They didn't just slap an S on the back and call it a day, you know. Apple has improved the 3D performance on the 3G S by including a more powerful graphics processor. According to John Casasanta, the speed increase is up to four times that of the 3G. But don't take his word or these OpenGL ES speed tests as proof -- check out the video and see for yourself.

On a related note, we hear that Apple has done "even more" than we can publicly disclose around speed improvements on the device. That could mean there are further software updates that may make the 3G S even faster. That's the kind of thing Apple loves to do, isn't it? Just look at the Snow Leopard marketing around it being lighter and more efficient. I've usually had (often temporary) system speed increases with updates as well, so here's hoping there's some unused horsepower under the hood just waiting to be unleashed.

There's been quiet anticipation for the last 6 months for OpenCL (Open Computing Language), which is an Application Programming Interface standard allowing developers to take advantage of the power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in parallel with multi-core processors. The result? Applications become much faster and responsive.

Apple announced in June that support for OpenCL would be built into Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). The Khronos Group, an industry consortium that creates open-standard, royalty-free APIs, put OpenCL on the fast track as a result, and announced yesterday that OpenCL 1.0 has been ratified by all of the consortium members.

Now that OpenCL has been officially blessed by the members of the consortium, could Snow Leopard be close behind? There has been speculation that the latest iteration of Mac OS X could be released as soon as Macworld Expo 2009 in early January. Snow Leopard, along with an announcement of quad-core iMacs, could throw a little fire into what is becoming an increasing chilly Expo. TUAW is attending Macworld Expo 2009 in force this year, so stay tuned for the latest news about Snow Leopard.

TouchArcade interviewed Handheld Games Corp's Thomas Fessler, who noted an interesting bit of the company's research: Second-generation iPod touch devices are significantly faster than their predecessors when it comes to 3D rendering.

In fact, it's faster than both iPhone models as well. In its tests, the iPhone 3G ranked second, the original iPhone third, and the first-generation iPod touch lagged behind in fourth. Fessler is paraphrased in the interview, even suggesting he would not recommend anyone interested in gaming to buy a used first-generation iPod touch.

The primary difference is a faster processor: The second-generation iPod touch has a 532 MHz processor. The iPhone, iPhone 3G, and first-generation iPod touch all have 412 MHz processors.

Fessler also speculates in the interview that the GPU has also been improved, but has no evidence to support that claim. These performance differences may also explain why certain apps only run on second-generation iPod touch devices.

We've already seen some suggestions that more is hiding under the hood of the new unibody MacBooks than Apple has disclosed. Now Gizmodo is reporting that the NVIDIA folks have revealed to them that the graphics hardware in the new MacBooks is capable of quite a bit more than Apple has has chosen to use.

In particular, the the dual GPUs in the MacBook Pros can apparently be run in a Hybrid SLI mode allowing them both to be active at once (and thus increasing graphics performance over the discrete chip alone). In addition, the hardware is apparently capable of on-the-fly switching between the two GPUs instead of the present implementation which requires logging out to switch between the integrated 9400M and the discrete 9600M GT. In principle, this would allow the machine to dynamically switch between using the discrete chip when plugged in and the integrated chip when running on battery power.

So what's the upshot? In the short run, not much. Just because the features are supported in the silicon means squat unless Apple decides to implement them in software. In the best case scenario, however, the new MacBook Pros might see performance increases with only software and/or firmware updates. Of course, whether Apple will choose to do that (which would perhaps decrease the incentive to buy the next generation of machines) is another question altogether.

Having options is good; saving energy is good; improving battery life on your laptop is very good. Having to log out and back in to switch between the two video cards on the MacBook Pro? Um... not all that good. Kinda annoying, to tell you the truth.

Engadget posted a video last night of the swap process (click one button in System Preferences, log out, log back in -- seems ripe for automation) and while it's not particularly onerous, it does seem very weird considering that there aren't any other Energy Saver changes that require a logout. Also worthy of note: the default setting on the new machines is for "Better Performance," using the integrated card.

