AMD and Nvidia had their own spec and it took Apple to come up with one that brought them together! This is a good thing, ihmo -- cannot wait to see the fruits of its labors.

Bring on the Xbox70000 with a Larabee!

This is (I hope) a step in the right direction. a standard platform. no CUDA or STREAM. With one standard, this might give application developers the freedom not to chose a specific platform.

Now if only the Animation packages (Cinema4d, Max/Maya/Softimage, Blender, and others) would adapt it, this could have a profound improvements in the movie industry.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

What about writing a nice solid DX5/6/7/8 emulator for DX10(+) hardware? My HD4850 is useless for a lot of olden goldies. All sorts of compatibility problems could/should be addressed?

Snow Leopard may end up being a more important OS upgrade than Leopard, despite the lack of "new features".

So what is Microsoft's answer to OpenCL? I can't imagine that they would actually support this -- surely they will try to roll their own thing... DirectMP or something?

If Apple is so tech savvy with this game API and they have so much money in the bank,how come they don't go to a major game developer and have them make a killer 3D title that works on Apple computers?

Because they hate games, and they hate gamers--enthusiast gamers, especially. It's corporate policy over there. It's also why you'll never see current graphics offerings on desktop systems, nor a mid-tower offering that's truly upgradable.

And no, you can't trot out that MacPro sh1t; hundreds of dollars for a RAID card that's included on $100 PC motherboards is not an example of upgrade capability.

Yeah, just because your graphics card will be useful for other things besides gaming doesn't mean it will have to run all the time. Just when you're using the apps that you need it for. Obviously, the more professional stuff will appreciate it even more, but there's good stuff for everybody.

If Apple is so tech savvy with this game API and they have so much money in the bank,how come they don't go to a major game developer and have them make a killer 3D title that works on Apple computers?
Seems like it's one of the major dings we always hear about whenever Apple are mentioned....

Unified shaders aren't really a prerequisite for GPGPU operation. Afterall, the first really popular use of GPGPU by consumers was the DX9.0c X1600, X1800, and X1900 which could do video transcoding using the original AVIVO Video Convertor and were also the original GPU Folding@home clients.

Similarly, ATI's Close to Metal platform uses Brook+, but the original BrookGPU framework can actually generate output to most OpenGL and DX9 GPUs including the Radeon 9700 and even the GeforceFX 5200. It all depends on how the standard is defined. It's probably in the Khronos Group's best interest to try to include as many GPUs as possible for a larger installed base. Certainly it'd be nice if ATI supported the X1xxx series seeing they've been shown to be able to operate as GPGPU.

DirectX 11 (with DX11 Compute) is due out Feb 2009*. It's a race!

* Won't affect me, since I'm still using xp x64, and DX11 will be Vista/Win7 only.

So on an nVidia card you use OpenCL within CUDA? That seems like too many steps.

So does this mean that I don't have to choose nVidia to get PhysX acceleration in my games soon? My next graphics upgrade was going to the green team for that even tho AMD seems to have the better product right now.

efficient interoperability with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and other graphics APIs.

What's the likelihood the 'other graphics APIs' includes DX?

I think this is great but for the average home pc not so much. Your video card uses enough electricity at idle but now with your graphics card chugging all day long at 30%-100% load your electricity bill will bump up quite nicely! That is why I primarily quit doing folding at home because of the cost. Figure an average cpu uses 65 watts max and you can certainly times that by 3 or 4 running your gpu all day long. I think it will be great for scientific, developers, graphics work, etc.....disclaimer: I'm no expert so I could be totally wrong. :-)

Does this mean that Geforce 7 or Geforce 6 will be supported aside from Geforce 8 and above?