"ATI Radeon 2900XT Finally Released"

[slughead]

ATI makes retail cards as well as OEM cards. ATI also makes the drivers for their cards.

ATI doesn't make 'retail' cards for the Mac Pro. Not yet, anyway. Also, ATI is not fully responsible for their drivers (on the BTO optional cards anyway). Apple does help write drivers for some of their cards to ensure compatibility with many of Apple's 'technologies'.

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.

This I'll agree with you on.

However, part of the blame lies with Apple for their lack of BTO video card options. That's all I was saying.

 

[Macmadant]

What i don't understand is, why do mac user pay sometimes 3X the price of a graphics card than the PC counterpart, when all that's different is the firmware

 

[slughead]

What i don't understand is, why do mac user pay sometimes 3X the price of a graphics card than the PC counterpart, when all that's different is the firmware

Because you have no choice.

By the way, like I said in this post, it's more about drivers than it is about firmware.

 

[mustang_dvs]

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/

To use your phrase: Incorrect.

The X1900 needs to be flashed so that the card understands the basic language that the motherboard interface uses. If you plug a stock retail X1900 into an EFI motherboard, it doesn't know how to talk to the motherboard and the motherboard doesn't know how to talk to it. Yes, you can jury-rig a "driver" -- a trial-and-error-based configuration file that tells the OS what the hardware is and how to effectively (and ham-handedly) access the BIOS-based hardware. 99% of users aren't going to spend the time or have the patience to play with IO configurations, especially when it will cause all kinds of interesting issues when they try to switch resolutions, play a DVD, or use more than one display.

The fact of the matter is that it's up to ATI/Intel and NVidia to produce cards that will work with the EFI architecture out of the box -- whether it's by separate retail boxes of BIOS and EFI (basically the sleazy way they've done it before for Mac vs PC) or by including a CD-ROM of the various firmware flavors and a flashing utility (which, God forbid, will prevent them from charging Mac users a premium and cost them all of $1.00 extra per card sold).

Laying the lack of graphics cards at Apple's feet is as ridiculous as blaming them for ATI's dragging their feet in providing the X1900 in sufficient quantity during the first 3 months of Mac Pro availability.

 

[slughead]

The X1900 needs to be flashed so that the card understands the basic language that the motherboard interface uses. If you plug a stock retail X1900 into an EFI motherboard, it doesn't know how to talk to the motherboard and the motherboard doesn't know how to talk to it. Yes, you can jury-rig a "driver" -- a trial-and-error-based configuration file that tells the OS what the hardware is and how to effectively (and ham-handedly) access the BIOS-based hardware. 99% of users aren't going to spend the time or have the patience to play with IO configurations, especially when it will cause all kinds of interesting issues when they try to switch resolutions, play a DVD, or use more than one display.

Let's put it another way:

If you'd read the actual essay, you'd realize that "EFI" ROMs are just like BIOS ROMS except they have a set of different device settings that inject themselves into the kernel on bootup. In BIOS cards, the driver is more on the hard drive.

This is why it's necessary for Apple to release flash upgrades to its cards (like the 7300 flash update a few months ago) whenever they want to fundamentally update the drivers.

So if you simply write a driver as a .kext (to go on the hard drive) that works in place of the "EFI" driver, a "BIOS" card can work just like an "EFI" card. The only real difference in operation would be that the normal EFI card would have hardware settings stored on the card's ROM when the computer is off, whereas the BIOS one would have the settings on the hard drive.

The reason titan drivers have compatibility issues is because they are jerry-rigged to, as far as I can tell, prove that EFI can be ignored, and nothing more. You're saying just because some guy couldn't get it 100% right in a weekend that somehow it's impossible?

 

[Pressure]

What i don't understand is, why do mac user pay sometimes 3X the price of a graphics card than the PC counterpart, when all that's different is the firmware

Should be pretty obvious but that is in the same ballpark as the difference between a normal card and a workstation card that features specialized software to get the best performance out of professional programs.

Drivers are quite expensive to develop and seeing how small the Mac community is, just drives the cost up because you have a much smaller base to earn money from to cover the initial cost of producing both hardware and software.

