hey guys
i am considering buying a mac pro for my corporate presentations of apps etc and just wondering if the new 320m cards are better then the 9400m cards on the previous gen laptops
i know that the 320m has more cores but it does not have dedicatred memory and is shared
i would rather get the last gen macs then the new ones if there is not a big performance gain from the new cards
i have a mac mini with a 9400m and it runs unity just fine
can even crank maya
I’d go with a PC instead.
Yea, I hate MAC’s. Overpriced fluff if you ask me.
Why does this uninformed miasma always infect a thread. My BSD UNIX Mac can kick the snot out of your PC and will last five times longer. Its interface is not an ugly mess to have to scoot around and over. The developer tools that come with the Mac are no slouch either.
And now…A windoze rant. Frak Bill and Melinda for wanting to license and vaccinate every child to be born on earth… And GMO advocacy, and NSAkey.dll and seven ghost files for every file you write…and…etc…etc…etc
Mind you Jobs is backing Rahm for Chicago Mayor. I may have a size ten cowboy boot for his ass on this one!
Back to your regularly scheduled program.
Yer Pal
BTH
And somehow this makes you better than the people that hate on Mac? Let’s be grown ups here.
The truth about operating systems is that they are a personal preference. There is no one operating system that is better than another. You pick your OS based on how it fits your needs. If Mac does it for you, then by all means get a Mac. If you like Windows, use windows. And if you like Linux use Linux. After adolescences I have never found any form of fan-boyism to be a quality worth keeping in my personality. Let’s recognize there are strengths and weaknesses in both products shall we?
And btw, yes the 320m cards are better than the 9600m cards. After the 9XXX series Nvidia went to the GT/GTS/GTX XXX series, starting at 200. So the first card was a GTS 230 if I remember correctly. Something like that anyway.
Macs are more business oriented (making games included), Pcs are more for playing the games.
PC’s are the same thing as a Mac but with a different OS, cheaper, and better specs available, plus self-building or custom specs as an option. That’s really all there is to it… one isn’t more “business oriented” or “gaming oriented”. You can even install Windows on a Mac, or if you really felt like it, vice-versa (but for licensing).
Macs are basically a boutique brand for a PC… much more expensive for the same spec, or worse spec, as a PC.
As far as the opinion part of this argument goes, personally, I prefer the Windows 7 OS vastly over OSX. It’s far more intuitive, and can run everything instead of a small subset of apps/games.
Additionally, it allows for easy overclocking. I’m running an i7 2600K at 4800mhz (fully error-checked/stability tested), a GTX 580 video card, 8GB DDR3 (which I could upgrade to 16GB for around $70 when I want to for the extra pair of 4GB modules), and a 256GB SSD with TRIM capability, as well as a few large mechanical drives including a 1TB 2.5" external, a couple of 2TB internals, etc. The SSD ran me $400 a year and a half ago. RAM cost me $68 shipped recently. The video card cost me $500 because it had just come out. The CPU+motherboard cost me $500 with a free game bundled into it (Civilization 5).
Finally, I use a Dell 3007WFP-HC 30" 2560x1600 panel with the same exact panel as was in the 30" Apple Cinema display of the time, purchased for $650 with a 5-year warranty from Dell.
Try speccing a mac desktop with, even stock…
i7 2600K 3.4ghz
16GB DDR3
GTX 580
256GB SSD
2TB Internal HDD
30" 2560x1600 display
For me, it would cost ~$2k total. For a Mac Pro, I can only imagine… $5k plus, easily. EDIT: I specced out a Mac Pro with equivalent speed/overall power and came up with a figure of over $8,200 including a 27" 2560x1440 display (they didn’t offer the 30" which is costlier/superior). Jaw-dropping…
False. That’s like saying Xbox 360 and PS3 are the same.
Xbox 360 has my favorite controller of all time, while the PS3 controller is the same terrible tacked-on-analog-sticks-to-lame-start-anyway that they’ve been using for nearly a decade and a half. I equate my giant multitouch trackpad with the former.
XBLA has a bunch of exclusive games that I like, while there isn’t a single exclusive retail 360 game that I care about. However, when there is a cross-plaform release, and neither one is superior by other measures, I get the 360 one, because we like the controller better at my place. PS3, on the other hand, has the God of War and Team Ico games, and Valkyria Chronicles. On the Mac, we have Logic Studio, with MainStage. On Windows, you can buy Ghost Master, one of the greatest games of all time, on Steam. Ghost Master won’t run on OS X anymore because it was an OS 9 game. (I don’t know of any Windows-only software I care about that aren’t games. 
