The Modern Mac Pro sport a possible breakthrough in Mac OS X OpenGL operation that could dramatically heighten the pep pill of 3 - 500 graphics — provided developer solicit into it .

Now the questions are : will developer use this applied science ? And when will it be useable to the repose of the platform ?

OpenGL is the 3 - D app program programming user interface ( API ) long favored by Apple . A foundation technology for Mac OS X , it ’s leveraged in everything from picture games to 3 - five hundred modeling applications like Maya . It ’s also used extensively in Mac OS go v10.4 “ Tiger ” as part of the operating system ’s Core Image technology , which has been used to build a variety of third - party applications . Even Motion , Apple ’s pro motion artwork program , leverages it .

Mac OS X has long been acknowledge as a chronic underperformer in 3 - 500 graphics speed compared to Windows . This difference became acutely obvious when Macs course Boot Camp usher blunt differences in frame charge per unit benchmarks running the same games in Mac OS X and Windows XP .

All new Macs except for the low-spirited - end Mac mini ship with dual - core chipping — central processor that fundamentally aggregate the performance of two microprocessors in one . And beginning with the Mac Pro , OpenGL endorse multithreading , which enable those multiple processing cores to part up the work of processing graphic .

How can that be , since , multicore processors and multiple central processor aside , there ’s still just a single graphics mainframe on a Mac Pro ? Because Mac CPUs still spend quite a minute of clock time helping OpenGL physical process entropy . So by offloading OpenGL to multiple screw thread , the Mac ’s CPU — orCPUs , it the case of the two - chip Mac Pro — can process OpenGL that much quicker . In other words , multithreading reduces the CPU ’s “ bottleneck ” of OpenGL performance .

The deviation in performance for applications that fend for multithreading in OpenGL can be striking , accord to early reports . There are two significant caveats , however . First , Apple is offering this as an “ opt - in ” engineering for developer . And second , multithreaded OpenGL is limited specifically to the Mac Pro .

It ’s up to secret plan and 3 - five hundred software developers to specifically support this feature . Why ? Sources tellMacworldthat depending on how the program works , it may have to be tweaked or massaged in edict to ferment right with a multithreaded OpenGL effectuation . And Apple would rather not go against a core operating system technology , for obvious reasons . So the party is giving developer the choice of do work with multithreaded OpenGL .

Glenda Adams , director of ontogeny for Aspyr , said , “ We are very interested in try out with it and see which secret plan make sense to enable backing for it . For the games that are very graphic bound it could give us some very nice frame charge per unit boosts . ”

That also probably explain why our initial tests of a standard - configuration Mac Pro have yielded significant but not earth - shattering 3 - five hundred software and plot public presentation improvement . The applications we ’ve tested have n’t activated OpenGL multithreading . At least not yet .

Apple support that the Mac Pro put up this lineament . “ With the debut of the new Mac Pro , the firm Mac ever , Apple has deliver a multi - threaded update to OpenGL , the diligence standard graphics computer architecture at the centre of Mac OS X , ” an Apple representative said . Alas , Apple would n’t confirm when the general operating system will gain this sweetening .

The Mac Pro itself ship with Mac OS X 10.4.7 , so multithreaded OpenGL appear to be something singular to the version of Tiger build to work on the Mac Pro . Could multithreaded OpenGL descend to a future Tiger loss ? It ’s entirely potential , though it ’s equally possible that Apple may withhold this for Leopard instead .

But at this gunpoint , that ’s just surmise . Apple , for its part , is mum on the subject . As you probably get laid , the company does n’t talk about next product plans , and despite multithreaded OpenGL ’s initial handout on the Mac Pro , this is no exclusion .