UnixMac said:
You seem to know about the card K..
What is UGA, and why the bigger ROM.. is this a Mac specific card then? I've heard only the drivers are different from the PC version.. no?
I know firmware, considering that is what I spent 3 years working with and studying for college.
For video to work correctly before the OS is loaded (so you can get that nice scrolling startup text on PCs, or the OS selector on Apple's hardware), your BIOS/EFI/OpenFirmware has to be able to talk to the card. Well, it would be poor design if you wired the 'drivers' into the computer's firmware, so the card comes with firmware of its own which is loaded by the PC's firmware and used to talk to the card before the OS' drivers take over.
BIOS, EFI, and OpenFirmware are all different enough that they can't just load one ROM. UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter) is a specification for designing video card firmware that EFI can load, but contains code that BIOS can load too. If you read up a bit on InsideMacGames around MWSF 06, you would have found a news article written from a chat with ATi where they still said the firmware was different from standard PC cards. The reason for the larger ROM is because of the fact that EFI uses bytecode, like Java and OpenFirmware, and contains quite a few libraries. It isn't nearly as simple as the BIOS of yore.
So the reason why Mac cards work in Windows is either the Intel Macs' CSM is emulating the BIOS interface to the video card for Windows (quite possible), or that the video card is running a UGA firmware.
It has already been confirmed that PC cards only work under Windows, so that pretty much tells me that UGA or something related is being used for the Mac cards, and is incompatible with the EFI implementation Apple has. That means dev work for ATi before they can launch (and the x1600 that Apple used was in development for /6/ months before the MWSF launch).