Another dynamic at work here is that all new Macs come with acceptable graphics cards. Acceptable may be a relative term, I know. And you can argue that models that haven?t been updated in a while leave a lot of room for improvement in their graphics cards. However, new model new Macs have decent cards. Maybe not decent enough to run Maya, maybe not top-of-the-line, but still not bad.
On the PC side of the fence, there?s a huge market for small mom & pop shops and larger (Alienware) shops that assemble their own custom brand of highly configurable PCs. There?s also a very large market in the do-it-yourself crowd. And, there?s yet another large market for people buying a low-end Dell/Gateway/whatever that uses a very very low-end graphics solution (probably on-board video). People buying any of these machines are part of the much larger market for graphics cards for the PC world.
For the Mac, there are no mom & pop shops, no Alienware-type shops, no third-party Mac makers at all. There?s no build-it-yourself Macs. And, there are no Macs with such a low-end cheesy graphics solution that the customer will want to run out and buy a new card within 10 minutes of turning the thing on.
So the ONLY thing left is people who want to upgrade their once decent graphics card to something better to get a little bit more use out of their Mac before tossing it and buying a new one. Which is the basic reason there aren?t any good choices for Mac users.
If some company thought there might be a profit in it, they would likely test the waters by making a card or two and see what happened. ATI does that now and then. The fact that they don?t come full steam into the Mac market is probably an indication of how well their aftermarket cards for the Mac are selling.
Another dynamic at work here is that all new Macs come with acceptable graphics cards.
Without a doubt, I think my 2 year old iBook with its 8meg ATI still has a better video card than most entry level PC laptops with intel extreme graphics. The irony is that the intel graphics is cheaper, and perfectly capable of all the 2d acceleration you need for word processing and the like, and the iBooks ATI, while more expensive, just isnt good enough to do anymore than the intel. It does play games better, but nothing new
Quote:
If some company thought there might be a profit in it, they would likely test the waters by making a card or two and see what happened. ATI does that now and then. The fact that they don?t come full steam into the Mac market is probably an indication of how well their aftermarket cards for the Mac are selling.
And when graphics cards used to cost an arm and a leg there was a very strong Mac market for third party video cards, even though Apple sold some very nice ( for their time ) accelerated cards.
It would seem that video cards, despite the expense of high end cards, have become a commodity market, and manufactures need huge numbers of sales to support themselves.
It is interesting to think that despite how much we complain about the sad state of iMac/eMac video cards, even if they were upgradable there would be nothing to upgrade to.
"It is interesting to think that despite how much we complain about the sad state of iMac/eMac video cards, even if they were upgradable there would be nothing to upgrade to."
BINGO! That's it.
All those who truly believe the Mac aftermarket is too small to be worth the effort think again. People are still running with their old B&W's. All these people would kill for the opportunity to be able to purchase a Radeon 9600 PCI card but alas that will never be. It's been a long while and several powermac updates since the first AGP based mac. There certainly are a whack of people looking to get a better graphics card without having to buy only the high end like the 9800 Pro. Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing. Remember how ATI was dropped as primo supplier when a PR leak deminished Job's big splash at a Macworld? Remember how only Apple supplied superdrives would allow DVD playback? ATI is certainly not going to release a product Jobs won't embrace. Our choices for many Mac upgrades have certainly improved but for video cards, they've actually deminished to the point where what you get when you buy your Mac is pretty much what you'll have to live with for several years if not for the life of your Mac.
Which is why WWDC is the deadline for me. I can no longer sit, and wait for another year like I have been. I was ready at WWDC last year. I can't even believe I've given Apple this long. If they don't come through I will be spending $5000.00+ on a PC. Can you believe that. My first PC. I never thought it would come to this.
Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing. Remember how ATI was dropped as primo supplier when a PR leak deminished Job's big splash at a Macworld? Remember how only Apple supplied superdrives would allow DVD playback? ATI is certainly not going to release a product Jobs won't embrace.
