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Jealous of friends who have a newer MacBook or iMac with the new NVIDIA graphics? Do you feel less able by comparison, what with that sad old Intel GMA chipset sported by your earlier model? Never fear, there’s hope for you yet! Enter a new tool called GMABoosterX.
GMABooster is a tool that allows you to up the clock speed on the Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) graphics chip included in your Mac Mini, MacBook, or iMac, resulting in faster graphics performance. The chip itself is capable of operating at 400MHz, but most systems throttle it down to 133/166MHz to save power. In highly unscientific tests, the program did bump the graphics capabilities of the GMA of a late-2006 MacBook (1.83GHz with the GMA 950), though not as much as the claimed 2.4x increase. Game play in Feral Interactive’s Lego Batman went from a clunky and often stuttering experience to a smooth one, with minimal stutter (and then, only when there was lots of action on screen).
Even if you’re not a gamer, general system performance is much snappier with the GMA running at full speeds. Quartz Compositor, the Mac OS X technology responsible for graphics in the operating system, can handle much more with the higher GPU speed. After running GMABoosterX, Exposé effects with lots of windows (45, Exposéd in slow motion) were smooth and crisp, without visual artifacts or jumping. Google Earth, when run in OpenCL mode, felt snappier and zoomed about with less stopping and redrawing. Are you running Vista in parallels/bootcamp? GMABooster comes in a Windows version, as well!
So it’s all fun and games, right? Well, not quite so (graphically) fast; there are two minor drawbacks. In order to use GMABooster, you will need to download and install Apple’s CHUD Tools. Once CHUD is installed, you can run GMABoosterX, but be ready—it’s command line only. Granted, the commands are very easy to follow; just double click, then follow the directions. But for us spoiled Apple folks, being forced into the command line can be a bit disconcerting.
Product [GMABoosterX] Via [Bit-Tech.net]
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