arrg 12" and limited Vram!! why apple why!

[X_X]

just when i decide the 12" is for me i find out you cant up the Vram to 128!! CURSE YOU APPLE! so now my big dileama is, do i give up on the 12" and just go 15" or will the 64ram be ok. now i know what you'll say "depends on what you use your PB for" so here goes:
in my desktop PC i have a Gforce 6800 128 DDR ram and get buy just fine with that, mind you i've never had anything less than 128 ram of vram before so i have nothing to compare it to. not to mention the apple mantra "MacOS is so much more efficient blah blah blah" cause i know i wouldnt go less than 128 atm on a PC but maybe Macs are different...but then again having seen their wacky crazy animations that they put all over the place (IE: opening/closing things) i'd guess it eats vram for breakfast...maybe not though?

so anyway i'd be using the PB for Photoshop CS
Painter X
Final cut pro
DVD studio pro
motion (or maybe after effects)
web
some mild gaming (maybe Battlefield 1942, darwinians and BF 2 if it comes out on macs though it'd be replacing BF1942 if it did)
my guess is that i wouldnt be able to run BF2 at all but i'll still try lol.
and some 3D stuff, probably only with maya but maybe modo or silo.
so i guess 3D modelling and maybe if it could handle it animation too.
i dont plan on using dual screens, and if i did use an external screen i'd just be using it not the PB screen.

so what do you guys reckon would a 12" PB with 1.5 gig Ram make up for some of the lack of vram??

[Fooboy]

About the Games: I was very into PC gaming for a long time and I kept up with the industry pretty well. Basically, don't plan on intensive games (aside from blizzard stuff) on a 12" powerbook. An ATI 9700 mobility chipset (in 15" and 17 ") is WAY better than a nVidia 5200 GO chipset (found in 12"). Even the ATI 9600 mobility chipset is much better than the 5200. I'm not an ATI or nVidia fan boy, each is good at different things (open GL vs DX 9... blah blah).

I can give you ONE idea of the difference, but these video card benchmarks are for Windows Desktop machines, but you can kinda get the idea of where they all stand.

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/index.html (scroll down to the game benchmarks at bottom)

Look at the 5200 (NOT the 5200 Ultra), its nearly almost in the bottom 3. The 9700 (NOT the 9700 Pro) is usually well above, in the middle of the pack.

Don't expect these frame rates for your Mac either. Laptops have mobile chipsets with slower speeds ... so they are a little watered down. Plus, MOST games are written and optimized for Windows and not Macs.

And yes, you are definitely right - there's no way you'll be playing BF2 on that thing. BF vietnam which uses a much older engine gets 15 fps on a windows desktop with the 5200 (look at the link above) ... and even thats unplayable. You want at least like 60 fps minimum. I guess if you want to game at all get the 15" with the 9700 ... cuase aside from maybe WC3 or WoW ... the 12" won't cut it.

As far as the other applications ... I think you'll be fine with the 12" with 64 megs of vram. I know tiger will use a lil more vram, but (correct me if im wrong guys) most of the applications are still using conventional ram much more so than vram. Depends on how much rendering there is in the application.

I have a 12" and I love it. I love the size ... and its almost just as powerful as the larger books. The only "differences" to me are the screen realestate and video cards. 200 mhz or faster firewire ... pssh.

[Koodari]

Games:

Don't sweat it with the amount of RAM. For games it's much more important how fast the GPU is, and like Fooboy said, the 9700 is a lot faster. High resolutions and better textures need more memory but then you would need correspondingly faster GPU to keep up and that you don't have.

I had a 15" with the 9700 and based on that experience I wouldn't try to stretch an Apple laptop for FPS gaming. I'll get a Windows desktop when I want to do that.

It's nice that there are games which are not resource hogs. I'm now happily WoW gaming with 12" iBook with a 32MB Radeon 9200 :)

Desktop use:

As long as you are not running complicated/textured 3D, or a 30" Cinema display, I don't see 64MB vs 128MB VRAM ever becoming an issue.

I am running the internal display and 1600x1200 CRT happily in the 32MB VRAM iBook, which automatically splits the VRAM for dualscreen, so the 1600x1200 screen has only 16MB VRAM. Expose stutters a bit but the actual task of switching apps is just as quick.

When I still had the 15", I looked at Quartz monitoring tools and saw that my 10+ app windows and 10+ Firefox tabs were using around 55MB VRAM. Apparently 128MB would have been a waste.

[Fooboy]

something else to think about with video cards in general ... is that you really can't just look at memory mhz or gpu chip mhz and determine which is the "fastest".

You have to take a lot into consideration that is much more important that the raw speed - such as pixel pipes, memory BIT size (128 bit, 256 bit ... not HOW much such as 128 megabytes or 256 megabytes).

A video card with slower memory and gpu chip speeds but more pixel pipes and higher bit memory would blow a card w/o those featuers but "faster" memory and gpu chip.

Picking a video card based on how fast the mhz on the memory or gpu is ... is like like trying to determine how "fast" a car is by what the red line on the engine is. The higher redline doesn't at all mean its a faster car. It depends on many factors working together to achieve high performance. Same with Video cards.

Benchmarks like the link I posted above arent totally relative to macs becuase, as I said, they are for windows desktop gaming machines ... but its still a good relative comparison and indicator as to where to graphics card ranks against its competition.

[X_X]

Fooboy, Koodari (whats with all these "oo's" lol) thanks for the great advice :cool:

i'm not really planning on running games on my PB, aside from maybe 1 or 2 small ones, its just that i guess seeing as i'm spending a fair sum of money on this PB i wanted to cover all possible bases. but i need to be realistic i have my PC workstation/game rig and the PB is really only going to be for working on the go as well as giving me access to mac only apps. i just have to stop wanting it all lol. so as long as the os can live happily with 64meg of vram then i'm cool with it.
and seeing as the screen size on the 12" is small i wont be doing any major 3D stuff on it. i see it more as a way of doing "3D doodles" that can then be worked on more in other apps on my desktop.
Fooboy you have a 12"? have you used any video editing software on it? stuff like FCP? how does it hold up?
cheers
X_X

[Fooboy]

No I havent yet - but I cant wait ... Ive done all the old video editing on Windows Movie Maker. Man, let me tell you - I had to do some southern enginnering to get those movies / effects to work and not crash the system.

Uh ... the guy who had the powerbook before I did - however - used FCP and had no issues.

Really - the issue with powerbooks isnt vram but sd ram. Thats where you need to let your powerbook ... BREATHE