1 year old ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro equiped iMac is not OpenCL compatible

No unfortunately. What's worse is Apple sold this card in the Mac Pro just over 3 months ago..

I did read information on the ATI Forum that this series of card doesn't support some hardware features of a related project they are working on, which could indicate there is reason there isn't compatibility.

But Apple knew OpenCL was coming so they shouldn't have equipped their computers with these cards anyway.

However, we should also keep in mind that Snow Leopard is still in BETA, maybe there will be support for more cards upon release.

Apple sold a similar card*, (2600 XT)

Well, Snow Leopard is not going to be any slower than Leopard, just because OpenCL is not supported on your Mac. For graphics, OpenGL is still supported in the same way it was for Leopard, and that's still the primary purpose of a +graphics card+, to accelerate graphics. Snow Leopard will no doubt be faster and use resources more efficiently due to all the general optimization. OpenCL only comes into play if the developer re-codes the application to take advantage of the new feature; that's not going to happen overnight and its use is not applicable (nor appropriate) across the board. I think people overestimate (by a large degree) the impact of OpenCL to the Mac's general operation.

I second Kenichi. OpenCL is over-hyped; it will come into play eventually, but only in selected applications.

With Snow Leopard, it is "supported" in every way it was supported when you made the decision to buy it. In fact, it is supported BETTER, because of the increase in 64-bit code, elimination of PowerPC code, new Finder, Grand Central, and many other improvements.

Your iMac also does not support up to 8GB of RAM, like the 2009 model. It does not support a 30-inch display connected to the video port, like the 2009 model. It probably has a smaller internal drive. Why? For the same reason OpenCL is not supported (because it's an older model).

One year is a long time for a computer. It's been less than 8 years since a brand NEW iMac had a CRT, PowerPC G3 processor, 256mb of stock RAM, and 16 whopping megabytes of VRAM. The 2008 model was released in April 2008. For the designers and engineers, its design and specs were probably set at least six months earlier, to allow time for testing and manufacturing to gear up. Six months earlier is when Leopard was released, in October 2007. Your iMac was designed with Leopard in mind, not Snow Leopard. Yet Snow Leopard will provide significant technical improvements that will probably improve general performance (in noticeable ways) from Day One, and those improvements will have nothing to do with OpenCL.

I got mine a little over six months ago. It won't support Open CL either. I think I'll learn to live with the disappointment, and you probably will too.

I think you may fail to see all the other benefits of Snow Leopard because of OpenCL fixation. 🙂

Remember, (1) the primary purpose of a graphics card is to accelerate graphics processing. Snow Leopard supports your graphics card for graphics processing every bit as well as Leopard does now.

(2) Open CL will not make graphics processing any faster. It allows developers to off-load non-graphics processing to the GPU, if they can find appropriate uses and recode their apps. If done improperly, I can see one app degrading the graphics processing of another, due to OpenCL. On your older iMac, your GPU will remain dedicated to graphics processing.

Look on the positives of Snow Leopard, and move on...

The reason for not including it might actually be technical. Read this

http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36536#

Not a big deal. I don't see any real big uses for openCL, for most typical users aside from video encoding.

That being said ATI GPUs +do have+ h264 decoding hardware since the x1600 I believe. That is one feature that a lot of people benefit from and only the newest 9400 based models are getting it.

YES it is a big deal

having an 8 core macpro with 4 ATI 2600XT in it and no opencl

and i do need the speed rendering/video etc
cannot put 4 newer cards in it cause of too less power on the pci slots (±350watt)

bah.

I think hd 2600 has all it needs for opencl / grandcentral :
http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2600/specs.html
especially this :
Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats

* High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats

# Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration

I hope either apple will include support of grandcentral for hd 2600 in next update of snowleopard , or some hacker will !