Apparently that control doesn't extend to anything else, because the video card is about the only thing you can't replace aftermarket - including CPUs. The flap about ATi had as much to do with the fact that Apple discovered at the very last minute that RADEONs in Cubes needed fans as it did with anything else. (I have a Cube with a RADEON myself. They overheat without the fan.)
There are a couple of things at play here: One is that in many cases there's nothing to upgrade (eMac, iMac, the notebooks); in most cases what Apple ships is good enough that by the time the video's too slow, so is everything else; and the last is that OS X, unlike Windows, actually demands a certain level, and a certain kind, of video acceleration, and its demands are still evolving. Under OS 9, companies like Formac could offer specialized cards because the graphics model had been stable since about 1986. In many ways OS X is still waiting out the current generation of cards. Once things settle down and shake out a bit, we might see more options. But the direction is clear: Non-programmable cards are not welcome. Unfortunately, a lot of the low- to midrange graphics offerings have very little programmability, and therefore very little general use under OS X.
On top of all that, AGP's on the way out, sooner rather than later, and not just at the high end either. Intel's already announced an integrated graphics chipset that uses PCI Express.
Interestingly, MrNSX, an ATi engineer late of AI, posted in Ars that the much-scorned integrated graphics chipset is actually getting fairly capable. This brings back an interesting option for Apple: Shipping machines with integrated graphics and graphics card expansion options. Furthermore, PCI Express is hot-pluggable, which opens the possibility that installing such a card would be far more painless -and therefor far more consumer-friendly - than installing an AGP card is currently. This could be win-win for Apple, and for people who want expandable graphics at the mid to low end.
In many ways OS X is still waiting out the current generation of cards. Once things settle down and shake out a bit, we might see more options. But the direction is clear: Non-programmable cards are not welcome. Unfortunately, a lot of the low- to midrange graphics offerings have very little programmability, and therefore very little general use under OS X.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here -- OS X, however, does not use the GPU programmability. It exposes the capability to program the GPU via OpenGL, but I'm fairly sure that the OS itself is not leveraging those capabilities. Neither does most current software (I don't know of any Mac games which do). We'd see a lot more cool graphic stuff if it did...
[there is one exception that I can think of, and that is a real-time video editing program which runs shaders on video frames as it plays -- the name escapes me]
It costs companies like ATI and nVidia millions of dollars to design, manufacture, test, package, and market graphics cards.
With the Wintel world, ATI and nVidia can easily recoup these expenditures. But because the Macintosh world is so polarized and small, it is not cost-effective to spend money on products that may not sell.
It's important to remember these facts the next time someone tells you that, "Apple's market share is not important."
Regards,
-Antithesis
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
What R&D? I have read countless times of people buying retail PC cards, and flashing them with mac bios and they run fine. So it seems that all a PC vender would need to do is flash a card with a Mac BIOS instead of a PC one, and sell it. No need to build a different board, or included anythign different at all. Sure, maybe some of the hgher end cards can't just be flashed, they might also require some drivers, but that is still not goign to be that much R&D compared to havign to develop a new board, etc...
Not sure if the newest cards are flashable... anyone?
Not sure if the newest cards are flashable... anyone?
Ya, I am a little out of the times. I just recall the xlr8your mac forums with talks of flashing geforce 2mx and geforce 3.
Some one recently was working on flashing a Radeon 9800, but ran into a problem. The pc card only had room for a 64k bios, and it needed to be 128k for the mac bios. They ended up removing the chip and repacing it with a larger one. So what does that show? That the only difference is the size of the rom, and the bios it is flashed with. Which goes back to my point of it not costing millions to market a mac card.
[there is one exception that I can think of, and that is a real-time video editing program which runs shaders on video frames as it plays -- the name escapes me
Don't some of ATI's video recording software do this (or is all still done by CPU grunt) ?
Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing.
Steve doesn't give a rip about what video cards are capable of doing - other than they be capable of helping to sell Macs. Steve does care about Apple's profits. If you're not able to upgrade your video - either because it's not upgradeable or there's nothing to upgrade to - you're more likely to buy a whole new Mac.
