SLI in Mac Pro. It's True Onlooker!! - Page 3

But the problem there is that the standard ATI ROM chip isn't big enough to fit both the BIOS and EFI ROMs; that's what's so custom about these X1900 XTs, they have extra-large ROM chips.

1) Ditch BIOS XT ROM
2) stitch CF part of XTX ROM onto XT
3) Get hybrid ROM onto XTX

Ludicrous?
Well, XP uses BIOS. PC video cards use BIOS (with XP), both work fine on the EFI based MacPro because Apple wanted them to. I have no doubt that BIOS based PC video cards could work with OSX if Apple wanted them to. Do you really think that Apple is incapable of coding OSX to use the most common Video card standard on the Planet?

You're missing the point. Macs are different. People buying Macs consciously choose something different. One difference is the availability of Mac OS. Another difference is the use of EFI. Both of these differences are part of what some believe makes Macs more valuable than other-brand computers. The use of EFI, for example, enables Apple to provide several easy-to-use features that are either implemented poorly or not at all on other brands' computers, such as:

• immediately having the full screen resolution available upon boot up, right from the moment you hit the power button
• being able to switch between boot devices in a graphical menu that supports hot-plugging of FireWire and USB devices, detecting bootable partitions on internal and external hard drives, optical disks and even network connections, and lets you plug and unplug, insert and eject media live
• providing basic drivers for several pieces of hardware agnostically of the operating system
• allowing administrators to insert scripts into the boot ROM

Compare that to a typical BIOS:

• you usually have to deal with a resolution round 640x480, or even a text mode far below that resolution, upon boot up. Colors are usually limited to 256 or even less. In order to achieve higher resolutions, the OS needs to manually load a driver, since the ROM only provides very archaic video modes.
• these days, many ROMs provide boot menus, whereas just a few years ago, this was still very uncommon. However, these menus typically are still text mode and very limited, not to mention they virtually never provide hot-plug support, let alone any uniform detection of whether that particular device is actually bootable. You're often forced to second-guess, and added to that, operating systems tend to provide their own additional menus which may be incompatible with each other.
• you're often forced to go into a setup screen, which is usually in text mode and near-impossible for a new user to understand, with lots of convoluted options and little indiation regarding their significance. Mainboard manufacturers tend to customize this this setup, throwing some options out, randomly renaming or reordering them, or adding some of their own that often aren't documented well. There is basically little standardization at all.

You may say "well, I don't need any of that!". But a lot of Mac users wouldn't want to miss it. Moving to BIOS would be a giant step backwards.

Does the video firmware do anything once OS X is up and running? Has anyone tried using a second card intended for PCs along side the stock card?

Going into the BIOS is something that's unnecessary for a beginner. Maybe an advanced user might want to set up hardware RAID or some form of SCSI.

TWO ROMS WON'T FIT ON THE XTX ROM CHIP, READ POST ABOVE YOURS

Not in case of trouble. Often, the default settings are either limiting (e.g., several boot devices aren't tested) or annoying (e.g., long memory test on every cold boot).

That is generally set up properly from the manufacturer so it's not necessary to get in there.

Back off topic, god why can't they ship these damned X1900 XTs.

Yes, all that sounds nice. But, if you were one of those people holding a $400-$500 card that wouldn't work on your new Mac, you might not care about those little features. I'm not one of them. I was going to order a MacPro with the x1900 even with the old price as it wasn't that bad IMO. The new prices make it a no brainer. And I'd still be waiting for my Mac. At this point, I think I'll wait 'till Jan.

The problem comes later on down the road when the Mac video card upgrade costs twice as much as the comparable PC card. I hope we see a different scenario with the MacPros. I just installed a $150 ATI x850 in a G4. The Mac version would have been around $340 and would not have been supported in an AGP 4x G4. Having a choice is always nice

Does the video firmware do anything once OS X is up and running....
I don't have a MacPro, yet, so I really don't know.

Half-Life 2 @ 4x AA/16xAF and HDR isn't that big of a deal... I do 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF on most games.

And for gaming, X1900XTX>Quadro,

Er, yes. I think that's precisely what a lot of people here are sadly screaming for.

Sunil did not suggest the Quadro for games. Quadro was never intended to be a game product.

Apparently they've forgotten that, oh shit, drivers don't write themselves!

The "problem" lies within my screen, the 30" ACD ueses 4 pixel at 1280x800 to display one, that's why it looks pixelated. However it's not thaat bad, I'll just sit a bit further away...

Those people are stupid then. I think People want apple to update their firmware and drivers so they can use a few of these select newer bios based cards, but not just walk backwards out of EFI.

Personally, I'm pissed they didn't use BIOS in the first place. They obviously did it to keep people from using it on 3rd party motherboards (using EFI instead of a jerry-rigged BIOS is much easier).

The option-key on boot menu could've been rigged into BIOS (No purdy little icons though.. is it really worth it?).

The rest of the reasons for using EFI are either misguided (and could be done under BIOS) or would be worth sacrificing so we could have some real video card selection for the years to come.

