Snow Leopard OpenCL support for GeForce 8800GS

Welcome to Apple Discussions:
This link might be useful:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html

The Official Apple Snow Leopard page to which you reference states:
OpenCL
NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.
ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

Unless something changes, and speculation is a no-no on these boards, it appears that your graphics card does not support OpenCL.
You might look into updating your card, if necessary and if possible.
All this would mean, as you note, is that your system could not utilize the new OpenCL technology, not that it would not work at all.
That's the best news I have. I suggest waiting for more info or until the OS is released.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

I was wondering too, and hope it's just a mistake... I paid an extra price to have this more powerful card, and it was less than a year...

Someone told me all the 8800 should be compatible, but as it's not any official response, I still wonder.

The entire GeForce 8000 line uses the exact same GPU. Since the 8800 GT is supported, that implies the GS model should work too, theoretically. You can look at which cards are supported by nVidia CUDA technology, which uses the same principles underlying OpenCL, here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cudalearnproducts.html

As you can see, the 8800 GS is specifically listed. This means it has the hardware potential to run OpenCL. However, this doesn't guarantee it'll be recognized by Snow Leopard as an OpenCL-compatable card.

If this is the case, I recommend one of two things:

1) E-mail Apple's dev team and ask them to officially support the card.

2) If you're fairly tech-savy, modify some system files to make OpenCL work with the GS. (Not recommended unless you're really comfortable with this!)

Yohmi wrote:
I was wondering too, and hope it's just a mistake... I paid an extra price to have this more powerful card, and it was less than a year...

Someone told me all the 8800 should be compatible, but as it's not any official response, I still wonder.

Sadly, in the list I linked to
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html
it's at the bottom of the line

JetBlackRX89 wrote:
The entire GeForce 8000 line uses the exact same GPU. Since the 8800 GT is supported, that implies the GS model should work too, theoretically. You can look at which cards are supported by nVidia CUDA technology, which uses the same principles underlying OpenCL, here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cudalearnproducts.html

As you can see, the 8800 GS is specifically listed. This means it has the hardware potential to run OpenCL. However, this doesn't guarantee it'll be recognized by Snow Leopard as an OpenCL-compatable card.

Again, check the comparative specs:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html
It's at the bottom end

I don't get it, I don't see any information about OpenCL in the linked page... the last line talks about SLI, but it has nothing to do with OpenCL (SLI is the ability for several graphic cards to cooperate between them, not CPU with GPU, it's an older technology, made for another purpose).

Yohmi wrote:
I don't get it, I don't see any information about OpenCL in the linked page... the last line talks about SLI, but it has nothing to do with OpenCL

That was not my point at all.
You were asking why your card was not included in Apple's specs.
I was pointing out that it is at the low end of that family and that might be the reason.
This is why speculation about future products is inane.

Oh, ok, I'm sorry 😉
But if you compare the specs, it's not exactly the bottom... better core clock than the GTS, better shader clock than the GTS, better texture fill rate than the GTS, same stream processor than the GTS, better memory amount than the low-rate of the GTS, only the memory bandwith and the memory interface are worse.

Anyway, just as a reminder, the 8800 GS was the optionnal high end card of the highest 24" iMac of summer 08.
By the way, OpenCL is supported on the 8600M GT, which is a very lower profile card (as it's made for laptops only).

On another site, somebody made a good point. The GTS model is a notebook graphics card, which is slightly less powerful than the GS. This makes it odd that the GTS would be OpenCL capable, but not the GS. However, here's the real kicker: The GTS was never used in any Apple notebook computer. Therefore, it's possible, but not guaranteed, that "GTS" was a simple typo for "GS."

A friend of mine is a dev with the same early 2008 iMac as I have. He's about to install Snow Leopard and determine if it indeed runs with OpenCL enabled. I'll let you know how it goes. *Fingers crossed*

If your card isn't supported and you think it should be TELL APPLE.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Alright. I've got good news. My friend says there's not much documentation up yet about OpenCL and that the current Snow Leopard release might not even have support for it yet, as it's more of a testing bed for basic compatibility with Snow Leopard's main system, acceleration techniques notwithstanding.

He filed a ticket though, and an engineer stated that the 8800 GS is really a GTS card with a "nickname," and the specs referred to on the Snow Leopards page list do include the 2008 iMac's high-end card. In fact, the 8800 GS is as powerful as the GT 130 that's in current iMacs, and actually more powerful in certain benchmarks.

So I hope this settles the doubt. 🙂

Great news! Thank you very much!!

JetBlackRX89 wrote:
He filed a ticket though, and an engineer stated that the 8800 GS is really a GTS card with a "nickname," and the specs referred to on the Snow Leopards page list do include the 2008 iMac's high-end card. In fact, the 8800 GS is as powerful as the GT 130 that's in current iMacs, and actually more powerful in certain benchmarks.

FWIW, I recently researched as best I could the convoluted NVIDIA naming scheme before deciding to buy an Apple-refurbished 2008 iMac with the 8800 GS GPU. I more or less concluded the same thing: that the 8800 GS Apple uses is a "nicknamed" GPU that is approximately the same as the GTS, & that this 2008 iMac's GPU is certainly more powerful than the GT 120 & maybe more powerful than the GT 130, too. (The entire GT XXX line appears just to be renamed 8800 series GPU's, apparently to simplify marketing with a 'bigger number is more powerful' rule.)

This would help explain something not previously noted in this thread: NVIDIA's specs list the 8800 GS as having 384 MB of onboard memory but the iMac's version has 512 MB.

However, this doesn't mean Snow Leopard will recognize the iMac's 8800 GS as a GPU supported by OpenCL, even though the GPU seems more than powerful enough to run it. For one thing, OpenCL was ratified as a standard in December 2008, so it is possible no NVIDIA GPU included in an iMac released before that time will be supported. Only time will tell, I think.

It may be an academic issue anyway: apps have to be written specifically to use the OpenCL technology, & there are not that many of them that could put the GPU's massive parallelism to work apart from graphics rendering, so even if the GPU isn't supported by OpenCL it may not matter to most users.

All. The 8800GS as found in the iMac is actually an 8800m GTS.

I noticed Apple must have revised their specs at some point. The 8800GS is now supported:

OpenCL

requires one of the following graphics cards or graphics processors:

* NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, *GeForce 8800 GS*, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX5600
* ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870