 

[bbplayer5]

If this card comes out for the mac pro, ill get it... But only if it is the price that is listed. If they try to rip me off, I aint bending over...

 

[Wild-Bill]

If I were Steve Jobs I'd call down to the Mac Pro integration department and have them swap their low-end and high-end manufacturers.

The X2900XT is a failure. The mainstream ATI cards X2600, X2400 do show some promise and are highly power efficient. They should start offering Mac Pro's with the 8800GTX as the "high-end" card and use ATI's 2600 and 2400's for the low ends, replacing the 7300GT's.

But they probably won't do that, as we've seen leaked pictures with an Apple-specific retention mechanism on one of their X2900 variants.

I sure hope Steve has something new to show us with the Mac Pro at WWDC. Aside from one CPU selection, the Mac Pro is still last year's tech, and at that price point, it's just plain wrong.

 

[daveL]

I sure hope Steve has something new to show us with the Mac Pro at WWDC. Aside from one CPU selection, the Mac Pro is still last year's tech, and at that price point, it's just plain wrong.

I see this point stated over and over in these threads, but I just don't get it. Aside from newly released video cards, there *isn't* anything out there more advanced than what is currently shipping in the Mac Pro. If there is, I wish someone would supply a couple links to HP and Dell showing their offerings. If you want to bitch at someone, try Intel. The Mac Pro has the latest workstation chipset and CPUs available. What do you expect Apple to do?

 

[Macinposh]

I sure hope Steve has something new to show us with the Mac Pro at WWDC. Aside from one CPU selection, the Mac Pro is still last year's tech, and at that price point, it's just plain wrong.

Wtfck?

Seriously?

Put down the crackpipe.Now.


Admitted,the GPU selection is weak,at least to say,but otherwise...

What the heck are you seeing on the competitors side? Same mobos,same memories and layouts. Thats what the the layout of the xeons dictate.
Granted,the harware raid support is lacking,but the reason to that lies on the os side.
Jeesh..

But yeah. It is intresting to see when,and IF the graphics cards get updated at all before the next revision of macpro. In the start of 2008 or something..
I would like that,but I wouldnt bet my money on it.

 

[slughead]

The X2900XT is a failure.

Really? I thought it hadn't come out yet...

All kidding aside, the NVidia 8800 is an amazing card. I'd pay $450 for a mac version of that (if I had to ).

As for the Mac Pro being dated technology, that's just silly. Apart from the GPUs (which are over 16 months old now), everything is up to date and reasonably priced.

Hardware RAID is really powerful and useful but not entirely necessary. Apple would have to put a totally new face on RAID (other than that DOS-looking Text interface) all by themselves; and that's only after the RAID controller companies wrote a driver for mac.

It's not "dated" because it doesn't have RAID (I don't think anyone actually said that), it's just annoying for some of us.

 

[Wild-Bill]

Wtfck?

Seriously?

Put down the crackpipe.Now.

NO!!!!!!!!!! I don't want to. Can't think of a better way to pass the time before WWDC.

Seriously though, I had thought that the Stoakley-Seaburg platform had been released this month. I stand corrected.

 

[mason.kramer]

apple needs to write the firmware

Apple was gambling when it adopted the EFI standard ahead of the rest of the industry. It is possible they chose to do EFI so that they could retain control over what hardware you can stick into a Mac (anything that works right now only does so because Apple has written drivers for it). Meanwhile, Microsoft very deviously counterattacked by not including EFI support with Vista, even though they had planned to. Therefore 95% of the market does not care about EFI firmware and drivers.

If Apple wants the next gen video cards, they're going to have to provide more development support for the cards. There is no point in arguing about who is morally responsible for writing the drivers. It's all about the biz. Right now Apple needs the firmware more than nVidia or ATI.

To the poster who said that gamers don't buy Mac Pros - you're right. It's a shame though, because they totally would if you could put an 8800 into it (granted, there still wouldn't be an SLI option, but not many use that right now anyway). If you could put in an 8800, it would be the true all-in-one box.