Same idea behind the AIO Macs. When you buy a new one, you also have to buy a new monitor.
Being able to upgrade doesn't help Apple's bottom line. That was the "old school" thinking. The new thinking is that, while it may have helped Apple in the past, and it may have helped the short-term profits, this is having a negative effect on the long-term marketshare for the company.
Which is why the next iMac will NOT be an AIO design. And maybe, just maybe, it will also be easy to upgrade the graphics card.
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
You might want to take a look at another one of the messages I've posted above.
It is regarding an old, flashable VooDoo3 card.
The fact is, different parts, memory sizes, and firmware are placed in Macintosh cards than in Wintel cards. Each time you switch out a part, it requires NEW engineering for assembly, quality control, and test. And each of those things costs MONEY.
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
The fact is that it doesn't matter if the cards are completely identical. Building a product is only part of the cost of entering a market. The rest of the cost is the packaging, the documentation, the marketing, the distribution, the (post-sale) customer support, and probably something else that I'm forgetting. The Mac and PC markets are quite different and so you can't just write "MacOS X" on your compatiblity list and be done with it. Given the 2% market share and the tiny fraction of that 2% that will actually swap video cards it just doesn't justify a full blown add-in board product line. Frankly we should be happy with the relatively uptodate offerings that ATI has put into the Mac market lately.
Being able to upgrade doesn't help Apple's bottom line. That was the "old school" thinking. The new thinking is that, while it may have helped Apple in the past, and it may have helped the short-term profits, this is having a negative effect on the long-term marketshare for the company.
I agree! It doesn't help Apple's bottom line when a lot of people want to buy a PC that has the potential to be upgraded.
I just doesn't make sense to me that there is next to no options available for the PowerMac. The PowerMac will never survive as a digital hub, it is a pro machine for pro users and why Apple would not seek to have multiple high and low end options is confusing to me.
My one thought is that with the new interconnect technologies that are emerging this year (Hypertransport2 and PCI-Express and SATA 2), that Apple is hard at work to come up with new form factors that will make us all Think Different. One of the things that I keep reading over and over again is that these new technologies will allow for radical form factors not possible with existing standard technology.
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
That's kind of like saying that there is no difference between Windows and Linux because they both run on x86 CPUs and chipsets. Believe it or not, there is a whole software side to graphics cards and this is where quite a bit of time and energy and money goes. As GPUs become more complex and do more things, their drivers become harder to write, to QA, to document, etc. All this takes time and money.
People with 450MHz G4s should go out and buy a single processor G5. Folks, it is time to upgrade. I genuinely struggle to believe that if such a amachine is slow, that the only bottleneck in is your GPU.
A question for the hardware/software gurus. Could Apple solve this with software, rewriting drivers that will work with the PC firmware on existing cards. It seams to me that this would be the easiest way to get rid of the problem of higher cost components. This may not be officially Apple's problem, but it does come into the purchasing decision of some people and professional fields.
A question for the hardware/software gurus. Could Apple solve this with software, rewriting drivers that will work with the PC firmware on existing cards. It seams to me that this would be the easiest way to get rid of the problem of higher cost components. This may not be officially Apple's problem, but it does come into the purchasing decision of some people and professional fields.
No. Drivers are platform (WIndows/OS X) and hardware (x86/PPC) specific. Imagine the "blazing speed" of your video card running under Virtual PC. Besides, drivers are actually quite complex beasts. This would be a significant development undertaking for Apple with not very much return.
Besides, drivers are actually quite complex beasts. This would be a significant development undertaking for Apple with not very much return.
On the other hand, what Apple has done is take care of the OpenGL implementation (which is usually part of the driver on Windows, and a major differentiator between "consumer" and "pro" cards) and in isolating common functionality into classes that drivers can inherit from (IOKit).
So although writing the whole driver is a bit much, they have at least tried to make it as easy as it's going to be to write a driver for OS X, while preserving a high degree of uniformity and consistency as far as the system API goes.