)
In theory, these things could be the same thing. They’re not, or else they wouldn’t be considered different things, instead of different brands of the same thing. There’s a bit of gray area here, and I don’t know of any way to discretely classify it, but humans definitely have a method of doing so. For example, there’s nothing worth mentioning that differentiates this from any other superstrat. However, just add a couple strings, and it’s a different story.
Blah blah tools…blah blah OS, blah blah 3D app. This has all been reiterated a million times before and is not any bright new point of logic. Frankly it seems the PC clowns are always starting this crap and the Mac guys for the most part pipe up politely and try to set a set of prejudices straight. I don’t stick my nose into threads where the PC owner has had major virus attacks and blue screens and tell them GET A MAC. I don’t see the other Mac users doing so either… And frankly it is insulting to the Mac users to have to deal with this miasmatic BS when we know what is under the hood and what dev tools come with the platform. The original Get PC…goooood…Mac…bad … fluffy… It frankly had no place in a thread asking for Mac advice and I don’t care about play like adults. I have children 29 years old. Please.
BTH
lol and all i did was ask for advice on whether the 320m card is better then the 9400m card
to justify spending more money on a newer machine for unity MAC game development
i have a pc and a mac and love both as they suit their INTENDED purpose
get over it guys
but please any techies if they could chip in and review the cards
i have googled and there are far too mnay reviews
i rather take the advice of a fellow unity user
Looks like you sparked a dynamite cache! I will try to refrain from jumping into the fracas, and simply help you summerl0v3r (BTW Triomferus is the only one who knows what he is talking about ab0ve).
The 320m will get you about 30% better FPS with most stuff, don’t expect more. Its nearly double the speed of the 9400 when it comes to shaders but with not geometry or textures, The real plus is that its energy consumption is lower.
Now if you aren’t making something at least as advanced as Quake4, I would go with the older macbook because at the very least it will force you to design your game for a broader range of PC performance. I’m making a visually rich, shader intensive game on a desktop gaming rig, and forcing myself to work on it with a netbook… this has kept my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed, so I know this strategy work
I cant resist… I grew up on the Mac side of the force, and perhaps it was a legitimate argument that you should pay over inflated prices for Mac hardware when the PPC was still around (even though for nearly 10 year Apple wasted the PPC on 680x0 instruction emulation) but for those who understand the technical side of the hardware, that argument went right out the window in 2005 when they switched to Intel, I left the platform as soon as that happened because it was clear that Apple was abandoning its desktop platform. To those of you still on that sinking ship- you had better grab an ipad as a raft, and paddle hard.
Before you flame… Mac OSX is the best operating system ever, and i think it will be around as a development and hobby platform for a long time, but i never use it because when I exclusively used Macs (25 years thank you) I had always found myself needing a PC or Windblows program for many tasks on my mac, be it burning a CD image or opening a document. Since i switched I have only needed a mac to run Unity (which is now a moot point). Its not because Windows is better technically, its not, it is the worst commercial OS. I run OSX86 on both of my PC’s and never boot it, hell i even have a virtual machine of it, but never start it. There just is not enough software. If you only email, surf, and write papers, then I guess MacOSX is the best.
Gates summed everything I’m trying to say up a long time ago:
"If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.” His strategy won, sadly, and since most compuer users are as dumb as spider monkeys, things aren’t going to be changing. Doubly sadly, Apple has followed Gate’s suit, and turned the Mac from a computer experience into a fashion trend for spider monkeys.
my game dev will be only for Ios (iphone games) so nothing geometry heavy
so would you suggest the new mac book pro or even the mac air
as i have a 14 month old daughter that loves the mall and i can get a lot of work done while sipping coffee at the mall so i would love to get a laptop
"turned the Mac from a computer experience into a fashion trend for spider monkeys. "
… lol what? hahah that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Seriously though…I always wondered why Apple encourages bootcamp, isn’t the Mac already a full computing experience…?
/ducks
/runs away
Let’s put Macs vs PCs discussions aside for a moment and return to the original question mkay? 
Yes, GeForce 320M is better than GeForce 9400M. They both use system memory for VRAM, both are integrated GPUs, but 9400M has 1800 Mpixels/second fillrate, while 320M has 3600 Mpixels/second. Other specs higher as well.
That said, if you get a MacPro, then it will be a beast in all aspects, but putting GeForce 320M into that would be a crime against the universe. An integrated GPU for an otherwise awesome machine? Come on.
honestly, save some money! there wont be a noticeable difference between the 9400 and 320m, aside from power draw, for your needs.
