8600gt 512 mb with ggr3?

In another thread someone said the new 8600gt cards in the new mbp's have ggr3 vs ggr2....is this true? If so where do i find this info? I looked on the apple site and didnt find it.

 

I can look on my system and see if I can find it.

 

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html

Says GDDR3 there.

 

All of the MBPs since last update have gdd3 memory on their graphics cards.

 

yeah.. the "old" one had ddr3.. and so does the new one.

i hate macs... but the title say 512mb ddr3.. is there a new 8600m?

before there was only a 128 and 256mb ddr3 version

 

All 2.5GHz and faster MacBook Pro's come with 512MB GDDR3 8600 GT cards.

They also come with jcovelli seeking missiles.

 

hahaha...

that's cool though.. i'm envious.. of the 512mb 8600 not the mbp

 

So are the 8600GT 512mb cards like top of the line now for notebook cards? How do they compare to the 8800 and the 9000 series?

 

bump, i'd like to know this too.

 

No, the top of the line cards for laptops are the 8700 and 8800.

 

the 512mb 8600m gt should perform mysteriously similarly to the 256mb 8600m gt. The 8700's and 8800's, especially, are much faster.

The 9000 series (9500m gt) is just a rebranded 8600m gt, so it does not have any performance or feature difference.

 

is there even a difference between the 256 and 512 card, there is like a 500 dollar gap between the two

 

There will be quite a bit of difference in new games where large maps and textures are used because more data can be stored on-board in the vram but in other games where you're not making use of much more than 256MB then there really won't be a difference much at all. The MBP doesn't use a real high resolution at 1440x900 so you're not using as much video memory as if you had a laptop capable of 1680x1050 or 1920x1200.

 

no. its already been shown 1000 times over that increasing memory beyond 256 megs does not increase performance in the 8600m gt. it is not a fast enough card (it doesn't have the memory bandwidth) to make use of more than 256 megs of ram.

you will need a faster card with more memory bandwidth (8700m gt, or really, an 8800m) to make use of more vram.

 

That's a bit misleading. While more VRAM is necessary for larger textures, the 8600M GT isn't exactly capable of using more than 256MB very effectively. It only has a 128-bit memory bus, which severely limits it's memory bandwidth. This means that even though you can move a larger texture through memory, the graphics card can't process it fast enough. It's kind of like having a Pentium 2 and 4GB of RAM. Sure, 4GB of RAM helps you do a lot, but the processor can't handle it anyway, so it's kind of pointless.

 

I'm guessing that there will be no MBP 9000 series graphics card updates for a while, then? I was rather hoping that it would be a 9600GT or some such, as the 8 series is practically end of life.

 

you can have somone run 3dmark06 with it and see if it gets higher score than the 256 version.

 

seeing as the 9600m gt does not yet exist, it will not be available in the macbook pro.

for reference- the 9 series cards currently available are the desktop 9600 gt, which is basically just a remake of the 8800 series, and the laptop 9500m gt, which is a rebranded 8600m gt. they are literally the same card.

 

Im about to buy a MBP for work, i play WoW and UT3 in my freetime, i travel a lot now so im hoping to put them on the laptop, basically for those its hard to see spending 500 more dollars for 2.5 instead of 2.4 and the extra 256 vram if the cards capabilities wont handle it

 

Ahh I see. I wasn't aware it had such a limited 128-bit memory bus. I would of thought with 512mb of RAM it would of had a 256-bit bus. Definitely no reason to go with the 8600M GT 512MB then if the bus link is severely bottlenecked past 256mb. Would of been nice if Apple had put an 8700m GT or higher in the more expensive model instead.

 

So there's really no difference between the two at all? I though the 9 series would be DirectX 10.1 compliant or have some other upgrades. I'm sure the rest of the 9 series will debut soon, so I guess we'll have to see?

 

Thanks burningrave101 for that input, now I truly have no buyers remorse on my 2.4ghz mbp SR with nvidia 256ram 8600 gt.

 

I too was just like you and always said those words, "I hate macs, their so slow." Back then when I spoke those words I've never used a mac only the ones at my elementary/jr/high schools where they had the OLD majorly outdated small mac's that were always so slow and thats how I had an impression of macs and was only loyal to m$ for 10+ years.. until I tried using osx and the latest macs I fell in love. Now I say the opposite, I hate m$!