Cards
Bigheadache said:
The issue is not that it is hard to make Mac versions, its the fact that manufacturers have to essentially do a second production run for what is basically a small market. If Macs had better interoperability then the manufacturers could just do one huge run, and supply a mac driver and a pc driver. And Apple don't manufacture the card, they contract that out.
This is true, and there are other factors. A company that offers Mac support must be prepared to provide separate tech support for Mac AND also provide it for the long run. AND they have to deal with headaches like drivers breaking with every minor revision of OS X.
I keep having to remind myself that yes, even with the crappy video cards Apple stuffs in the G5s it's wayyyy better than when they had even ****tier OEM boards back in the day, and we only had NuBus or onboard unaccelerated VRAM. And way wayyy better than when I had an Apple IIGS and sat on my ass wondering why more people didn't write programs for 3200 color mode or to take advantage of that wonderful 640 * 480 mode with only 16 colors.
A friend gave me a Radeon 9600 OEM out of his G5 as he waits for his nVidia 6800 and 30". I plopped it in, replacing the nVidia 5200FX and you know what? Except for when I play a quick round of Halo, it doesn't really make a bit of difference. My menus and windows are infinitesmally snappier. And you know what? If fairies and elves were to wave a magic wand and stick a nVidia 6800 Ultra in my 1.8 GHz single G5, I bet I *STILL* wouldn't notice, or even give a rat's ass. And yes I can already hear the peanut gallery saying ooooo now you can run those cool 3D demos that ATI has on their site, to which I say, yeah sure, I will be emotionally fulfilled for about 34 seconds now I have to get back to work. Sheesh.
Apple, to its credit, recognizes that while the nVidia 5200FX is not state of the art, at least in 3D, they don't really NEED that when 85% of its users only need perfunctory 2D and that the application to bring Quartz Extreme to its knees (or a user crazy enough to put it in such a situation,) apart from the occasional benchmark, doesn't exist yet, nor is ever likely to. And if someone DOES want big honking 3D, at least they can get kinda sorta cutting edge.. Apple only claims that its own software and the G5 is state of the art, nothing else.