Speculation of Intel Power Macs Video Card?

[-x-]

Has there been any speculation on what the Intel Powermacs may include for a Video Card? Any speculation if you could just buy off the shelf PC video card and use those? Since intel Macs run windows now it would be great to finnaly get rid of my PC and have a Mac as a nice game rig. My intel Imac is great for games under windows but my PC still has better framerates due to the better video card.

Anyone have any rumors or a good guess?

 

[Sun Baked]

Still will require an OpenGL driver for the Mac OS, so the choice will still be limited to those with a Mac driver -- at least the Mac ROM and endian requirements should be reduced/eliminated.

But card companies should already have OpenGL drivers for quite a few of these cards, so the price of entry is not longer quite as high for card companies.

 

[Mord]

x1600XT stock BTO options of a 7800GT and an x1900XTX.

as for pc card compatibility who knows, some pc boards run EFI so i assume the firmware on pc graphics cards should work fine on it, though device ID hacks will still be needed for the driver more often than not.

 

[BlizzardBomb]

What I'd want to see:
X1900 GT 256MB - Low-end + Mid-range
X1900 XT 512MB - High-end
X1900 XTX 512MB - BTO

What is more likely:
X1600 XT 256MB - Low-end + Mid-range
X1900 GT 256MB - High-end
X1900 XT 512MB - BTO

X1900 GT is a cheaper option than an X1800 XT, so even though performance is a little worse, I still think its a better choice.

 

[Blackheart]

<-- Beware of crazy speculation -->

Hey, would you be able to:

1) Buy an off-the-shelf PC video card
2) Stick it in a Mac Pro
3) Run XP
4) Have full use of the video card, as if you were using any other PC hardware?

 

[Squareball]

<-- Beware of crazy speculation -->

Hey, would you be able to:

1) Buy an off-the-shelf PC video card
2) Stick it in a Mac Pro
3) Run XP
4) Have full use of the video card, as if you were using any other PC hardware?

Supposedly, with Virtualization you can (at least on paper) have full 3d support IF you have 2 video cards (one for OS X and the other for Windows inside a VM system like parallels). At least that is what Intel claims about VT

 

[Xander562]

Dont you guyse mean an nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2?

 

[iBunny]

I am thinking that Stock will be a x1600 with HDMI Support, and High End x1900XTX 512MB BTO.

I am hoping for Dual 3GHz Dual Core Woodcrest's. Fcsking <3

 

[Lollypop]

I was also wondering the same thing.. this morning in trafic actually... I think with EFI capable bioses on the graphics cards we should see a large increase of available cards, drivers should be the problem however. Lets hope Apple, ATI and NVidia can step up and maybe make a unified driver systems like on windows.

 

[Josias]

What if Ati were nice this time, and made a pwning X2000 XTX 1 GB GDDR3 excluseivly for Apple?
With Quadlink DVI?