Given that ATi and (I believe) nVIDIA now have unified drivers as well (in the sense that they have one driver codebase that drives all their cards for any given platform), I think the main thing holding back the retail graphics card offerings for the Mac is the near-total lack of a market.
Comments
On the PC side of the fence, there?s a huge market for small mom & pop shops and larger (Alienware) shops that assemble their own custom brand of highly configurable PCs. There?s also a very large market in the do-it-yourself crowd. And, there?s yet another large market for people buying a low-end Dell/Gateway/whatever that uses a very very low-end graphics solution (probably on-board video). People buying any of these machines are part of the much larger market for graphics cards for the PC world.
For the Mac, there are no mom & pop shops, no Alienware-type shops, no third-party Mac makers at all. There?s no build-it-yourself Macs. And, there are no Macs with such a low-end cheesy graphics solution that the customer will want to run out and buy a new card within 10 minutes of turning the thing on.
So the ONLY thing left is people who want to upgrade their once decent graphics card to something better to get a little bit more use out of their Mac before tossing it and buying a new one. Which is the basic reason there aren?t any good choices for Mac users.
If some company thought there might be a profit in it, they would likely test the waters by making a card or two and see what happened. ATI does that now and then. The fact that they don?t come full steam into the Mac market is probably an indication of how well their aftermarket cards for the Mac are selling.
Originally posted by PB
After reading the posts in this thread, I feel happy that Macs have at all a graphics card by default
Amen brother
Originally posted by Faeylyn
Another dynamic at work here is that all new Macs come with acceptable graphics cards.
Without a doubt, I think my 2 year old iBook with its 8meg ATI still has a better video card than most entry level PC laptops with intel extreme graphics. The irony is that the intel graphics is cheaper, and perfectly capable of all the 2d acceleration you need for word processing and the like, and the iBooks ATI, while more expensive, just isnt good enough to do anymore than the intel. It does play games better, but nothing new
If some company thought there might be a profit in it, they would likely test the waters by making a card or two and see what happened. ATI does that now and then. The fact that they don?t come full steam into the Mac market is probably an indication of how well their aftermarket cards for the Mac are selling.
And when graphics cards used to cost an arm and a leg there was a very strong Mac market for third party video cards, even though Apple sold some very nice ( for their time ) accelerated cards.
It would seem that video cards, despite the expense of high end cards, have become a commodity market, and manufactures need huge numbers of sales to support themselves.
It is interesting to think that despite how much we complain about the sad state of iMac/eMac video cards, even if they were upgradable there would be nothing to upgrade to.
BINGO! That's it.
All those who truly believe the Mac aftermarket is too small to be worth the effort think again. People are still running with their old B&W's. All these people would kill for the opportunity to be able to purchase a Radeon 9600 PCI card but alas that will never be. It's been a long while and several powermac updates since the first AGP based mac. There certainly are a whack of people looking to get a better graphics card without having to buy only the high end like the 9800 Pro. Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing. Remember how ATI was dropped as primo supplier when a PR leak deminished Job's big splash at a Macworld? Remember how only Apple supplied superdrives would allow DVD playback? ATI is certainly not going to release a product Jobs won't embrace. Our choices for many Mac upgrades have certainly improved but for video cards, they've actually deminished to the point where what you get when you buy your Mac is pretty much what you'll have to live with for several years if not for the life of your Mac.
Originally posted by DVD_Junkie
Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing. Remember how ATI was dropped as primo supplier when a PR leak deminished Job's big splash at a Macworld? Remember how only Apple supplied superdrives would allow DVD playback? ATI is certainly not going to release a product Jobs won't embrace.
Apparently that control doesn't extend to anything else, because the video card is about the only thing you can't replace aftermarket - including CPUs. The flap about ATi had as much to do with the fact that Apple discovered at the very last minute that RADEONs in Cubes needed fans as it did with anything else. (I have a Cube with a RADEON myself. They overheat without the fan.)