 

[CyberPrey]

To the poster who said that gamers don't buy Mac Pros - you're right. It's a shame though, because they totally would if you could put an 8800 into it (granted, there still wouldn't be an SLI option, but not many use that right now anyway). If you could put in an 8800, it would be the true all-in-one box.

Not quite.

I use my system 99% for games, and I have a Mac Pro......

 

[mustang_dvs]

Apple was gambling when it adopted the EFI standard ahead of the rest of the industry.

Apple also gambled when they:

• produced a consumer computer with a 'mouse' interface device,
• released an operating system that used a windowed graphical interface to represent the drive architecture,
• adopted Sony's expensive 1.44mb SuperDrive floppy mechanisms,
• adopted the "dead-end" USB interface,
• eliminated "crucial" floppy drives from their products,
• abandoned the 680x0-series processors for the PowerPC chip,
• abandoned the PowerPC for Intel's x86,
• abandoned the System 6.01-9.2.1 architecture for a system based on NextSTEP and BSD,
• spent millions developing a digital music player to compete against established products like Walkmans and Discmans,
• developed an all-digital music store to compete against physical music retailers, online music retailers and illegal P2P networks,
• and so on...

It is possible they chose to do EFI so that they could retain control over what hardware you can stick into a Mac (anything that works right now only does so because Apple has written drivers for it). Meanwhile, Microsoft very deviously counterattacked by not including EFI support with Vista, even though they had planned to. Therefore 95% of the market does not care about EFI firmware and drivers.

EFI was adopted simply because it is the future of motherboard architectures -- it has been since 1999. MacOS X for x86 had no need for old-style BIOS, so why adopt it? And you're giving Redmond too much credit -- they didn't drop EFI support from Vista to screw Apple; they couldn't get it to work -- mainly because Vista isn't the ground-up new codebase that Longhorn was promised to be (and XP was promised to be before it), it's an incremental update of XP, which is still basically an incremental update of Win95, which is still built on the foundations of Win3.1.

And Apple's "retail" desktop marketshare is now pegged at 9% -- which is based only on new computer sales in physical, brick and mortar stores. (Installed user base is more likely around 12-15%, given the longevity of Apple hardware.)

 

[slughead]

EFI was adopted simply because it is the future of motherboard architectures -- it has been since 1999. MacOS X for x86 had no need for old-style BIOS, so why adopt it? And you're giving Redmond too much credit -- they didn't drop EFI support from Vista to screw Apple; they couldn't get it to work -- mainly because Vista isn't the ground-up new codebase that Longhorn was promised to be (and XP was promised to be before it), it's an incremental update of XP, which is still basically an incremental update of Win95, which is still built on the foundations of Win3.1.

And Apple's "retail" desktop marketshare is now pegged at 9% -- which is based only on new computer sales in physical, brick and mortar stores. (Installed user base is more likely around 12-15%, given the longevity of Apple hardware.)

I agree with all this. EFI is far superior to BIOS.

Also, apple's utilization of EFI isn't very effective at keeping people from using OS X on other machines. The OSx86 project pretty much proved that EFI and BIOS aren't all that different.

I think the reason M$ hasn't released an EFI version is that there's no demand for it. BIOS doesn't really lack anything all that important that EFI makes up for. All the shortcomings of BIOS have been overcome already through a mixture of software hacks and common knowledge.

BIOS isn't some sort of restrictive issue for PCs, it's just one minor throwback to the past which can be ignored. By the same token, Macs are not made faster or significantly more versatile as a result of having EFI.

Not quite.

I use my system 99% for games, and I have a Mac Pro......

You are aware that you could've bought a PC gaming rig for $500 less that would beat the pants off the mac pro in gaming benchmarks, right?

 

[spaz8]

I dont carewho does it; apple, ati or nvida.. i just wanna see a card in the mac pro that was released in the the last 12 months..

Is it me or have the last couple of Apple "updates" felt like their trying to unload a surpluss of old technology that is not selling.

 

[mustang_dvs]

I dont carewho does it; apple, ati or nvida.. i just wanna see a card in the mac pro that was released in the the last 12 months..

