R600 GPUs in Macs

1. How long do you think it will be before we see ATI's R600 CPUs in Macs?
2. How long do you think it will be before we see Santa Rosa chipsets in Macs?
(3. And I'm assuming Mac won't be switching over to nVidia any time soon?)

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the R600 becomes available for Macs fairly quickly (although the Mac Pro is really the only current Mac that could make use of it). I actually recall one of the earlier rumors saying that the Mac Pro would be one of the first systems to actually have it available, but I don't know how credible that was.

I'd expect to see Santa Rosa in the MacBook Pro at least fairly soon, as it is due for an upgrade. June or July seem more than realistic to me. The iMac (which uses laptop components) and the regular MacBook should probably follow suit a few months later, but it's hard to say for sure when.

When you say "switching over to NVidia", do you mean on the laptop side? Apple does offer NVidia GPU's in some of their desktops as options.

I don't know what to expect on the laptop side; realistically the MacBook Pro would probably continue to use an ATI part (presumably an updated MBP might use the DX10 equivalent to the current X1600), but there isn't anything keeping them from using an NVidia card instead of its more suitable. Apple has gone back and forth between using ATI and NVidia GPU's in their laptops.

 

I actually hope Apple does switch to nVidia in the next iteration of the MBP, but who knows if they will. As far as when Apple will switch to newer GPU's and Santa Rosa, your guess is as good as anyone's. Expect it to be within a couple months of availability to manufacturers.

 

Yeah, I should specify: I'm mostly interested in the timetable for which we'll see DX10 GPUs in the 15.4" MBPs.

So you guys are thinking around June?

 

Yeah, if you asked me to guess, I'd say June/July, and I expect there will be a GPU upgrade to some sort of DX10 part.

 

I'd expect Apple to switch rather quickly, if not by anything but Intel's pressure. It really depends on the past agreements with both Intel and ATI. OTOH, I myself am not so impressed with Nvidia's new DX10 gen. Curious how this stuff is cyclic: GForces 5xxx sucked, 6xxx were on par with ATI's, 7xxx were usually better (IMHO), now I guess 8xxx will be worse. I hope next year when (and if) I upgrade (more like rebuilt) my desktop I'll be able to find a 7600GTX for a good price.

 

Do you just mean that the 8800GTS and GTX don't impress you relative to what you expect the R600 to be?

Just because in and of themselves, the 8800GTS (both 320 and 640MB versions) and 8800GTX look pretty nice to me.

 

Companies should really stop keeping consumers in the dark, I think...

I hate all this guesswork.

 

Part of the game bud. They don't want you to know when the new stuff is coming because they want to sell as much of their current stuff as they can.

 

Kind of both... the 7xxx series was pretty good, but I think the 8xxx fails to improve much upon it. I am not sure the R600 will trump Nvidia's offerings, and I usually prefer Nvidia due to their superior drivers and OpenGL support anyways. I just had a kind of "meh" reaction to the 8xxx line.

 

Fair enough..... maybe it's just because I am still on a 6800GT, but I guess I've been a lot more impressed by the leap in performance I would see with an 8800GTS or 8800GTX.

Then again, it seems like none of us will really be able to tell how impressive these parts are until the actual DX10-based games come out..... I would guess at that point we would really see the difference.

And I guess it's also a matter of NVidia getting their Vista drivers sorted out too.