[mythtvnz] New Mac Mini maybe a good VDPAU frontend?

[Tortise]

Thanks Wade
I am sorry I was referring to the discussion at the bottom of my post that I understood to be about the NVIDIA cards and I should 
have said in the Linux World.  Still your comments may well apply.
Thank you for replying.
David

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wade Maxfield" <mythtvnz at hotblack.co.nz>
To: "MythTV in NZ" <mythtvnz at lists.linuxnut.co.nz>
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 9:53 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtvnz] New Mac Mini maybe a good VDPAU frontend?


On 28/5/09 9:05 PM, Tortise wrote:
> What advantage is there with the higher amounts of video card RAM?
>
> Does more RAM still support larger desktop areas, as they used to in the past?

Under OS X?

We're way past that point now.  Mainly it's used for textures.  And in
OS X each window is pretty much a plane with the contents of the window
as a texture.

Some hardware test/reviews I've read (sorry no URLs to back this up)
have compared 15" MacBook Pro's side by side, and the machines with the
extra video RAM have been able to handle more open windows before
feeling sluggish. Particularly when using moving/switching windows or
using Expose. Apple makes it hard to quantify the difference exactly,
since the machines with the extra video RAM also had slightly faster
CPUs (≈10%, but same GPU chip/speed), but the CPU by itself shouldn't
have that kind of effect.

Apps like Aperture and Final Cut also make use of the video RAM and have
particular minimum requirements. I think Aperture uses it for caching
thumbnails (as a series textures/objects), etc to improve responsiveness
of the app, as well as for doing real work when manipulating images
(scaling, compositing, effects/filters, etc). So more video RAM is
better here as well.

On a Mac Mini where the system RAM is being used for video RAM, I'm not
certain if you'd see as much of a difference as dedicated GDDR on a
card. But I guess that's why the Pro Apps don't have Mac Mini's on the
supported hardware list...

  - Wade


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