New Chips=New Hardware?

[G5Unit]

Will the switch to intel make it so all the cool PCI and AGP cards that Windows users can use will work on a mac?

 

[Cybernanga]

Not without Drivers, and Apple don't write drivers for Graphics Cards, those are done by NVIDIA or ATI.

Although the Open Source Community will probably come up with a few.

 

[dotdotdot]

There will obviously be hacks to this when it first comes out, like the PSP thing - everyone was modding it and hacking it.

I have no doubt that those high end graphics cards will be hacked and work on Macintels.

So now, a mac will be a good gaming system maybe?

SO no more referring people to Windows?

 

[atszyman]

There will obviously be hacks to this when it first comes out, like the PSP thing - everyone was modding it and hacking it.

I have no doubt that those high end graphics cards will be hacked and work on Macintels.

So now, a mac will be a good gaming system maybe?

SO no more referring people to Windows?

I wouldn't bet on it. If someone were to "hack" or program a driver for one of the high end video cards why have they not done so already? The drivers have less to do with the CPU than which OS you are running. In all likelyhood a well written driver for a video card now will probably re-compile with very little tweaking for OS X on Intel. I've been researching writing an hardware driver for OS X off and on for awhile now. Drivers involve many calls to the kernel which should remain the same regardless of the underlying hardware.

In theory any AGP graphics card out there right now, even the high end ones for Windows should work just fine on Mac if someone were to write the driver.

 

[dotdotdot]

I wouldn't bet on it. If someone were to "hack" or program a driver for one of the high end video cards why have they not done so already? The drivers have less to do with the CPU than which OS you are running. In all likelyhood a well written driver for a video card now will probably re-compile with very little tweaking for OS X on Intel. I've been researching writing an hardware driver for OS X off and on for awhile now. Drivers involve many calls to the kernel which should remain the same regardless of the underlying hardware.

In theory any AGP graphics card out there right now, even the high end ones for Windows should work just fine on Mac if someone were to write the driver.

Some have already, you just need to be really into hacking to know - I don't know firsthand, but I would bet ALL my money people already have.

 

[atszyman]

Some have already, you just need to be really into hacking to know - I don't know firsthand, but I would bet ALL my money people already have.

I'm sure some people have, but I don't think that the switch to Intel will make it anymore prevalent than it already is. I'm not sure that I even really qualify this as "hacking" this is just plain and simple "writing drivers."