Archive for: grand central

Craving a little Snow Leopard early review?

  • August 27, 2009 5:28 am

yawning-leopard

Apple’s Snow Leopard OS launches tomorrow and comes into the world as one of their cheapest upgrades in a long time — 8 years in fact. If you are contemplating upgrading for monetary reasons, current Leopard users can take advantage of the super attractive $30 price, while Tiger users will have to pony up an extra $130. (Though Walt Mossberg is claiming you can go from Tiger -> Snow Leopard w/o doing a splash and go with Leopard). Whether or not Mr. Mossberg is correct, one thing is for certain, while it isn’t a major upgrade, it will solidify Mac OS X into even more consumers’ computers and minds. In case you were still on the fence about upgrading or simply love knowing everything about everything before it’s technically available, stop on by BBG and take a gander through their Snow Leopard review round up including many popular players such as Engadget, Cnet, Gizmodo, Walt himself, and several more. Is it worth the extra dough? Guess you’ll have to go check it out.]

Source: BBG, 9 to 5 Mac

Want h.264 GPU assisted processing in Snow Leopard? Better have an Nvidia 9400M or better.

  • June 10, 2009 11:37 am

snow-leopard

Snow Leopard is bringing with it many notable speed improvements, memory management techniques, and space saving features that are worth more than the surprising though greatly welcomed $29 price tag. Perhaps one of the greatest features that Snow Leopard will bring is that of the CPU offloading cycles to the GPU to speed up tasks when things get hot and heavy. As long as you have an Intel equipped Mac and a graphics card from the following:

  • NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130
  • ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

most of the benefits of Snow Leopard and GPU processing will be yours to have. However, if you’re a big h.264 supporter and were looking forward to enjoying h.264 GPU accelerated fun, I’m sorry to say that you’re going to be waiting for quite a long time. It seems that only Nvidia 9400M cards and greater will support h.264 acceleration. While this may be the end of the world to some, for others it will merely be a reason to upgrade. What’s your take?

Source: Crunch Gear