New Evil: Intel Integrated Graphics

Tuesday, 2006-02-28; 11:13:00



The very first thing that caught my eye about the new Mac mini: it has an integrated Intel graphics card. That's right, nothing from ATI or nVidia, we're talking about those low-end graphics chips that come with bargain-basement PCs. Not only that, but it has shared system memory. That means that there's no dedicated VRAM for the graphics card -- it uses the main memory of the system. That means that, out of the box, you effectively don't have 512 MB of RAM. According to Apple: "Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available."

Blah. I hoped that Apple wouldn't go this route, but I guess they just introduced another evil to our world.


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