MacBook GMA 950 integrated graphics
japlady asked me about the MacBook's graphics capabilities. I want to save myself some time, so I'll explain here.
The regular MacBook uses GMA 950 integrated graphics. The graphics processor is integrated into the chipset, so there isn't an extra chip to accomodate or cool. It's got 4 pipelines, runs at 400mhz, and borrows DDR2 RAM from main memory. It's DirectX 9 compatible with lots of nice hardware-supported tricks as long as you don't want to do a lot of those tricks at once. It'll support fancy things in hardware like MPEG2 and hardware motion compensation, render Quartz Extreme effects like the ones in Photo Booth.
The MacBook Pro uses a separate ATI Radeon x1600 graphics chip. At 157 million transistors and 196 square millimeters it's bigger than the Core Duo, which has 151.6 million transistors and is only 90.3 square millimeters. The Radeon x1600 has 12 parallel texture pipelines running at up to 470Mhz (the 'Pro is clocked slower) and is very, very good at turning very large numbers of highly textured polygons and higher-ordered surfaces into pixels. It does everything the MacBook's GMA 950 does, but 4.5x faster. If you decide to do something especially crazy like develop for BrookGPU or perform special vectorized calculations you'll also like having what amounts to a second (third?) processor, but if you know how to do these things you're smart enough to know this already.
Basically If you play a lot of high-end games that put a lot of graphics on the screen you'll probably notice the slow 3D performance of a MacBook and wish that you got a MacBook Pro and you probably ought to wait for the MeromBooks anyway. On the other hand if you're planning to use your mac for web, programming, Photoshop, iChat AV videoconferencing, or almost anything else you'll probably notice that your MacBook Pro runs hotter, gets less battery life, and gives you a lot of features that you're not actually using and wish that you got a regular MacBook.
The regular MacBook uses GMA 950 integrated graphics. The graphics processor is integrated into the chipset, so there isn't an extra chip to accomodate or cool. It's got 4 pipelines, runs at 400mhz, and borrows DDR2 RAM from main memory. It's DirectX 9 compatible with lots of nice hardware-supported tricks as long as you don't want to do a lot of those tricks at once. It'll support fancy things in hardware like MPEG2 and hardware motion compensation, render Quartz Extreme effects like the ones in Photo Booth.
The MacBook Pro uses a separate ATI Radeon x1600 graphics chip. At 157 million transistors and 196 square millimeters it's bigger than the Core Duo, which has 151.6 million transistors and is only 90.3 square millimeters. The Radeon x1600 has 12 parallel texture pipelines running at up to 470Mhz (the 'Pro is clocked slower) and is very, very good at turning very large numbers of highly textured polygons and higher-ordered surfaces into pixels. It does everything the MacBook's GMA 950 does, but 4.5x faster. If you decide to do something especially crazy like develop for BrookGPU or perform special vectorized calculations you'll also like having what amounts to a second (third?) processor, but if you know how to do these things you're smart enough to know this already.
Basically If you play a lot of high-end games that put a lot of graphics on the screen you'll probably notice the slow 3D performance of a MacBook and wish that you got a MacBook Pro and you probably ought to wait for the MeromBooks anyway. On the other hand if you're planning to use your mac for web, programming, Photoshop, iChat AV videoconferencing, or almost anything else you'll probably notice that your MacBook Pro runs hotter, gets less battery life, and gives you a lot of features that you're not actually using and wish that you got a regular MacBook.