology, documents from the US Patent and Trademark Office show. The standard is intended to better distribute processing power on a computer, by using the normally segregated processing on a video card to help with tasks unrelated to graphics. Video cards can be extremely powerful, Apple notes, but only tend to maximize their use in certain applicati...

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/beta-liberty.jpg" width="525" height="412" style="display:block;" //p div style='float:right; margin-left:-9px;'script type="text/javascript" digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/A_Call_for_Revolution_Against_Beta_Culture'; /scriptscript src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript" /script/div pI'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change./p pTake the iPhone, for example, one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. We like it, I love mine, but the fact is that the first generation was rushed out, a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/no-bs-iphone-review-276116.php"lacking basic features/a that were added in later releases or a href="http://gizmodo.com/5083116/iphone-22-release-just-10-days-away"are not here yet/a. Worse: The a href="http://gizmodo.com/5047372/iphone-21-update-coming-friday-less-call-drops-crashes-faster-sync-better-battery-life"iPhone 3G was really broken/a. For real. Bad signal, dropped calls, frozen apps. This would have been unthinkable in cellphones just five years ago. They were simpler, for sure, but they were failure proof. Today's engineering and testing is a lot more sophisticated. In theory, products can't go out into distribution with such glaring problems undetected./p pAnother recent example is my iMac 24, which had the infamous a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/imac/ati-graphics-may-be-at-the-root-of-imac-freezing-issues-307409.php"video card problem/a out of the box. How can a machine with such an obvious problem—instantly detected by the user base—be sold like that? The same happened recently with a href="http://gizmodo.com/5061605/apple-confirms-failing-nvidia-graphics-cards-in-macbook-pros-offers-free-repairs-and-refunds"Nvidia video boards/a. In fact, graphic cards—being always in the cutting edge of technology—are perfect examples of beta hardware being sold as final hardware, with many released with beta-quality drivers and requiring firmware patches./p pFrom that to the now-universally-accepted Blue Screen of Death, from a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/movies/problems-with-blu+rays-bd+j-spec-causes-headaches-for-early-adopters-266923.php"buggy Blu-ray players/a to a href="http://gizmodo.com/5064742/microsoft-sued-over-xbox-360-rrod-issues"the Xbox 360's red ring of death/a and a href="http://gizmodo.com/367611/playstation-3-217-update-brings-bug-fixes-hard-drive-installation"PS3's bugs/a, even from a href="http://www.turbochef.com/residential/service/oven-firmware-updates.aspx"kitchen ovens/a to a href="http://gizmodo.com/356092/nikon-d300-firmware-update"faulty DSLR cameras/a, the list of troubled products is endless. Just this week, the eagerly anticipated BlackBerry Storm launched to a href="http://gizmodo.com/5094371/10-takes-on-the-blackberry-storm"mixed reviews/a, in part because of its crashy, apparently unfinished software./p pOn the other side, my parents have a Telefunken CRT TV and a Braun radio from the '70s which are still in working condition. They were first generation. They never failed. Compare that to my first plasma TV from Philips, which broke after less than a year of use. Mine wasn't the only one. The technology was too young to be released; it was still in beta state. Philips wanted to be the first in the world with a flat TV and beat the competition, so they released it. This probably wasn't a good move: Today, Philips' TV business is struggling, and is a href="http://gizmodo.com/377355/philips-wont-sell-tvs-in-north-america-anymore"nonexistent in the US/a. Meanwhile, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple IIe from the 1980s still work like they did from day one, perfectly./p pFor sure, today's products are far more complex than those of 20 or 30 years ago. But back then, the manufacturing was also a lot worse. It was less automated, often purely manual, and imperfect. Today, in a world where automated factories run 24/7, there's less chance of error. Yet still, there are countless problems in the final products, and those problems affect every unit in an entire model line. In the age of manufacturing perfection, there are still major recalls concerning products that a href="http://gizmodo.com/5067386/rage-wireless-guitar-leaks-acid-can-burn-your-rock-jewels"burn/a or a href="http://gizmodo.com/5052568/apple-recalls-ultracompact-usb-power-adapter-for-the-iphone-3g"break/a./p pClearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear./p pWho's to blame? Google and their web apps? Apple and their iPhone 3G problems? Microsoft and their countless buggy versions of operating systems and the Xbox 360's RROD? Philips? Sony? Samsung? LG? We all are. The manufacturers, who are driven by a thirst to expand and satisfy their shareholders at all costs. The consumers, who are so thirsty to drink in the shiniest, newest technology that they are willing to sacrifice stability. And the press too, who pours more gasoline onto the consumerism bonfire by writing glowing reviews and often minimizing things that are simply not acceptable./p pPersonally, I'm tired of all this. But I'm mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because a href="http://gizmodo.com/5070154/why-its-safer-than-ever-to-buy-first+generation-hardware"now we see "upgrades" as an opportunity to protect our investment/a, but in reality, it's laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying./p pThat's the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades./p pMaybe the recession will put some order in this thirst of new stuff and change the product cycles. As the economy slows down, people will think twice before buying the latest and greatest; they'll keep older hardware for longer. Then, manufacturers will have to rethink their product lines, and lift their feet from the accelerator, which will result on slower cycles and better products. Maybe that's our ticket for better electronics that actually make sense./p pOr maybe... maybe that will be another excuse for the manufacturer to cut even more corners and keep lowering prices so that consumers keep spending and ending up with worse products than we have now./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c3e455c3677a43b80709099d95624e7cp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c3e455c3677a43b80709099d95624e7cp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c3e455c3677a43b80709099d95624e7c" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=RvVWNmt4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=3tnPs2JD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=8syG9UpF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=8syG9UpF" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=NKPoFVUd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=NKPoFVUd" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/fCpCo4ktygQ" height="1" width="1"/