Is it me or have the last couple of Apple "updates" felt like their trying to unload a surpluss of old technology that is not selling.

They can't sell products that don't exist.

The current Quad-core 3.0GHz Xenon's aren't available in any other computer or as a component -- technically, they haven't even been announced by Intel, and Intel has yet to announce the availability of the next generation of Xenon chips.

As for graphics cards, while I'm sure Apple has some pull, there's still only two players these days, and one of them is owned by Intel, so it's doubtful that Apple can play one against the other for much leverage. Basically, so long as ATI and NVidia feel there's no incentive to produce "Mac Pro compatible" retail cards, the only options are the OEM cards supplied by Apple as BTO and upgrades. Undoubtedly, Apple could cut customers a price break (I was disappointed that there wasn't a price reduction in the existing Mac Pro lineup when the 8-core machines were introduced), but they haven't and them's the breaks.

 

[CyberPrey]

You are aware that you could've bought a PC gaming rig for $500 less that would beat the pants off the mac pro in gaming benchmarks, right?

Then I would have had to deal with Windows Full time

I love my mac pro

 

[dusanv]

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.

Bingo! Until they release a properly priced MacPro/2 our little cult will remain a huge niche nobody will bother with. Notice the latest quarterly results. Desktop sales only grew a couple of percent (that's everything: mini, iMac and MacPro lumped together) whereas laptop sales grew by leaps and bounds. And this lackluster desktop sales pattern has been a trend couple of years now. I wonder why.

 

[spaz8]

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/15/next_gen_mac_graphics_hardware_roundup.html

Hope theres some truth in this..

 

[slughead]

Then I would have had to deal with Windows Full time

I love my mac pro

heheh I know what you mean, I'm a gamer too. Yeah, I boot into windows to play, but it's great to just wave "bye!" and boot right back into OS X when I'm done.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/15/next_gen_mac_graphics_hardware_roundup.html

Hope theres some truth in this..

From the article: It's unclear as to just how much of this technology Apple will choose to implement as its various Mac models receive updates in the coming months.

You never know with Apple.

 

[Umbongo]

Bingo! Until they release a properly priced MacPro/2 our little cult will remain a huge niche nobody will bother with. Notice the latest quarterly results. Desktop sales only grew a couple of percent (that's everything: mini, iMac and MacPro lumped together) whereas laptop sales grew by leaps and bounds. And this lackluster desktop sales pattern has been a trend couple of years now. I wonder why.

It isn't just Apple this is happening to. Estimates put 50% of sales going to both laptops and desktops within several years (I think it was about 30% laptops last year). I think this is very much down to the fact that laptops now can have strong performance and that people always will buy more mobile technology if it is available with features and at a price that indicates value to them. Which I think the current ranges of laptops do for a vast majority of consumers.

 

[dusanv]

It isn't just Apple this is happening to. Estimates put 50% of sales going to both laptops and desktops within several years (I think it was about 30% laptops last year).

That is true for PCs but consider that Apple already sells more than twice as many laptops than desktops already (that's not the case with any PC manufacturer). Note that Apple has about 10% of the total laptop market right now and less than 5% of the desktop market. Apple's desktop sales have often been dropping quarter to quarter (previous quarter was negative for instance) whereas laptops have been into double digits of growth for a while now (not true for any PC manufacturer).

Edit: My numbers are off (just skimmed the report when it came out), it's 7.7% of desktops actually (still less than 10% of laptops) and the split between desktop/laptop is 40/60 in the latest quarter (I expected it'd get to 33/67 already but it didn't). Apple quarterly report is here.

 

[danskimanuk]

Holy Grail -ATI Driver 2900XT for leopard (x86)

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know, (and I think I know the anser to this) if there is anywhere,
where there is a definitive ATI driver for this card on leopard, OR a 'successful' driver workaround (with clear 'noobie type' instructions)??

It seems there is a lot written about this subject on the web but not much in terms of results....

Also, and call me a dumb dumb for asking, but is their no intention on ATI's/apples' parts to produce a driver for OSX so that we can actually use this superb hardware???


thanks
Danskimanuk