Mac Mini with GMA 950!
Community Forums/General Help/Mac Mini with GMA 950!
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| I just bought a Mac Mini with Snow leopard, 2gb ram and a 2ghz core 2 duo processor from a reputable seller on ebay. It's one with an intel GMA 950 gfx card. Total cost £325. Was this worth it and is the GMA card good enough for simple 2d/3d iphone dev? Ta! |
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| Sounds much like mine. |
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| Cool, if Brucey has it then it must be ok. :) |
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| Its much better than my imaginary one! |
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| I wouldnt buy anything with an intel graphcs card. Intel GPUs are like tofu. Boring, tasteless and generally crap. |
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| The IPhone is pretty underpowered, so it should be alright. It has 4 pixel pipelines, which is a minimum requirement if you're planning on using Unity for Mac. Haven't used the IPhone version, so that may not be an issue anyway. It's got support for pixel shader 2.0. Yeah, it should just about scrape by. |
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| I wouldnt buy anything with an intel graphcs card. Intel GPUs are like tofu. Boring, tasteless and generally crap. Yeah, my Mac Mini with its Intel graphics is really crap. How on Earth I've managed to use it to code up scores of mods for OS X and Win32 (native thru Parallels, and cross-compiling) on it... I'll never know... And the 1900x1200 display it outputs on my 24" Samsung is totally crap. Right. is the GMA card good enough for simple 2d/3d iphone dev? Considering you'll be running your dev stuff either through an emulator or on the device itself (yes, you can even debug "live" on the device, which is pretty cool), I don't think it's too important. |
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| Yeah, my Mac Mini with its Intel graphics is really crap. I am not quite sure if you are agreeing with me or not there :DHow on Earth I've managed to use it to code up scores of mods for OS X and Win32 (native thru Parallels, and cross-compiling) on it... I'll never know... And the 1900x1200 display it outputs on my 24" Samsung is totally crap. Right. Sure Intel are good for coding on i suppose, because they are so bad that often things dont work the way they should and they are unfortunately common. As for the Res, all modern GPUs should be able to handle that (even the ancient geforce fx5500 i have kicking about can handle that... if i had a better monitor), so i wouldn't really say that was anything to note. (unless you are scraping the barrel for 'good points' ;P) Perhaps they work better with OSX, but on Windows and Linux they suck big time, (especially in the OGL dept. -perhaps its because their drivers & shovelware are awful, who knows). Either way for a 3D graphics workstation or gaming rig i wouldnt touch another intel with gloves on. However in answer to Amons question, for development it is fine as long as you dont want S.O.T.A. 3D, but for 2D graphics intel cards seem fine. |
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| Intel chips don't do shaders very well (or at all in some cases), but aside from that they're just a bit slow. Aside from a few more recent OpenGl tricks(i think the GL version for this chip is 1.4, so no point sprites for me :( ), i've yet to code anything that won't run on my GMA950 laptop. You should have no problem doing iPhone dev on you new mini :) Cheers Charlie |
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| Perhaps they work better with OSX, but on Windows and Linux they suck big time, (especially in the OGL dept. -perhaps its because their drivers & shovelware are awful, who knows). You'll find that all the makes of GPU's work better on OSX as they basically use custom drivers. Has to do with not catering with every possible hardware combination that can exist and only concentrating on the hardware they have chosen. So in theory all the components in a mac are tuned to work well together. Though I would have gone for something with slightly better GPU myself. |
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| As all MacBooks and mac minis came with intel chip sets, until they switched to the nvidia 9400 that's in my macbook. apple would be a bit stuffed if it wasnt up to the job. The nvidia chip is miles better though it's the same as the ion chip set that was ment to be the next big thing in atom based netbooks but it kills the battery life in netbooks. The new MacBook has a great battery so it's not an issue. |
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