mac minis and shaders/slabs

Axiom-Crux's icon

Does anyone know the compatibility of all the various jitter features with the current gen mac mini cards (intel integrated graphics?)

I am doing an install soon and I wont have very long to tweak after we get the hardware, and I just wanted to know if anyone knew of a compatibility list for these, or if they work with shaders and slabs and such...

Rob Ramirez's icon

short of someone compiling a list of supported shaders for the intel 950, you can look at the wiki page and determine the supported shader models and opengl support. e.g. vertex shader model 3.0 and pixel shader model 2.0.

from here it's just another matter of some google searches of these shader models to determine the precise capabilities of this card. i think it's the same card as the macbook, which might be easier to get ahold of for testing.

it's not a terrible card, but it's certainly limited.

Axiom-Crux's icon

cool.

thanks rob, maybe I should start emailing you my questions directly, as youve been pretty helpful on the last few! hehehe

Andrew Benson's icon

Part of the problem with the integrated cards is limitations in the texture memory and the programmable pipeline. A lot of the more simple shaders should be fine, but things like td.rota.jxs might just pass a black screen without any errors. To tell the truth, I wouldn't rely too heavily on slab-based processing or texture-intensive stuff if you're planning to use a box with the integrated card. That said, I've been pretty impressed in the past with the general performance of mac minis (probably because I didn't expect it to do much). YMMV.

Andrew B.

strimbob's icon

I got a white mac book with a 950 in it, would be happy to test a patch for you

Axiom-Crux's icon

check if this shader works, and if the included plastic, glass and phong jxs shaders that come with max work, you can use "p.jit.gl.shader" (search it, great tool) to test if you like. Thanks, please let me know if these work

strimbob's icon

yeah all those shaders worked, tried the other shaders from the material folder and the only one that did not work was that mat.sinebump

Axiom-Crux's icon

cool thanks much1

Also, I noticed they upgraded the mac mini cards to nvidea ones, they seem pretty nice... I think they will do what I need, I wonder if the museum got the new ones or not (they seem to not really know whats going on in that department)

Axiom-Crux's icon

We got lucky, they came out with the new generation of mac minis the day before the museum bought them for the install. now they have nvidea 9400 chips. Word!!!