Own a MacBook or MacBook Pro that doesn’t have an Nvidia 9400M? Don’t expect to use hardware acceleration for h.264 video decoding in Snow Leopard. Yup, a quick check of Apple’s Web site shows that only the 9400M will be compatible with Snow Leopard’s ability to hand off h.264 video decoding to the GPU. Tough break, kids. (Or you can get a Windows PC, which has had hardware-assisted h.264 decoding for some time now.)
In other news, OpenCL, the feature that offloads CPU cycles to the GPU, will work with a number of GPUs. And they are:
• 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
I must say, the last time I was truly impressed with a new version of Mac OS X was Tiger, and that was seven years ago. Perhaps that’s why Snow Leopard is only $30?