MacBooks have been enormously popular since their introduction, but
their reliance on Intel-integrated graphics has made them almost wholly
unsuitable for most of the graphically-intensive games on the market.
They’ll do just fine with “casual” games and with older games, but
newer games either don’t work at all or run so poorly that it’s hardly
worthwhile to even try them.
Game publishers have responded by
noting that “Intel GMA graphics are not supported” in many newer games;
in some cases, they’re able to eke out enough frames per second on
newer MacBooks equipped with the GMA X3100 chipset to make it
worthwhile, but that creates a fair degree of confusion for
non-technical MacBook users—do I have a supported machine or not?
This
is particularly critical because the MacBook has been hugely popular
with college students and other young adults, and it only makes sense
that they’ll want to play a few games in their leisure time.
There
has been some suggestion in technical circles that Apple is going to
make the move to a different motherboard design with its next
generation of MacBooks, to a system that uses more sophisticated
graphics hardware from Nvidia or AMD (owner of ATI). If that comes to
pass, and I hope we’ll find out next week, then that’s an excellent
thing—the more powerful graphics in MacBooks, the better.
Any
new, top-tier games that come out from companies such as Blizzard,
Electronic Arts, Aspyr Media, and MacSoft will demand incredibly
sophisticated lighting and shading effects—effects that are well beyond
the capabilities of the MacBook now. Without a dramatic overhaul to the
graphics architecture of the low-end Mac laptop, these systems are
going to be obsolete for anything but the most casual entertainment
game titles.
Think this problem is specific to games? Think again. Maybe you’ll remember last summer, when Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” Snow
Leopard is going to bolster Mac OS X to get the most out of Intel-based
hardware. One of the technologies Apple will introduce is called Open Computing Language (OpenCL). And it will leverage discrete graphics hardware unlike anything we’ve seen before on the Mac.
OpenCL
is the first broad attempt at an industry standard for what’s known in
industry parlance as “General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing
Units” (or GPGPU). It will enable the operating system to redirect some
computationally-intensive processes to the graphics hardware.
Graphics
chips found in today’s computers are capable of very advanced
parallel-processing tasks, such as physics modeling, image processing,
and much more—activities that can be complementary to the dual-chip and
multiprocessor design increasingly found in the average computer. ATI
and Nvidia have competing GPGPU technologies: ATI calls its version
“Close To Metal” while Nvidia calls its “Compute Unified Device
Architecture” (CUDA). OpenCL is an attempt to create a single standard
that programmers can use to access graphics hardware for general
computing tasks, regardless of who makes that hardware.
Unfortunately,
for all of this, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of MacBooks
Apple currently has out in the world are a lost cause. Those laptops,
while perfectly suitable for a wide variety of tasks in their own
right, come up pathetically short in gaming and other tasks where a
speedy graphics processor is a requirement.
The first step
that needs to be taken is to introduce a MacBook that actually has
sophisticated-enough graphics hardware to accomplish these and other
tasks. Hopefully Apple is on the ball here and we’ll get our first
glimpse of that product next Tuesday.
From : http://www.macworld.com/
