VSXu on apple - current status

I recently got a question about hardware and Macs in particular. The mac is a tricky platform which I will explain in this post.

We are working on a macintosh version of VSXu but most won't be able to run it.

First of all, VSXu won't run on a machine without _hardware_ supporting OpenGL 2.0 which counts out most macs in people's posession.

The upcoming version of VSXu won't even start on a machine that doesn't have OGL2.0. Currently vsxu assumes it's there and crashes if the hardware doesn't support OGL2.0 which is causing confusion. With more and more being done with shaders and even geometry shader support in the upcoming version, VSXu needs proper hardware to run.

Now let me explain what I more often call "the apple situation"®:

Apple tend to rip of their customers by using only the worst (cheapest for them) graphics chips possible, if your mac is a macbook (not macbook pro) you're out of luck unless
it's the latest version being sold now.

It barely supports OGL2.0 and the graphics performance is horrible - it's sharing RAM between the GPU and CPU which is typical for cheap low-end computers in the 200$ to 300$ range. As soon as you start throwing some work on it it'll drop to 10fps.

What to look for when buying a computer for VSXu/OpenGL is the same as for the latest games - a graphics card with dedicated vram.

So one would expect this from a Macbook pro then? right???

But no, even the graphics on the macbook pro's that are now selling is poor at best - I just checked.
They ship with nvidia 9400M - old graphics components not intended for high-end graphics - and some of the models also (imagine that!) use RAM instead of real VRAM.

So either way the performance on a mac laptop will be bad.

For the mac platform to run proper graphics, the only acceptable computer will be a mac Pro (the big over-priced lump of metal) with the _extra optional graphics card_ (the original one is also old cheap crap they get from nvidia almost for free which really does NOT suit the rest of the components in it and has nothing to do with being professional). And it can't even power 2 graphics cards from nvidia because of the under-dimensioned PSU. NOT professional at all! I mean - a Pro graphics machine should be able to run multiple screens with hardware accelerated graphics. But apple apparently don't care at all about graphics.

Conclusion: the mac (due to the bad hardware) is a truly horrific realtime graphics platform. It can do only the most basic things, the rest of the hardware world is like 2-3 years ahead of apple. Most likely you can't run vsxu on an old apple machine.

Now for the reality:

A "Sony Vaio" model CW2 CI3 has a pretty good graphics card (and costs the same as a regular macbook).



So, buy that instead of a mac and run linux (Ubuntu or Linux Mint) on it. Now that's a good VSXu computer, it has 512Mb of dedicated vram.

THAT folks is DOUBLE compared to the macbook pro for the same price as a macbook, plus it looks pretty neat - mac fanboys are usually a bit on the pink side of the world (and don't know what they're buying) so they might accept the design of this box since that is more important in such a situation than the hardware inside.

Or if you're looking at the macbook pro: get this instead (for instance) http://www.agearnotebooks.com/sagernp5797.html

Ka-CHING!