There are a couple of things at play here: One is that in many cases there's nothing to upgrade (eMac, iMac, the notebooks); in most cases what Apple ships is good enough that by the time the video's too slow, so is everything else; and the last is that OS X, unlike Windows, actually demands a certain level, and a certain kind, of video acceleration, and its demands are still evolving. Under OS 9, companies like Formac could offer specialized cards because the graphics model had been stable since about 1986. In many ways OS X is still waiting out the current generation of cards. Once things settle down and shake out a bit, we might see more options. But the direction is clear: Non-programmable cards are not welcome. Unfortunately, a lot of the low- to midrange graphics offerings have very little programmability, and therefore very little general use under OS X.
On top of all that, AGP's on the way out, sooner rather than later, and not just at the high end either. Intel's already announced an integrated graphics chipset that uses PCI Express.
Interestingly, MrNSX, an ATi engineer late of AI, posted in Ars that the much-scorned integrated graphics chipset is actually getting fairly capable. This brings back an interesting option for Apple: Shipping machines with integrated graphics and graphics card expansion options. Furthermore, PCI Express is hot-pluggable, which opens the possibility that installing such a card would be far more painless -and therefor far more consumer-friendly - than installing an AGP card is currently. This could be win-win for Apple, and for people who want expandable graphics at the mid to low end.
Originally posted by Amorph
In many ways OS X is still waiting out the current generation of cards. Once things settle down and shake out a bit, we might see more options. But the direction is clear: Non-programmable cards are not welcome. Unfortunately, a lot of the low- to midrange graphics offerings have very little programmability, and therefore very little general use under OS X.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here -- OS X, however, does not use the GPU programmability. It exposes the capability to program the GPU via OpenGL, but I'm fairly sure that the OS itself is not leveraging those capabilities. Neither does most current software (I don't know of any Mac games which do). We'd see a lot more cool graphic stuff if it did...
[there is one exception that I can think of, and that is a real-time video editing program which runs shaders on video frames as it plays -- the name escapes me]
Originally posted by Antithesis
It costs companies like ATI and nVidia millions of dollars to design, manufacture, test, package, and market graphics cards.
With the Wintel world, ATI and nVidia can easily recoup these expenditures. But because the Macintosh world is so polarized and small, it is not cost-effective to spend money on products that may not sell.
It's important to remember these facts the next time someone tells you that, "Apple's market share is not important."
Regards,
-Antithesis
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
Originally posted by kupan787
What R&D? I have read countless times of people buying retail PC cards, and flashing them with mac bios and they run fine. So it seems that all a PC vender would need to do is flash a card with a Mac BIOS instead of a PC one, and sell it. No need to build a different board, or included anythign different at all. Sure, maybe some of the hgher end cards can't just be flashed, they might also require some drivers, but that is still not goign to be that much R&D compared to havign to develop a new board, etc...
Not sure if the newest cards are flashable... anyone?
Originally posted by emig647
Not sure if the newest cards are flashable... anyone?
Ya, I am a little out of the times. I just recall the xlr8your mac forums with talks of flashing geforce 2mx and geforce 3.
Some one recently was working on flashing a Radeon 9800, but ran into a problem. The pc card only had room for a 64k bios, and it needed to be 128k for the mac bios. They ended up removing the chip and repacing it with a larger one. So what does that show? That the only difference is the size of the rom, and the bios it is flashed with. Which goes back to my point of it not costing millions to market a mac card.
[there is one exception that I can think of, and that is a real-time video editing program which runs shaders on video frames as it plays -- the name escapes me
Don't some of ATI's video recording software do this (or is all still done by CPU grunt) ?
Originally posted by DVD_Junkie
Fwiw, I believe Apple, more likely Steve Jobs, wants total control over the video cards and what they're capable of doing.
Steve doesn't give a rip about what video cards are capable of doing - other than they be capable of helping to sell Macs. Steve does care about Apple's profits. If you're not able to upgrade your video - either because it's not upgradeable or there's nothing to upgrade to - you're more likely to buy a whole new Mac.
Same idea behind the AIO Macs. When you buy a new one, you also have to buy a new monitor.
Being able to upgrade doesn't help Apple's bottom line. That was the "old school" thinking. The new thinking is that, while it may have helped Apple in the past, and it may have helped the short-term profits, this is having a negative effect on the long-term marketshare for the company.
