According to reliable sources, if you own an Intel Mac other than the Mini or an original Macbook — either of which shipped with Intel’s GMA950 integrated GPU — then you are already good to go for support of the full range of OpenCL acceleration features.

If you have a Mac with the Intel GMA950, then you will get most of the benefits of OpenCL though the performance level of those functions will be significantly lessened due to the lack of dedicated graphics RAM and absence of support for many programmable GPU features that exist in other chips/cards going back to the ATi X1000 series.

To get that full support, GPUs as “old” as the ATi X1600, X1800 and X1900 (the latter of which was available for PowerMac G5s with PCI Express slots, based on the PowerPC 970MP dual-core processor while the former shipped in early Intel iMacs and its X1600M cousins in Macbook Pros) will do the job….but certain nVIDIA cards from the GeForce 7000 series, which shipped in iMacs and PowerMacs during the G5 era, most likely will not.

Older Macs and older GPUs will still technically support *some* OpenCL functions going back to the same first-generation AGP graphics cards that supported the original Quartz Extreme — but unless your GPU is a true “GPGPU,” capable of being programmed and made to perform a far wider range of functions by the host system than non-GP GPUs, those OpenCL functions won’t do all that much more than its predecessors QE and Core Graphics do on the same hardware.

We will hold out hope that engineers at Apple, ATI & nVIDIA will be able to implement at least some of the most beneficial OpenCL functions on graphics processors older than the models mentioned above. In any case, we will continue to cover this and all things Snow Leopard very closely….count on Mac OS Rumors to deliver all your Apple & tech dirt before anyone else, just as we have for 14 years and counting!

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