It actually woudn't be as hard as it sounds to switch to BIOS even now, as it's not essential to the functionality of OS X.

As far as updating the firmware and drivers to accept new cards, that's really not going to happen. Even if it were possible (I don't think it is), Apple's not going to do it.

Apple had a perfect opportunity to change their evil graphics card hording ways with the ICBM's, they chose not to, and it's not tough to see why.

EDIT: .... Eats babies.


If Apple used BIOS. all you'd have to do is write an OS X driver to use any video card on the market. I'm sure NVIdia may write some drivers themselves, probably ATI too.

I have a question?


Does a mac having an EFI system as opposed to a bios matter in using a stock pc video card in a mac. It is the same pci express architecture, and the cards are even recognized by osx as a video device. I placed a geforce 7600gs alongside the 7300gt and it showed up as a display adapter. It will not however detect a display attached. So i am guessing that it is a matter of nvidia provifing a firmware update to replace the non native osx compatible firmware on the card or even just having osx support the cards current chipset. While I am sure the pc cards can not handle a 128kb firmware to handle a pc/mac compatibility, I am sure there is room for a native osx revision.

Apple had a perfect opportunity to innovate by not using technology that's close to three decades old, and they chose to, and it's easy to see why.

Let's see.. they're based on UNIX which is that old.. wait, but you say all old technology is bad... how can we turn this around in Apple's favor..

You're also wrong about 'convoluted boot menus' being a product of BIOS. Yes, it's text based, but they could have volume labels and drive types if they wanted to.

I test PC motherboards for a LIVING. I deal with boot menus almost daily from tons of different manufacturers. There ARE some that are easy to read and intuitive. It's not like text somehow makes things 50 times more complicated. I saw an HP laptop the other day which gathered the volume labels and gave you a list of valid boot partitions (not just drives!)

And last time I checked, NTFS boot volumes are all labeled "WINDOWS" in the option menu.. OMG COUNTER INTUITIVE! It's amazing, if I had 2 windows partitions, I'd have a better chance of knowing which is which on *gasp* A PC!

Oh no! 256 colors! 640x480! Cry me a river.

A 3rd option would be to have the motherboard detect the ROM on the card and see if it supports full color boot menus or not. If so, use purdy icons, if not, use text.

BIOS itself may not be necessary, but neither is the 128kbyte ROMs on all the Apple video cards just to show some full-color boot menu.

And say what you want about 'pc's and their decades-old 'BIOS', if you put a 6800 Ultra FOR MAC into a G5 without the driver installed, you'll get a kernel panic on bootup!

So great! we get full color graphics! ... unless the driver isn't installed, in which case we get pwnt.


Apple to graphics cards: "My precioussss.."

Old technology is bad when something superior comes along. Unix was never actually beaten in any widespread form whatsoever. There were attempts, sure, but they ultimately all failed. The only major alternative to Unix that's left is NT, which takes a lot of cues from Unix.


Not an essential one, but effectively, yes. No other mainstream manufacturer I know of actually provides good ones.


Oh, so why don't they?


And it supported external drives via FireWire and USB that it all scanned automatically once connected? And the same for optical discs? How about network volumes?


Yes, that's correct.


I will. Provide me with a postal address as a destination.

It really is worth crying about.

(Quad-)SLI would definately be nice but it's way to expensive for a non-Hardcore-Gamer, especially if I can't use them under OSX.
That's why I'll go for the x1900xt if it gets aviable anytime at a reasonable price...

The Apple upgrade price is pretty competitive.

Fortunately, the way PC graphics cards industry works can circumvent this, making it how the Mac industry will probably start working as well. About 10% of all the cards sold have the GPUs on chip boards made by ATI or Nvidia. The rest are the product of companies like BFGtech, Sapphire, eVGA, and XFX. Thus, one of these companies might see it profitable to head into the Mac aftermarket GPU market by releasing clones of Apple's latest BTO cards with ROMs swiped from the Apple GPUs as soon as they start shipping combined with a little bit of solder and a box of 128-kilobit ROM chips.


Sure, a 20% premium isn't as bad as it's been in the past, but having such a controlled supply of GPUs is bad for prices and variety.

All it takes is for such a card producer to recognize that supplying a hybrid ROM would be a unique selling point.

The suggested "swiping" the firmware is probably going to net a copyright infringement lawsuit. I can see maybe they might offer larger ROM chips, but they probably can't legally sell boards with pre-installed copies of Apple's ROMs unless they can do a clean room implementation.


While the loss of variety is unfortunate, I really don't see an $80 difference in price being a show-stopper when one is going to spend $4k US on hardware and software.

Why couldn't they create their own EFI firmware? It's not exactly a closed system; some of it is even open source.

It's just an EFI ROM. It's not that hard to do. I mean, the docs exist to do it in the public sphere. But there's still the driver issue.

EDIT: What part of it's open source? I thought the whole EFI thing was owned by Intel. Granted, it'd be cheap to get a license, if they even charge.