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"ATI Radeon 2900XT Finally Released"

It gotten nice reviews at case-mod.com:
Submited By: Clarence Boddicker from Delta City, USA on 05/12/2007
Beats the pants off of my 3dfx Voodoo2. Might even be as good as one of those GeForce2 cards. Hopefully it'll work in my 600mhz PIII with 128mb RAM....
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product26 said:
good now maybe prices on the X1900XT will drop
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Well the x1900xt has dropped pretty steep over the past 9 months (when Ati didnt have a DX10 part), so i'm not sure how much more it'll drop. Whether or not it becomes much cheaper depends on how competitive it is against the x2600xt.
 
Play4keeps said:
at 400$WOW
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$400 is actually not THAT crazy of a price.

i'm pretty sure apple will rip people off yet again if this ever shows up as a BTO option for the Mac Pro, like they're doing with the current cards (add $150 for EACH additional 256mb 7300gt?!?!? the cards go for half of that! 🙄
 
When pictures surfaced of the card before the NDA's expired and the product was even announced, one of the shots was a 2900XT variant with a long cooler, and was said to be their "Mac" version, so I would say its not out of the realm of possibility for it to show up in Mac Pros soon.
 
TheFuzz said:
i think op was asking if it was available
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oh, right. The punctuation threw me off

Apple's not all that concerned with video card options in their mac pros. I wouldn't expect the 2900XT but their cards seem to be selected at random.

Gamers don't buy mac pros, and Maya for mac is nearly worthless. I doubt Apple feels much of a financial impact from having a laughable video card selection.

Luckily, there are some 3rd party drivers for video cards out there. It doesn't look like any of the brand-spanking new cards are compatible though.

Personally, I prefer NVidia in my macs. ATI has crap visual quality and isn't as optimized for OpenGL as NVidia. Not to mention ATI's heat issues that go all the way back to the 9800's.
 
I prefer ATi to nVidia in Macs.
Although I have the 7800 GT in my Quad and am very pleased with it, I liked the extra 3D settings the ATi control panel gives you on Mac OS X.
The performance in gaming between the nVidia 7800 GT and the ATi X1900 GT is quite similar, but if I had to choose between these two for my G5, then the Radeon would have been the choice.
At the moment there is no GeForce 8800 for the Mac Pro. The X1900 XT is a gr8 card, but it's not cutting egde anymore.... <what else is new in grfx cards for Mac..>
IF this X2900 will come to the Mac, getting this in the Mac Pro gives you the ULTIMATE PC.... 😉
 
I know i'm sure hoping this card (2900Xt) and some version of the G80 (8600 or 8800) nividia's show up at a BTO..

Really Apple should replace the 1900 with the 2900XT.. I don't care what they do on the low end about the 7300.. if that becomes a 7600? .. would be nice to see a 8600 or 8800 nvidia... and the Quadro FX 4500 should be updated to a 5500 or 4600.. u know to refresh the 17 month old cards their currently selling.
 
I still have yet to see any evidence that the narrow selection of Mac Pro-compatible video cards is Apple's fault.

I'm more likely to blame the card manufacturers -- as Apple has little control over whether or not they produce EFI-compatible cards.

Bear in mind that Vista doesn't even support EFI (one of many of Redmond's broken promises), so there is little impetus for EFI-compatible PCI-X cards, and it will be that way for some time. In fact, AFAIK, the Mac Pro is the only EFI machine on the market, and you have to figure that less than half of Apple's 8% desktop marketshare is comprised of Mac Pro's (versus iMac's and Mini's).

Hell, ATI/Intel cares so little about the Mac market that they haven't even bothered to disclose that there's a Universal Binary version of the ATI Displays software (it's hidden in the Radeon X1900XT G5 Edition software).
 
slughead said:
Most PC video cards ARE EFI compatible.

Apple just needs to write drivers for them.
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WHY does Apple NEED to do this? Why can't Nvidia do this like ATI does???

I blame Nvidia for this more than Apple. ATI develops their drivers. It's not rocket science.
 
