How is the performance of this hardware compared to the other Mac´s graphic options?
Thanks.
Intel GMA X3100 overall looks about twice as fast as the older Intel cards (GMA 950). Possibly because it seems to have vertex shaders in hardware.
Which is still a couple of times slower than the “real” graphics cards in other Mac models.
However, at this very moment (OS X 10.5.0 and 10.5.1) the Apple drivers for GMA X3100 are very bad. Most pixel shaders compute wrong results (which sometimes look cool though), shadows don’t work correctly, and a pile of other things does not work correctly. There’s hope that Apple will fix the drivers sometime. We’ll be adding some driver workarounds for it in Unity 2.0.2.
Thanks Aras, I was thinking of buying a new Macbook because is the cheapest Mac notebook but now I don´t know what to do…
Either buy a-bit-older version (with Intel GMA950), or wait a bit until Apple releases driver fixes (or buy it now, and wait a bit until you can use all advanced shaders). We’re making Apple use our unit testing suites for their driver development, so hopefully these types of driver issues will be reduced in the future.