Which is why the next iMac will NOT be an AIO design. And maybe, just maybe, it will also be easy to upgrade the graphics card.
Originally posted by emig647
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
You might want to take a look at another one of the messages I've posted above.
It is regarding an old, flashable VooDoo3 card.
The fact is, different parts, memory sizes, and firmware are placed in Macintosh cards than in Wintel cards. Each time you switch out a part, it requires NEW engineering for assembly, quality control, and test. And each of those things costs MONEY.
Regards,
-Antithesis
Originally posted by emig647
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
The fact is that it doesn't matter if the cards are completely identical. Building a product is only part of the cost of entering a market. The rest of the cost is the packaging, the documentation, the marketing, the distribution, the (post-sale) customer support, and probably something else that I'm forgetting. The Mac and PC markets are quite different and so you can't just write "MacOS X" on your compatiblity list and be done with it. Given the 2% market share and the tiny fraction of that 2% that will actually swap video cards it just doesn't justify a full blown add-in board product line. Frankly we should be happy with the relatively uptodate offerings that ATI has put into the Mac market lately.
Being able to upgrade doesn't help Apple's bottom line. That was the "old school" thinking. The new thinking is that, while it may have helped Apple in the past, and it may have helped the short-term profits, this is having a negative effect on the long-term marketshare for the company.
I agree! It doesn't help Apple's bottom line when a lot of people want to buy a PC that has the potential to be upgraded.
My one thought is that with the new interconnect technologies that are emerging this year (Hypertransport2 and PCI-Express and SATA 2), that Apple is hard at work to come up with new form factors that will make us all Think Different. One of the things that I keep reading over and over again is that these new technologies will allow for radical form factors not possible with existing standard technology.
Originally posted by emig647
Had to message you as soon as I saw this... so someone might have said the samething by now...
There is barely ANY difference between WinTel cards and Mac cards... You're acting like they have to design from the ground up! Remember the good old days when one could go out and buy a geforce 3 (wintel card) then slap it in a pc... flash it... throw it in a mac and it would work...
There is definitely more to the puzzle then "cards being created for mac"... apple definitely has say in this.
That's kind of like saying that there is no difference between Windows and Linux because they both run on x86 CPUs and chipsets. Believe it or not, there is a whole software side to graphics cards and this is where quite a bit of time and energy and money goes. As GPUs become more complex and do more things, their drivers become harder to write, to QA, to document, etc. All this takes time and money.
People with 450MHz G4s should go out and buy a single processor G5. Folks, it is time to upgrade. I genuinely struggle to believe that if such a amachine is slow, that the only bottleneck in is your GPU.
Originally posted by JCG
A question for the hardware/software gurus. Could Apple solve this with software, rewriting drivers that will work with the PC firmware on existing cards. It seams to me that this would be the easiest way to get rid of the problem of higher cost components. This may not be officially Apple's problem, but it does come into the purchasing decision of some people and professional fields.
No. Drivers are platform (WIndows/OS X) and hardware (x86/PPC) specific. Imagine the "blazing speed" of your video card running under Virtual PC. Besides, drivers are actually quite complex beasts. This would be a significant development undertaking for Apple with not very much return.
Originally posted by Yevgeny
Besides, drivers are actually quite complex beasts. This would be a significant development undertaking for Apple with not very much return.
On the other hand, what Apple has done is take care of the OpenGL implementation (which is usually part of the driver on Windows, and a major differentiator between "consumer" and "pro" cards) and in isolating common functionality into classes that drivers can inherit from (IOKit).
So although writing the whole driver is a bit much, they have at least tried to make it as easy as it's going to be to write a driver for OS X, while preserving a high degree of uniformity and consistency as far as the system API goes.
Given that ATi and (I believe) nVIDIA now have unified drivers as well (in the sense that they have one driver codebase that drives all their cards for any given platform), I think the main thing holding back the retail graphics card offerings for the Mac is the near-total lack of a market.