I DEMAND BETTER GRAPHICS CARDS

[Mord]

I personally think the video cards in the macs are fine....
If I wanted to play leading edge games I would run the on my c ustom built PC

a video card dosent only affect games god damn it it affects the entire system

 

[MacsRgr8]

a video card dosent only affect games god damn it it affects the entire system

Exactly!

Especially once apps start using CoreImage.

Kinda paradox:
Steve mentions the faster GPU speed increase than CPU speed increase, and wants to use the GPU more: CoreImage.
Rumored iMac G5: GeForce 5200....

Not the best advertisement for CoreImage to put in the weakest grfx card...
Developers will be happy too

 

[Horrortaxi]

Mark a hella lot more that do care, as demonstrated well by the amount of those that have posted their opinions in the various threads in this forum.

So my opinion is in the minority. So what?

 

[edesignuk]

So my opinion is in the minority. So what?

So nothing, just as you were putting your "mark" down, I put mine.

 

[macsrus]

Don't forget, PC gaming is more niché than the entire community of Mac owners. They're probably the loudest in the industry, however, because gamers are the main ones that push computing to the next level. And if you look at sales, the best selling games are always games that appeal to non-gamers (IE The Sims).

I'm not saying Apple shouldn't put a better card in the next iMac, but there's no need protesting if they don't deliver. Apple wouldn't gain too much from doing so. There's no way a hard-core PC gamer would switch to the Mac even if the $1299 iMac had a 6800 Ultra in it.

I agree...
All modern video cards give sufficient performance for everyday computer use.... Except for 3d rendering applications and games...

I do not agree as some suggest here that video cards have much effect in normal applications or in overall system performance

 

[jhu]

Why cant apple just setup the g5 so that it can accept any pc agp card
as long as there is a driver. for it


the pc and mac versions arent that different

it's because of the way devices are enumerated on x86 and mac. first, pc cards have x86 code in their rom which openfirmware can't currently understand. second, that rom is intended to interface with the pc bios. you'd need to rewrite the rom to interface with openfirmware.

you could conceivably modify openfirmware such that it can emulate x86 code and be able to interface with the device's rom.

i don't know if this works in osx, but under linux you can actually use the pc version of cards because the linux kernel attempts to detect and use everything it finds without interfacing with whatever system rom is in place (for the most part).

 

[jefhatfield]

Not true. The 15" and 17" powerbooks come with the Radeon 9700 mobility which is the most powerful laptop GPU available on a Mac or PC (at least until the new 9800 mobility starts showing up, which I hope is included in the next powerbook revision). The amount of video memory means very little from 128mb to 256mb in almost everything except doom3.

say wha? the ATI mobility radeon 9700 has 64 mb ddr ram, not 128 mb

i have seen pc laptops in the midrange of the powerbook line price with 256 mb ddr ram graphics cards

that being said, for other reasons, i still prefer powerbooks and ibooks to any pc laptop line...if i had to get a pc laptop next, i would choose a sony laptop

 

[Mord]

for the love of god dont even think of getting a sony vio they have crappy intergrated ghrphics and very low max ram limits like 512 or even 256MB

1st off as the other guy said dont select a card based on vram it dose not directly represent proformence the speed of the ram and the speed of the gpu are bigger factor when we are dealing with more than 64MB vram it made a big difference in sub 32mb cards but now it makes cery little difference for example a 15" pb with the 128MB 9700 option is only about 6% faster in games the difference is tiny.

sure a 256MB 9700 would be better but the only laptops that have 256MB 9700's are bricks.

i'd bet good money that the powerbooks 9700 with 64MB vram would beat a laptop with a 9600 that has 256MB vram because all of that ram is not saturated.

the vram gradeing of cards took allot of people off guard when they bought cheaper cards because they were "128MB cards" but when they started to use them they proformed like geforce 2's (cough 5200 cough)

 

[Mord]

it's because of the way devices are enumerated on x86 and mac. first, pc cards have x86 code in their rom which openfirmware can't currently understand. second, that rom is intended to interface with the pc bios. you'd need to rewrite the rom to interface with openfirmware.

you could conceivably modify openfirmware such that it can emulate x86 code and be able to interface with the device's rom.

i don't know if this works in osx, but under linux you can actually use the pc version of cards because the linux kernel attempts to detect and use everything it finds without interfacing with whatever system rom is in place (for the most part).

fyi some pc geforce 2's worked out of the box which is to this day unexplaned, the roms are not in any x86 code or ppc code they are just like a filter between openfirmware/bios and the card makeing a dual platform card would not be hard to do

 

[jhu]

fyi some pc geforce 2's worked out of the box which is to this day unexplaned, the roms are not in any x86 code or ppc code they are just like a filter between openfirmware/bios and the card makeing a dual platform card would not be hard to do

that's interesting. any other documented cards that can do that? on the other hand, i'll bet that if you put that in a sun running solaris, it wouldn't work.

 

[Nermal]

Some Open Firmware-based systems, such as the Pegasos, will happily use 'PC' video cards. I'm not too knowledgeable about the internals of a Mac, but surely Apple can do something to let generic cards work.

On another note, maybe we should all band together and try to convince a third-party (eg. Asus, Gainward, Powercolour or whoever) to produce Mac-compatible cards. According to nVidia, there is no technical reason why nobody other than Apple makes Mac-compatible cards ('Other board manufacturers may build Mac Geforce add-in boards'), the companies just don't see it as a big enough market. But if we all get together then there may be a slim ray of hope

Thank you for your email. Other board manufacturers may build Mac Geforce add-in boards however since the market is much smaller for Mac add-in boards, there are no companies that are currently producing add-in Geforce boards for the Macintoshi platform. Apple is the only company that is currently manufacturing cards for the Macintosh platform.