Hello,

Can someone here, possibly a beta tester tell me when the official cat's are going to support the 4830 series? I have to install them manually with anything other than what came on the cd otherwise the newest cat's 8.11 don't recognize the card. I have to pick the 4000 series in the inf. Not a big deal IF you know how to do it but it is still a little extra pain to go through. :D

I have a Powercolor video card but I assume that shouldn't matter as it uses the standard ati cat's.

Thanks...

centerimg title="Okoro OMS-LX100 Digital Entertainment System" style="MARGIN: 0px" alt="Okoro OMS-LX100 Digital Entertainment System" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/11/okoro-htpc.jpg" border="0" //centerbr / pOkoro has a new HTPC for the masses with the OMS-LX100 Digital Entertainment System. Inside the rather slim exterior, you will find the following specifications :- /p p ul liSingle CableCARD tuner /li liIntel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz processor /li liNVIDIA GeForce 9300 video card/li li4GB RAM /li li7,200RPM SATA hard drive (500GB)/li li7.1-channel high-definition audio support/li liHDMI port/li liDual-layer DVD burner/li/ul p/pEach $1,725 purchase comes with a wireless keyboard that works perfectly fine within a 20-foot radius, and the whole PC is powered by Windows Vista Premium. If you have a little extra bit of dough to spare, you can always replace the front-panel display with a 7" touchscreen display for easier navigation. pa href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/okoro_omslx100_digital_entertainment_system.html#comments"Add a comment/a | From: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/okoro_omslx100_digital_entertainment_system.html"Okoro OMS-LX100 Digital Entertainment System/a | Visit a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"Ubergizmo/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081120195700" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081120195700?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081120195700" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081120195700amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F11%2Fokoro_omslx100_digital_entertainment_system.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/cpXzuhgOkQVOl4byJw-fYFdl8ig/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/cpXzuhgOkQVOl4byJw-fYFdl8ig/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=sSGOIWau"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ZNk6qTWt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ZNk6qTWt" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=Pm4QYY4T"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=pqeVgBUC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=pqeVgBUC" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=KFh7QSsO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=KFh7QSsO" border="0"/img/a /div

I have a driver installed for Ubuntu 8.10 for dual monitors, and I dont like it, I want to do what they say in this video but I'm afraid if I configure the video card, It will screw up my Windows XP drivers. please help!