BTW i feel bad about my rant earlier… I think that the Unity community embodies alot of what Apple USED to stand for. You guys are awesome, creative, savy, and you tend to think about having fun fir
LoL, I love how I derailed an entire thread using a single sentence, like a penny thrown onto railroad tracks. Hahahahahaha!
I am not arguing over the Operating Systems. I really could care less, they’re all the same to me.
I’m just stating a simple fact: The actual Computer Hardware is overpriced for the Mac.
It has nothing to do with the Operating System. It has to do with the fact they overcharge you by forcing you to pay a “Mac Label Fee” which is overpricing the computers solely because they are Mac’s.
Not O/S debate. Computer Hardware (which is the exact same in PC’s and MAC’s) which is always overpriced on a Mac.
Of course… PC’s are overpriced at places like Best Buy, which scam people every day, selling them PC’s they know nothing about. But then again, I see Best Buy as the same as MAC- overpriced fluff which lies to the ignorant masses to oversell their inferior (because they use worse hardware, for more price) products.
I think the difference between macs and PC’s is all down to personal preference and what you want to do with your machine at the end of the day.
(When I mention windows I’m talking about windows 7 in the rest of this post)
Windows 7 has made the gap between OSX and Windows very small indeed. Most peoples arguments will be about the UI and how they can’t stand one or the other, and the price of hardware. OSX is good for the fact that it’s hardware is made by the same people who make the software and so you wont get incompatibility issues and know everything will just work, where as Windows has to cater for every type of different hardware configuration possible which will inevitably cause some issues and instabilities sometimes, but windows has come along leaps and bounds in this department. Another thing with hardware is that you can’t deny that the build quality of macs are second to none, when you use a mac it ooses quality rather than a typical PC which is made of plastic and a lot are built with the cheapest parts possible. It’s true that the innards of macs and PC’s are mostly the same, but there are things like the battery and trackpad that do make the macs have that little extra quality to them (yes this only applies to laptops in this case) that most PC’s don’t. The one thing with PC’s is that you have free reign with updating them and this negates the quality argument from before to bring PC’s as being more universally liked over macs, but then you could say that the apple customer service and ‘genius bar’ is brilliant compared to all other PC manufacturers… and the argument goes on.
OSX UI is a lot more simplified than that of Windows, but windows is more flexible, and this reflects heavily in the settings in both OS’s. Where as OSX preferences is to the point and doesn’t really delve very deep in some area’s, in windows you can get down to the very nitty gritty settings if you want to to tweak things to just how you like. The wealth of software available for PC’s is huge and something that OSX can only dream of having, but on the same note the quality of OSX software is typically higher than that of PC software, which some might argue is more valuable to them. Viruses is a mute point, OSX will get hit more and more by threats the more popular it becomes, the only reason that windows is more targeted is because it’s so widely used and hence more profitable for attackers.
As a final note, I think OSX appeals to people who don’t want any hassle with their computer, they want it to just work and not have to mess around with it to get certain things to work and to do it with the up most quality, and they pay for the privilege of that. PC’s are for people who want flexibility and the wealth of software available on the market, they are also cheaper and can be upgraded easily, but you need to know your way around hardware to do this yourself which most of the general population don’t know how to do (this wont apply to all the geeks on this forum, but think about all your family asking for your help).
If I have a family member who asks for any recommendations for a computer now with the least amount of hassle, I will always point them in the direction of the mac mini as they will mostly be surfing the internet, watching videos’ and doing light work (word processing, excel etc). They will never once come back to me with any problems, and any that they do have they can quickly take it to the apple store to get it fixed professionally with the least amount of hassle.
I used PC’s solely up until about a year and a half ago when I got the basic white macbook for iOS development, now I use PC’s and Mac’s every day and I like both equally, windows is better in some areas, OSX is better in others, it all comes down to personal preference.
fair enough tilluss, but emergence is right about the hardware. It is the same stuff in PC’s, but the prices are jacked through the roof. Case in point: go look up the price for a mac 8800gt on ebay, this is a card that nvidia had discontinued, which can be had for $50 or less on ebay without the “for mac” description. The mac version is $200. Do macbooks or mac pros even have i7 yet?
One’s best bet would be to get a PC and put a MAC O/S on it…lol 
It’s entirely possible, and significantly cheaper. So if you want the MAC O/S, get a PC.
PC always. Always. Unless you also enjoy flushing money down toilets.