Video card rant

R

Ravix

Registered
I found hundreds of posts on video cards but no one asked the real question. Why are Mac video cards SOOO much more the PC video cards?

I can get a 512mb AGP video card for my PC for $60 but a 256mb card for my Mac is $200! Where's the logic? I know as mac users we are special, but I didn't think we were short bus kind of special!

So I pose this question. I need to to replace my Rage128Pro crap with a real card, one that will handle PS without spazzing out on me for UNDER $100. Has anyone found a PC AGP card that will work with a pre-MDD G4?

BTW I was kind of under the impression that after the beige era that mac started using industry standard equipment. How come still to this day nothing is cross platform?
 
To answer why they're so much more expensive, it's because no generic video cards exist for the Mac.

On the PC side, you can get any number of generic-brand video cards that use NVidia or ATi chipsets, but are manufactured by third parties (PNY, ABit, etc.). Not so on the Mac side -- when you buy an ATi or Nvidia card, it's not a generic-brand, and is made by ATi or Nvidia. If you were to purchase a video card for the PC that was manufactured by ATi or Nvidia, you would pay a lot more than $60.

PCI and AGP are cross-platform buses. But the drivers and firmware are not cross-platform. That's why you can't cram a cheap-o PC video card in your Mac and expect it to work... the firmware on the card is written for the PC architecture, not the Mac architecture.

There are ways to "flash" the firmware of PC cards and use them in Macs, but the results are... less than optimal in most cases.

You can get a Radeon 9200 PCI card for around $100 (+/-$30), but from what I've heard, they've been discontinued and may be hard to come by.

I think you're stuck paying high prices for AGP-based Mac video cards for now.
 
Most of the cards that ATI has available now are compatible for both Mac and PC. This isn't necessarily the case with the third-party licensees for those chipsets, and it's usually why they're cheaper than the stock name-brand model from the originator.
 
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