Kosh66 said:
WHY does Apple NEED to do this? Why can't Nvidia do this like ATI does???

I blame Nvidia for this more than Apple. ATI develops their drivers. It's not rocket science.
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One of the great things about Apple's computers is that Apple makes the drivers work as well as possible before sending the product to market. Apple works with hardware companies like ATI to make the drivers.

Currently, the only way to sell video cards for mac pros is for them to be a BTO option. This depends on Apple choosing the card and collaborating with NVidia or ATi on writing the drivers.

When there are more Mac Pro's in the world, with enough of them aging and in need of upgrades, then you'll see after market cards.

At present, however, NVidia needs Apple to sell their cards inside Mac Pros if they want to sell them at all.
 
slughead said:
Most PC video cards ARE EFI compatible.

Apple just needs to write drivers for them.
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I find it interesting that someone who has a flashed X1900 doesn't understand that the firmware in the retail-boxed X1900 isn't compatible with EFI architecture. Furthermore, that incompatibility has nothing to do with "drivers" -- if it did, a non-"Mac" X1900 wouldn't need to have its firmware replaced.
 
slughead said:
Currently, the only way to sell video cards for mac pros is for them to be a BTO option. This depends on Apple choosing the card and collaborating with NVidia or ATi on writing the drivers.
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Yeah... NO. Both ATI and NVidia have the hardware specifications of the Mac Pro, (and have written software drivers for their cards to work in the Mac Pro -- you can download ATI's, it's just not publicly acknowledged by them). The simple truth is that neither Intel nor NVidia think it's worthwhile to devote resources to marketing Mac Pro video cards via retailers -- they get a smaller cut of the money that way.

Furthermore, they believe the Mac Pro to be too small of a market segment to cater to, at the moment, since it is the only Mac with an upgradeable video card and the only EFI-based system aimed at the mainstream consumer/end-user market (a situation further hampered by Microsoft's reluctance to support EFI in their client OS for the foreseeable future and the dearth of EFI support in x86 flavors of Linux and UNIX).
 
slughead said:
One of the great things about Apple's computers is that Apple makes the drivers work as well as possible before sending the product to market. Apple works with hardware companies like ATI to make the drivers.

Currently, the only way to sell video cards for mac pros is for them to be a BTO option. This depends on Apple choosing the card and collaborating with NVidia or ATi on writing the drivers.

When there are more Mac Pro's in the world, with enough of them aging and in need of upgrades, then you'll see after market cards.

At present, however, NVidia needs Apple to sell their cards inside Mac Pros if they want to sell them at all.
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ATI makes retail cards as well as OEM cards. ATI also makes the drivers for their cards. The ONLY thing Apple does with the ATI drivers may be testing them. The only reason there isn't retail cards for the Mac Pro is that it's not beneficial for ATI to release a retail card because there isn't a market for one. Apple is selling the OEM ATI Radeon X1900XT and the ATI Radeon X2900XT isn't out yet for the Mac.

As for the Nvidia side, I'll assume what Mustang_dvs wrote is correct, that Nvidia writes the drivers for the Geforce cards. Although I disagree with Mustang_dvs that there isn't a market for Nvidia cards. I think if someone sold a Mac version of the Geforce 8800 with MacOS X drivers, they could sell enough cards.
 
mustang_dvs said:
I find it interesting that someone who has a flashed X1900 doesn't understand that the firmware in the retail-boxed X1900 isn't compatible with EFI architecture. Furthermore, that incompatibility has nothing to do with "drivers" -- if it did, a non-"Mac" X1900 wouldn't need to have its firmware replaced.
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Incorrect. The x1900XT needs to be flashed in order to be compatible with the drivers ATi and Apple wrote for OSX. A non-flashed 1900XT will work in a Mac Pro, but only if the OS has drivers for it.

EFI is getting blamed for a lot, but the fact is that if you have the right drivers, you can get most any modern card to work in a mac pro, and even in OS X

Just read this page, you can use some PC NVidia cards within OS X using these drivers:
http://omni.110mb.com/titan/
 
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