[MaybeIShould]

Hey Guys.

Sitting wondering about the upcoming operating systems. After all we here, you could expect Snow Leopard to come around Q2 2009 and Microsoft say they will launch Windows 7 this year, probably trying to beat Apple in coming first with a new OS. Now from what I have read around the Web this weekend, the Snow Leopard is going to be seriously powerful. What I was wondering was if you guys think Snow Leopard would change the whole gaming perspective with their OpenCL, etc. compatibility?

[goMac]

OpenCL and grand central won't really matter much imo because most Mac games are ports, which won't contain those optimizations.

[Mac User #001]

Why not? TransGaming seems like they might take the time to add those optimizations. Aspyr I'm sure would.

Now I'm curious if Blizzard is with StarCraft 2 and Diablo III, which won't be ports.

Not that I care. I'm still gonna use Windows. Because of wider support, and my Mac sucks.

[mduell]

OpenCL won't do much for games; they're already pounding on the graphics card for images, so there isn't much idle capacity available anyway. It will be good for things like image/video editing/encoding and scientific computing.

It's extremely unlikely Microsoft will release Win7 before Snow Leopard; it will probably come out at least 6 months later.

On other other hand DirectX 11 Compute, a GPGPU API for Windows from Microsoft, will be out next month for Vista and Win7. I think backporting the API to Vista is a great idea, since it immediately gives it an installed userbase of 300+ million instead of the limited userbase a new OS (Snow Leopard or Win7) would have for a while (at least the rest of this year).

[Chuckit]

Yeah, Apple's unwillingness to ever backport API features means that new goodies they develop are less useful in practice than they ought to be because no one can use them without shutting out most of the user base for several years.

[Hawkeye_a]

I've thumbed through the OpenCL specification, and from someone who's fairly familiar with OpenGL, this essentially looks like vector math (linear algebra), with queues for scheduling for multiple cores. Thats the basic impression i got from the API.

I'm sure the avid Mac gamer could be able to shoe horn the OpenCL libraries into older versions of OSX, that new software could take advantage of if detected. Will OSX(or any existing commercially available software) be able to take advantage of it ? Of course not... not without an upgrade.

Saying DirectX11 will have similar features before OSX is ..... inconsequential since nether that operating system nor current software will be able to use it. Not to mention that OpenCL got ratified in December(if im not mistaken) and should be available for almost all desktop OSs eventually (unlike DirectX).

OSX will also be the first OS to actually take advantage of GPGPU libraries (OpenCL)... unlike Win7, which is 'theoretically' scheduled for late 2009/2010(?).

And yeah, i doubt games will see any significant increase in performance as they tend to max out the graphical hardware and Cocoa(afaik) puts the multiple CPU cores to use.

Scientific apps, simulations, movie, image, music processing are set to see a significant increasing, judging from the CUDA demos ive seen on YouTube.

Of course this is opinion based on articles i've read on the subject and the OCL specification i thumbed through.

Cheers

[AppleGirl1990]

Need more information on Snow Leopard. LET IT SNOW.