[Helmling]

I've seen a lot about video cards in the lower end Macs not supporting Core...what does that mean?

[Catfish_Man]

Core Image is a set of technologies that allow programmers to write program that manipulate images in certain ways. One of its major advantages over other image manipulation techniques is that it can run on the graphics card rather than the processor, if the graphics card is advanced enough (primarily in terms of what it supports, but speed is an issue as well for some cards like the nVidia FX5200). If the graphics card can't support it, it will fall back to using the processor (including altivec and dual/quad processors).

Currently it's not used a lot (iPhoto uses it a little, iirc Aperture uses it quite a bit. Dashboard uses it to display ripples around widgets), but it will likely be in the future. Some other technologies like using the graphics card to accelerate all drawing have similar graphics card requirements, so "Core Image" support may mean support for them as well in the future.

[chris v]

There's an app called iMaginator which does nothing but apply the system-provided core image filters to files, if you want to see those. It cost $$ for a version that'll save, but you can at least preview them all with it. Some of them are pretty cool.

[goMac]

CoreImage Fun House which is provided with the Developer Tools applies all the filters and I believe it can save.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Like the others have mentioned, there are a number of apps that use Apple's CoreImage. The first app that was seen having this capability was Motion.

Apple's apps that make use of CI are:
Motion
Fun House
iPhoto
Photo Booth
Aperture
Keynote

3rd party apps:
iMaginator
LiveQuartz Image Editor
Super secret build of SNES9x
Beta builds of Sandvox
Shiira

[CaptainHaddock]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man

Aperture uses it quite a bit.

Heh, that's a bit of an understatement. Aperture applies all your photo manipulations to your original Raw camera image in real time using CoreImage and saves all those changes as a stack of instructions, making the "save" menu command obsolete. That kind of program wouldn't even be possible without CoreImage (and CoreData).

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

3rd party apps:
(…)
Super secret build of SNES9x
(…)

Please, could you elaborate?, just curious, my MDD G4 is not Core Image powered, but I would like to know the way a SNES emulator uses it. TIA.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by angelmb

Please, could you elaborate?, just curious, my MDD G4 is not Core Image powered, but I would like to know the way a SNES emulator uses it. TIA.

It applies a CoreImage filter onto the emulated games.

You can get crazy effects such as Edge, Crystalize, Dot, Pointilize, and many others...

Since CI can be extended with new filters, the sky is the limit. As you can see, some filters aren't suitable for playing games, but others such as Bloom and Gloom (not shown in the screenshots) add a nice effect to some games. Of course, CoreImage can be used by anyone...but only certain video cards can handle these transformation in real time (to a certain limit)...CI on moving video such as a SNES9x emulator absolutely requires that you have such a card. For transformation on still images almost any G4 will do if you're only applying a few layers of tranformation to it.

[Helmling]

So which Mac models can do it? New iMacs?

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Helmling

So which Mac models can do it? New iMacs?

It depends mostly on the video card. I think there's a knowledge base article on Apple's website detailing which cards are core-image capable.

[P]

Anything that boasts "Direct X 9.0 compability". DirectX is Windows only, but CoreImage seems to use the same functions. Basically, it's nVidia boards Geforce FX 5200 or better and ATi boards Radeon 9600 and better.

[CaptainHaddock]

I'm no expert, but I think the key to CoreImage is the pixel shading functions that newer cards have, which allows the GPU to calculate and modify pixel image data on the fly (in addition to basic polygon shading and texturing). Direct X 9.0 might require the same shaders.

[pat++]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

Like the others have mentioned, there are a number of apps that use Apple's CoreImage. The first app that was seen having this capability was Motion.

Apple's apps that make use of CI are:
Motion
Fun House
iPhoto
Photo Booth
Aperture
Keynote

3rd party apps:
iMaginator
LiveQuartz Image Editor
Super secret build of SNES9x
Beta builds of Sandvox
Shiira

I don't think Keynote is using Core Image at all. Core Image didn't even exist when Keynote was released... so I don't see how it could use it... Same thing for iPhoto...

[CaptainHaddock]

According to one source I dug up (this one), certain Quartz APIs that already existed in Panther call on CoreImage if it's available. iPhoto 5 and Keynote 2 were written with this in mind, so they automatically use CoreImage in Tiger.

I expect iLife 6 and Keynote 3 to use CoreImage even more.