After having about 24 hours to play with the newfangled Intel - based Mac miniskirt , I pay back the chance to plunk the psyche of Apple ’s aged director of desktops , Tom Boger . With senior editor ( and game expert ) Peter Cohen also on the line , I asked Boger about a theme on many masses ’s minds — the new Mac mini ’s desegregate graphics poker chip .
Unlike the previous model , which included ATI Radeon 9200 nontextual matter with 32 MB of dedicated DDR RAM , the raw mini uses Intel ’s GMA950 graphics heart and soul , which does n’t let in its own graphics store — or else , it share its RAM with the Mac miniskirt ’s main memory . Because of this , many citizenry have been calling the new miniskirt ’s graphics a ‘ downgrade ’ from the last example .
Boger said the newfangled computer graphic are actually a significant upgrade from the Mac miniskirt , and pointed out that the GMA950 is programmable , allowing the Mac mini to support Tiger ’s Core Image features for the first meter . For example , when you add a thingmabob in Dashboard , you ’ll see the ripple issue on these new systems , and it simply was n’t there on the previous Mac mini models .
Although on PCs the GMA950 can potentially eat up up as much as 224 MB of master retentivity for utilisation in frame buffering , Boger told us that Apple ’s implementation does n’t play that way : on the Modern Mac minis , the GMA950 ’s memory board habit is locked at 64 mebibyte . In other words , graphics wo n’t wipe out up more than its allotted contribution of your RAM ( which is in reality 80 MB , since in gain to the 64 MB for graphics , 16 MB is set apart for what Boger called “ general apparatus of the organisation ” ) .
Peter and I also need Boger about how well the new Mac miniskirt would handle 3 - D game . He replied that Apple has n’t published any play run on the miniskirt , but colloquially , the company was seeing gain of between 10 per centum and 40 percentage for skeletal frame rates on games they try ( although he did n’t bring up which ones ) .
That statement conflicts with our initial examination of the Core Solo version of the Mac mini . In our Unreal Tournament 2004 test , the Mac mini Core Solo actually had a dispirited frame rate than the former - genesis Mac mini . However , there ’s still more testing to be done .
What Icansay that the Mac mini Core Duo I ’ve been using for the past day worked swimmingly when it came to playing videodisc , QuickTime motion picture , and 1080i HD movie house trailer .
