Best 3D Graphic Card

MacFreak

Chic Not Geek
I noticed there are only two products are ATI and NVida. Which it offer for Mac. I do see other video card product are more powerful video card for 3d or CAD for PC. Also they have two video cards with SLI make it more powerful and fastest. I wondering why they don't offer for Mac? Anyone might know there are other products that already have for Mac that I might overseen it?

Thanks
 
Sonnet makes a card for Macintosh, but it's pretty comparable to the ATi Radeon 7000 card (which is a better value/more powerful anyway).

As we all know, you can't just plug a PC video card into a Mac and get it to work. It seems that there is a severe lack of Macintosh programmers out there that know how to program low-level (like the ROMs on the video cards) and are willing to do it -- that's probably the main reason for the lack of Mac video cards.

Another thing is market share -- to make a card cross-platform compatible, you'd have to have a ROM chip twice the size of the current ROM chips to hold both the PC and Mac firmware on the card. That's not cost efficient... which is why we have PC-specific cards and Mac-specific cards. At any rate, you'll notice that most PC cards are based off of one of two chips: either ATi's chip or NVidia's chip. The rest of the cards are just generic knock-offs of those chipsets, and most of those generic companies aren't gonna take a loss in the profits department just to produce a card for a computer that holds only 3% marketshare. That would mean that for every 97 cards they sell for the PC, they sell 3 for the Mac. They'd lose money, because they just produced a whole bunch of Mac cards that don't sell nearly as fast as the PC cards.
 
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