set up check

1
Hi to all,

I need to get set up for PTB experimental development in a new lab.
Within my financial grasp is an iMac 24 inch with NVIDIA GeForce 7600
GT graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM using PCI Express.

Is there anyone out there who can reassure me that they have something
similar and they are working smoothly?

I just left a post-doc position where we had Matlab 5.2 and PTB on OS9
machines. That is what I know and I was pretty proficient in getting
things done- I pray to avoid technical problems or a steep learning
curve. I need to use Screen, color clut animation, and need timing
resolution on the order of 5 ms.

Cheers,

Dawn Morales
Asst Professor
University of South Carolina, Aiken
2
Dawn,

I can resassure you that PTB works okay on such an imac. Although I haven't used it in any
way for actual experiments, I have done a bit of development on one of them, without any
problems. It's a very nice machine in any case.

The problem will be in your required timing resolution of 5 ms. That means that you need
a 200 hz screen, which the imac certainly doesn't have (it has a LCD screen, which
nominally runs at 60 hz, ie a resolution of ~16 ms).

You can attach an external screen, but I am not sure what the max framerate is that it will
drive (120 hz?).

I am not sure either whether the intel graphics in the mac mini will drive a 200 hz
monitor. It sounds you may need either a powermac or macbook pro.

Gr.

Frans

PS: regarding your learning curve, it is fairly easy to convert from OS9 to OSX PTB. Once
you figure out the deal with Flip instead of WaitBlanking you're largely there ;-). But it does
require a bit of rethinking to take advantage of all the new goodies that the opengl
underpinnings offers. (e.g. the shader stuff looks quite intriguing, but ........;-)



--- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "aikenphdawn" <aikenphdawn@...> wrote:
>
> Hi to all,
>
> I need to get set up for PTB experimental development in a new lab.
> Within my financial grasp is an iMac 24 inch with NVIDIA GeForce 7600
> GT graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM using PCI Express.
>
> Is there anyone out there who can reassure me that they have something
> similar and they are working smoothly?
>
> I just left a post-doc position where we had Matlab 5.2 and PTB on OS9
> machines. That is what I know and I was pretty proficient in getting
> things done- I pray to avoid technical problems or a steep learning
> curve. I need to use Screen, color clut animation, and need timing
> resolution on the order of 5 ms.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dawn Morales
> Asst Professor
> University of South Carolina, Aiken
>