Video Cards in Macs, especially Intel Macs

Scooting around the Windows discussions, its clear that nVidia is greatly favored over ATI cards for SL. My question is whether this applies to Macs too?

If so what are the implications for the new Intel Macs (assuming we get a universal binary soon) which have ATI cards?

The problems appear to be with an issue relating to the ATI OpenGL drivers for PC. Macs so far have been unaffected by this problem.



None. This is an OS specific driver problem not a hardware issue. I say this with confidence as a Mac software developer with a long history and plenty of OpenGL experience

I'd suggest on a Mac (and PC too actually) you should make your choice of card based on other criteria than just Second Life. Unless SL is all you plan to use it for ; ) because ...

All SL needs is a fast CPU, loads of memory and loads of GPU memory so basically any card with 128Mb or more will work well enough with SL on a Mac. It's also worth mentioning no cards work really well with SL because of the nature of the beast. Modern cards are not designed to be used the way SL uses them. If you do a forum search you'll find plenty of threads discussing the technical reasons why.

Thanks for the great answer Lauk

I use Mac and Windows for lots of things, but the only one where graphics speed is very important is SL.

Have to say I have 1.25 Gb ram in my PB 12-in and the performance with SL is no diff than when I had 768 MB. Activity monitor show memory usage at the 300-500MB range. I guess I'm limited by the 64 MB in the graphics card.

256MB in the Macbook on order.....