On 19 Dec 2010, at 22:36 , John Francis wrote:
It's handy if you can render all application windows into VRAM, and let the window manager decide how to construct the desktop display from all the separate parts.
which is what Mac OS X does since it uses the alpha channel and OpenGL to render many of the basic desktop effects
But it isn't necessary to do so; most applications are capable of redrawing their windows if asked.
that works, but can be much slower; Mac OS X virtualizes texture memory, meaning that what doesn't fit in VRAM is "swapped" to regular RAM; this is faster than re-rendering, but slower than keeping everything in VRAM
In any case, the original question was about 256MB, which is going to be more than enough for just about any scenario
indeed, my original response (stuffed into a black hole) was "adequate for what?" and i pointed out that the particular GPU can also make a big difference; but if you plan to keep your computer for a couple of years, higher VRAM might be desirable, which is why 256MB is the low end of what the iMacs offer -- it's not just for gamers
And Photoshop is beginning to make use of GPUs for some purposes.
Mac OS X makes extensive use of the GPU, so returning to my original point, 8MB of VRAM would not be enough -- it would slow things down tremendously; OpenCL APIs just launched in 10.6 so applications will lean on the GPU a lot more in 2011 and beyond
I'm sure that we'll soon see a version of Photoshop that can do real-time panorama stitching (with on-the-fly lens profile correction) from multiple RAW images; when that happens high-end video cards will use memory by the GB.
high-end video cards already go up to at least 2GB VRAM -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