Why force a logout? Perhaps there are issues with having to redraw windows when flopping from card to card, or particular apps that go 'kaboom!' when told to move onto the other hardware? I can certainly imagine that 3D games or Core Animation-dependent apps might throw a minor freakout if the world shifted under them suddenly, but it still seems like a lot of people are going to settle on one graphics card based on their usage profile (desk-bound gamer vs. mobile maven) and stick with it.

There's also the possibility that the real advantage of this dual-GPU config won't be realized until the OS catches up with the gear. Adding a 2nd GPU is a fairly radical proposition if all you're gaining is the option of better battery life (although, since the 9400M hardware is part of the system chipset, it comes along 'for free'), but when Mac OS X 10.6 comes along it should include the capability to offload general-purpose computing tasks to the GPU, which could provide exponential performance increases for certain apps. Having an extra GPU sitting around waiting to be harnessed starts to seem like a really good idea when considered in that context.

One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac's graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.

TG Daily is reporting that Adobe recently previewed the next version of Photoshop (CS Next / CS4) with GPU acceleration. And as expected it made for an enormous improvement in speed. They they observed "the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core [Intel] Skulltrail system."

There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine) and also no discussion of if and how the 32-bit limitation of CS4 on the Mac might affect this GPU assisted performance boost. Nonetheless, the addition of GPU acceleration is a big deal, and perhaps will push Apple into getting more high performance graphics cards into its systems.

[via Gizmodo]

Bare Feats continues to pit Macs against each other in a no-holds-barred, up-against-the-wall benchmarking breakdown, and this time around it's the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air in the octagon together. And things go about as planned -- while the solid state drive in the MBA has its advantages, the processor and GPU (what little there is of it) in the MBA don't even really compare to the MBP. Sure, it's a small, super thin, super portable computer, but not only are you paying in cash for the portability, you're paying in performance, too.

This doesn't mean the MBA is a bad computer at all -- for most tasks, it'll work just fine. But complicated 3D graphics (both Halo and Unreal Tournament 2004 were tested) will be almost unplayable in games, and there will be a substantial wait, sometimes up to minutes more, for certain processor intensive tasks. If speed is a high priority (at least higher than portability), the MBA isn't for you.

I would like to see how the MacBook compares, though. It's not surprising that the MBP is a fast machine, but where does the MBA line up compared to the cheaper model?

[Via IMG]

FiringSquad, a site covering all things gaming, interviewed Derek Perez, the Director of Public Relations for NVIDIA (ATI's largest competitor), about yesterday's news of the AMD and ATI merger. Mr. Perez looks at the merger as a boost to their own business, excited that NVIDIA will be the only GPU company that supports both AMD and Intel. If this is true, however, this merger could wind up being a bad thing for Mac users as Apple's machines are 100% Intel Inside (yes, I know that slogan is dead now). FiringSquad didn't get much out of Intel, their only comment was basically "we'll get back to you after we're finished reading all this legal mumbo jumbo".

It's still way too early to tell, but I hope this merger doesn't mean that Apple's customers will lose one custom build option in the online store.

[via IMG]

Oh those enterprising hackers, whatever are we going to do with them? First they're blazing their own trail by getting Windows XP on a Mac, and now they're overclocking their GPUs. Hardmac.com posted about one forum member's discovery (in French) that, when compared to similar PC notebook hardware specs, his MacBook Pro's GPU seemed to be a bit underclocked - by over 100 MHz. However, these specs are on paper, and I haven't seen reports as to whether this is a practice exhibited by other manufacturers.

So what's a hacker to do? Why, use ATI's tools to get some overclocking action on! ATI offers a set of video card tools that unfortunately are Windows only, but if you come to the same results and just gotta have some more MHz, using Boot Camp to run these tools under Windows XP ought to do the trick for you. Just don't blame us if your MacBook Pro suddenly morphs into liquid metal form.

[via Engadget]